Book banning has become so “routine” in the Davis School District, state officials concluded its school board doesn’t need to publicly discuss appeals that get sent their way.

The issue came before the Utah State Board of Education after Davis school board members decided April 7 to support banning Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel “Fight Club” from all Davis schools — but didn’t discuss it.

More specifically, the board didn’t state aloud its “rationale” for agreeing to remove the book, which Utah law — and the district’s own policy — requires them to do.

Their silent vote prompted a Davis parent to file a complaint with the state, alleging the board had violated procedure.

Davis leaders argued they didn’t, noting the board’s intent “has always been to conduct these decisions openly in public meetings.” They pointed to a written statement of rationale in the board’s April 7 public meeting documents.

The district also bans books relatively frequently, contributing to more statewide book bans than any other in the state. Since January, more than 35 titles have been challenged in the district for allegedly containing prohibited content under Utah’s sensitive materials law.

“That’s the nature of our school district,” Davis Assistant Superintendent Logan Toone told state school board members Sept. 3. “We have a lot of these requests for review.”

‘Fight Club’ not the district’s first consent agenda vote

School boards like the one in Davis aren’t typically involved in book removal decisions. State law instead assigns that task to each district’s sensitive-material review committee, made up of parents and staffers.

If a district parent, student or employee disagrees with a committee’s decision, though, they have a right to appeal it — and that’s what happened with “Fight Club.”

Anytime that happens, the decision to either remove or retain the book gets bumped up to the entire school board.

Over the past two years, the Davis school board has considered at least 40 appeals — all of which were placed on the board’s consent agenda, a district spokesperson told The Salt Lake Tribune. Consent agendas bundle certain meeting actions into one item, usually to save time.

“They have appeared as consent items, because they had become a routine part of the board’s work, not as any attempt to avoid transparency,” Toone told state board members Sept. 3.

According to Robert’s Rules of Order (a standard for conducting fair meetings that the Davis school board follows), consent agenda items must be both routine business and noncontroversial.

Initially, a USBE subcommittee determined the “Fight Club” decision warranted public discussion. Together, they recommended USBE’s full-15 member board find that Davis School District violated policy and recast their votes on “Fight Club.”

But despite that recommendation — and despite counsel from an assistant attorney general that book bans should be considered controversial and do not belong on consent agendas — state board members decided the opposite.

The board determined that because book appeals occur so frequently in the district, the action meets the definition of “routine business” for consent agendas.

“The only thing it comes down to is how they define ‘routine and controversial,’ and how someone else defines ‘routine and controversial,’” board member Cindy Davis said.

Board member Rod Hall concurred: “After 40-plus times, I really do think this was their policy that they followed,” he said.

Despite state officials’ signal of approval, a spokesperson for the Davis district said future book appeal decisions will be treated as regular agenda items, meaning they’ll be discussed publicly.

“Going forward, we will provide more descriptive rationale statements and address appeal determinations as business items so there is no ambiguity about the process used or the intent of the Davis School District (DSD) Board of Education,” the statement said.

“The intent has always been to conduct decisions openly in public meetings,” the statement continued. “If there is any perception that our process is not transparent, we take that very seriously.”

‘Controversial’ is subjective, parliamentarian says

How governing bodies conduct business is determined by two things: state law and the body’s own policies, said C.J. Cavin, vice president of the National Association of Parliamentarians.

While Robert’s Rules sets the standard for what can and can’t be placed on consent agendas, it doesn’t attempt to define what’s considered ”routine” or “noncontroversial,” Cavin said.

“That’s going to be subjective based on the organization,” he said. “And for Robert’s to work as a default manual … it’s got to have some subjectivity.”

This is the first time in the two years since Utah’s sensitive materials law took effect that state school board members have addressed a procedural appeal.

The law requires a book to be removed from all public schools if at least three school districts (or at least two districts and five charters) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material.”

That includes depictions of intercourse, masturbation or the touching of a character’s genitals, as well as nudity, defined in state law as anything “less than completely and opaquely” covering human genitals, buttocks and female breasts “below a point immediately above the top of the areola,” as well as any depiction of “male genitals in a discernibly turgid state,” covered or not.

A book can meet those standards if it contains a single mention.

So far, 37 titles have been removed from public schools statewide. Each ban has originated from at least one of nine school districts in the state, which is comprised of 41 districts.

Davis has removed all but one of those titles.

In districts across the state, books can also be banned for containing “subjective” sensitive material — content that doesn’t meet the state definition of pornographic or indecent material but can otherwise be considered “harmful” to youth. (Books removed under this standard aren’t subject to statewide removal.)

That’s what happened with “Fight Club”: A Davis committee found it contained no “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value” under Utah’s subjective standards.

Lawmaker agrees: No policy violated

Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who sponsored Utah’s sensitive materials law, said placing appeal votes on school board consent agendas falls within the parameters of the law.

“I understand that a consent calendar is a public vote, and a written determination adopted in that vote identifies the rationale and each component as clearly as a floor discussion would, if not more so,” Ivory said.

He also said the law directs schools to prioritize “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography” over everything else.

“More concerning, to the point of the legislation, is where districts have received an official challenge to a particular objective sensitive material, and for months/years and have neither removed it nor explained why,” he said.

Ivory provided The Tribune with a review of “Fight Club” that is available on the website RatedBooks.com, which is run by Brooke Stephens, a Davis School District parent and prominent book ban advocate.

Her website, modeled after the Motion Picture Association’s film ratings, rates books on a scale of 0-5, with 0 meaning suitable for all ages and 5 meaning “deviant,” or adults-only.

There, “Fight Club” received a rating of 3 (not suitable for minors).

Referencing the review, Ivory in a statement wrote the book should be prohibited under Utah law because it includes depictions of penises and a vagina spliced into a children’s film on one page, along with several sexual terms, such as sodomy and bondage, on another.

“No extended discussion is needed to arrive at such a determination,” Ivory said of the consent vote. “Which is presumably why the board saw none was needed.”

Not all books stocked on Utah public school shelves are available to students at every grade level. School librarians in the state are trained to make age-appropriate selections.

So far, none of the 37 titles banned from schools statewide had been available to elementary students.