Let's talk about it - Book unavailable to ASD students used as straw man to pummel public education
*This is a one-off, as it hadn't been written about.
Jay McDonald, a former candidate and former legislative staffer to state Co-Chair of House Education, Rep. Jamie Allard, has made it his mission to read from LGBTQ books available in ASD school libraries during the public testimony portion of Anchorage school board meetings. During the most recent meeting, McDonald attempted to use his three minutes of public testimony time to read select passages from Let’s Talk About It, a book he falsely claimed was available to students of an ASD high school. Midway through his testimony, Board member Carl Jacobs stopped him.
“I’m going to interrupt you at this point. It sounds like you have a concern about a book. I’d be glad to get you connected to the superintendent or team to go through the appropriate processes,” said Jacobs.
Conservative Board member Dave Donley objected: “Mr. Chair, I don’t think he’s violated any rules. I mean, he hasn’t used pornography. I mean, he hasn’t shown any pornography, any bad words.”
In the end, Kelly Lessens, Carl Jacobs, Pat Higgins, Margo Bellamy, and Dora Wilson voted to stop McDonald’s testimony. Still, McDonald was provided the opportunity to testify on a different subject and encouraged to go through the appropriate process if he wanted to lodge a complaint about a book in the district’s collection.
After leaving the meeting, McDonald took to his car and recorded a sixteen-minute Facebook live video, lamenting that the school board had silenced him from reading the book he falsely claimed was available to ASD students. The video has been viewed more than ninety-three thousand times and drew over sixteen hundred responses, including a comment from Rep. Jamie Allard, who commended him for doing a “great job.”
Others on social media wrote that the book was sick, satanic, and perverse. Predictably, McDonald’s video made its way into right-wing social media groups and pages, where one group administrator wrote that the book was “grooming at its finest.” Another Anchorage resident wrote: “This is what pedophilia looks like. And the only therapy is a jacketed hollow point to the back of the skull.”
Needless to say, McDonald’s video was quickly swept up in a social media tsunami and written about by Alaska Watchman and Must Read Alaska, where it played better than their mostly non-existent coverage of Bronson’s imploding administration. Must Read Alaska headlined the board had shut down McDonald’s testimony for reading a passage from a “sexting-porn manual in schools’ libraries.” The Alaska Watchman headlined McDonald was silenced for his objection to an “anal sex book in school libraries.”
McDonald found the book listed on ASD’s website and checked it out from the Anchorage Public Library system, and therein lay the problem, mayhaps a significant one.
It appears nobody outraged over the book verified whether it was available to students because Let’s Talk About It was never in circulation at ASD and is unavailable for students to read or check out at any ASD school. In addition to listing books in the district’s library collection, ASD’s online catalog of reading material also lists material staff uses for research and continuing education, which is why it appears on ASD’s website. The book is isolated in a professional collection of material that is available only to ASD staff.
And that, as they say, is that.
