[MUSIC PLAYING] DELANIE GOSS: Starting in 2021, parents of Nixa students started challenging books in the high school library. A group of students started a club called SABR standing for Students Against Book Restrictions to voice their opinions on the book bannings. Delilah Neff, a senior, is one of three core members.

DELILAH NEFF: SABR is Nixa Students Against Book Restrictions. We’re a group that was founded after the original book bannings in May of 2021. We decided that if we– we knew that there was going to be more restrictions and challenges in the future, so we decided to create this group just to try to counteract the challenges and to counteract the parents that believe that these books don’t belong in the library.

DELANIE GOSS: This group of students, plus some supporters, share their opinions with members of the school board.

DELILAH NEFF: Just go to school board meetings regardless of if there’s books on the agenda or not. Just showing the school board that we care what happens in our school and we care what happens in our library. The school board is impressed with our presence and just– while they don’t necessarily listen to our voices, they do recognize that we’re there. And they recognize that we take time out of our day too to go to these school board meetings.

DELANIE GOSS: While the school board bans books for a variety of reasons, Glennis Woosley, another core member of SABR, sees similarities in the restricted books.

GLENNIS WOOSLEY: A lot of times, people claim that these books are sexually explicit or too inappropriate for children. But we’ve also noticed that a lot of these books tend to have queer characters and people of color. And we’ve connected the pieces a little bit there. But overall, it’s just– book banners claim is that they’re too sexually explicit for us, even though we’re high schoolers and we can put context to these books.

DELANIE GOSS: These students believe the books that have been banned belong back in the library.

GLENNIS WOOSLEY: So they have a time for public comments. And so every person can talk for 3 minutes individually. And each of us will go and give a speech, explain the student’s views on it, and why we believe that these books should still be in our library. And also explaining what these books are and their stories and why they’re important because we believe that these books hold real value to us and how we consume our media and the world and how we’re growing up in Nixa, Missouri.

And there’s not the most diversity around here. So whenever we consume books from different views and perspectives, we learn a lot about other people that we’ve never really been as exposed to before, making us more experienced and honestly more empathetic people.

DELANIE GOSS: The school board members have become more receiving of the students’ opinions.

GLENNIS WOOSLEY: Yeah. So I think at the beginning of when we started this, the school board was not really transparent with their actions at all. But as our group has started to go to more and more school board meetings, the school board has started to openly talk about why they vote certain ways on certain books.

So at the last school board meeting where they banned books, they went through– I think it was an hour or two long period where every school board member talked about why they voted yes or no to banning each individual book, which was a lot more transparency than we’ve ever seen before. It’s not exactly where we want it to be. But I will say, me personally, I’m glad to see that there are at least somewhat receptive to what our group has been doing. And so seeing more transparency has been a big impact.

DELANIE GOSS: To stay up to date with information about the book bannings, make sure to follow Nixa SABR on Instagram. For Eagle Air Radio, this has been Delanie Goss.

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