February 3, 2025
Sen. Dave Murman, Chairperson
Sen. Margo Juarez
Sen. Jana Hughes, Vice Chairperson
Sen. Dan Lonowski
Sen. Danielle Conrad
Sen. Glen Meyer
Sen. Megan Hunt
Sen. Rita Sanders
The Lincoln Public Schools submits this letter of opposition to LB390, which would expand the scope of and establish a range of additional school requirements, including means of parental notification for library checkouts via electronic communication methods. LPS fully embraces the importance of the underlying premise of parental involvement and parental engagement in students’ educational experiences. In the particular facets addressed by the bill, we wish to emphasize the importance and functionality of local control to address the concerns identified in LB390 and support parents through existing means without additional unnecessary expenditures to achieve the intended outcomes.
LPS has a model plan in place which has proven to be highly functional and which has been sustained for years. Lincoln Public Schools offers to parents a Library Service Plan, which empowers the parent to make determinations about access and availability to books for their minor child, including identifying authors and titles they wish to specifically prohibit their students from checking out and providing parents with an opportunity to opt out of e-book (electronic books) collections for their students. We also already offer a robust, exhaustive and accessible online database, including searchable library collections per school for our parents.
Unfortunately, one of the prescriptive elements of the bill as proposed which we object to is an electronic notification upon library check-out to parents. This imposes an unfunded mandate and the narrowly defined provisions will be problematic for school district adherence in a wide variety of school settings, not limited to LPS. We currently would have to conduct this messaging manually per checkout, and do not possess a technologically efficient method to automate said process. This means that we would have to acquire new technology or assume an additional burden equating to time and effort for staff in order to comply with this stipulation. We would instead strongly suggest redirecting back to our local level solutions which provide timely, efficient, and transparent communication back to parents regarding their children’s accessing of school library materials. We assert that our current LPS Library Service Plan proactively and transparently partners with parents to empower them with broad oversight for their children’s library checkouts.
In conclusion, we do not support LB390 as introduced.
Sincerely,
Dr. John Skretta
Interim Superintendent
Lincoln Public Schools
