After reading through Fayetteville School District's Criteria for Selection of Library Materials document, I made two additions to my own school's reconsideration policy. One detail I added is regarding the time frame in which requests for reconsideration can be submitted in order to handle the requests effectively. Fayetteville's document included this detail, stating that a reconsideration request "would only be accepted beginning the first day of any school year through the last student contact day in March" (2006). I added this because it makes sense when looking at who composes the reconsideration committee and respects the time and contracts of these individuals while still providing an adequate amount of time to effectively handle any concerns. A second detail I added from Fayetteville was regarding the composition of the reconsideration committee that emphasized the importance of the committee being composed of individuals that reflects the diversity of the school (Fayetteville School District, 2006). I had not considered explicitly stating this as part of my policy as it seems to go without saying that the composition of a group making decisions should reflect who the decisions are being made for, but then I remembered that too often in history (and present times!!) there have been and still are groups of people making decisions who do not reflect the people for whom the decisions are being made.

In addition to those details I added from Fayetteville's document, I also made several additions from Blue Valley Schools document titled Challenges to and Reconsideration of Learning Resources. One addition I made is who is able to request a reconsideration. I went back and forth on this, but finally decided I would also include any school district residents in the list of who is able to make this request (Blue Valley Schools, 2015). I made this addition because any resident within the district, whether they have a child presently attending the public schools or not, still have a stake in the school community. Another detail I adopted from Blue Valley Schools' document to my reconsideration policy is the addition of two current students to the reconsideration committee if the material challenged is at the high school level (2015). When I came to this detail, I immediately added it to my own policy because not only am I creating mine for my high school library, but our students are the ones being directly impacted by any potential changes made to the library's collection, so in order to have a well-rounded committee to evaluate challenged materials, it just makes sense for students to be included.

References

Blue Valley Schools, (2015). Challenges to and Reconsideration of Learning Resources. http://go.boarddocs.com/ks/usd229/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=B9Z5UB11E984

Fayetteville School District, (2006). Administration regulations for policy #6.15. Retrieved from http://www.fayar.net/images/6.15AR.pdf