Monday, November 9, 2026

ALA Bullies Another Community: The Readington Letter

Dear Members of the Readington Township Board of Education:

I am writing to confirm in writing the substance of the three-minute public comment I delivered at your October 13, 2026 meeting, to document the manner in which that comment was received, and to place on the record the legal and factual points that remain relevant to your pending decision on "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."

The Statement I Made


My name is Dan Kleinman. Chatham.

First thing I want to say is, all of you are really hardworking people, putting in a lot of time and effort, no matter what side you're on, to come in and be on a school committee and have to go through things like this. So I thank you generally. So my comments are gonna be made as constructive criticism, even though they're gonna be a little... on the strong side.

First of all, I want to give people here who are looking at this report ammunition that they need to realize that the report is extremely misleading. We have heard repeatedly from counselors and superintendents, and other people, how professional the librarians are in making their decisions, and that they use professional reviews. So, like, basically look up a book in a professional review, like Mackin, which you have, and Booklist, which is from American Library Association, and they make a decision based on the age of what's appropriate for the children.

I just want you to know that the American Library Association's, um, School Library Research Journal of the American Association of School Librarians, published in March of this year, an article called, "Books and Barriers: The Influence of Book Censorship on the Role of School Librarians, Their Self-Efficacy, and Well-Being," by Misty Schattle. She also appeared on School Librarians United, a podcast in which she discussed the story. And what she specifically discussed, and what the ALA found, and published in March before your committee thing was written in October, is that professional book reviews have no value. They don't help librarians make a decision at all.

The librarians end up reading the things, the books themselves, for the potentially inappropriate material. So, this whole thing is based on all these professional reviews that the American Library Association has admitted in March have no value, yet your report puts a lot of weight on that.

The other issue here is that the American Library Association community organizes people to come out to the meetings by the hundreds or dozens, and then you all think that you need to do what these people with the blue shirts on are want them to do, because they've been community organized.

It is so...bad. It is so bad that the President of the American Library Association bragged about one librarian from North Hunterdon who used American Library Association tools to get out 400 people to a meeting, and the school board decided, well, since so many people were in favor of this, they kept an inappropriate book.

Thank you very much.

What Occurred At the Meeting


Amy Barrett told people to "Wear blue!"
They did. Here are just some of them.
During and after the comment, members of the audience heckled. The board had to intervene and call for decorum. That response is part of a larger pattern. The same national organizing infrastructure previously used in North Hunterdon-Voorhees—EveryLibrary’s Fight for the First platform, Unite Against Book Bans tools, and local activation—has been applied in Readington. Martha Hickson, the librarian whose North Hunterdon effort produced the 400-person turnout the ALA president publicly celebrated, remains active; on October 1 she addressed this board on Bluesky with EveryLibrary’s stock lines (“The library isn’t your mommy or daddy… grow up, be a parent”). Amy Barrett has functioned as the local public face of the effort to keep the book available to eighth graders.

Subsequent Public Attacks


After the meeting, a Facebook post from DemsInTheWild – NJ Chapter characterized my three-minute speech as "antics ... potentially dangerous to librarians and costly to school districts” and a deliberate mischaracterization of the Schattle study. In the comments, Amy Barrett wrote that I “has also posted several times on X that school librarians should be ‘beaten to death.’” That is false. The post in question is a February 16, 2026 reply to Jesse Kelly. Kelly had written, in the context of a student at a walkout stating she would shoot conservatives if she had a gun:
“I do wonder if the teachers pushing and organizing this stuff understand they themselves will be beaten to death by these savages when Cultural Revolution 2.0 kicks off.”

My reply was: “School librarians will be beaten to death too.” It continues the hypothetical scenario; it is not a directive. Barrett removes the context. The same standard is not applied in the other direction. Librarians, including Martha Hickson, have posted or reposted “8647” on Bluesky. Parents who quote a single sentence from a book are told they must evaluate the work “as a whole”; the reverse is applied when the goal is to smear the speaker. 

Additional false claims made in the same thread include the assertion that I was paid $1,000 to speak. I have never been offered, nor would I accept, money for a speech. And the portrayal of an ordinary Leatherman multitool as evidence of danger is part of the bullying campaign to silence anyone who opposes ALA goals.

The significance of Amy "Wear blue!" Barrett's involvement is that she is the one supported through the EveryLibrary/Fight for the First organizing infrastructure that operates in coordination with ALA campaigns to community organize people to keep the book available to eighth graders in your school and classroom libraries. (https://www.fightforthefirst.org/petitions/keep-the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower-in-the-middle-school-library) Her public comments and the coordinated heckling that followed violate the standards set out in the American Library Association’s own Statement of Appropriate Code of Conduct, which prohibits harassment, intimidation, and verbal abuse (https://2026.alaannual.org/statement-appropriate-code-conduct).

The Book And the Law


"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" contains a r[*]pe scene. Professional advisories generally recommend it for ninth grade and up. The committee report and the public campaign supported through the EveryLibrary/Fight for the First infrastructure and led locally by Amy Barrett have defended its availability as a self-selected title for eighth graders.

Under Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, a school board may remove materials when the decision rests on educational suitability rather than a desire to prescribe orthodoxy. New Jersey’s Freedom to Read Act does not overrule Pico. The Act, written with the participation of the American Library Association and Martha Hickson, incorporates elements of the Library Bill of Rights and adds procedural requirements; it does not eliminate the board’s authority under Pico to exclude material that is educationally unsuitable for the age group in question. Nor does the Act repeal or limit N.J.S.A. 2C:34-3, which continues to address the distribution of obscene material to minors.

The March 2026 Schattle/O’Connor study (https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2026-06/schattleandoconnor.pdf) combined with Schattle’s own statements on the School Librarians United podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/censorships-impact-on-school-librarians-and-their/id1434321470?i=1000784807311) establish that the professional reviews on which the committee report relies are no longer regarded as reliable by the librarians who use them. The report’s heavy dependence on those reviews is therefore misplaced.

Conclusion


I request the board place this letter in the record of the matter and consider the points above before any final decision. I remain available to answer questions.

Sincerely,

Dan Kleinman


Here is contained the audio of my speech:



NOTE ADDED EVEN DATE:


Dear Boardmembers:

I have published what I wrote to you hours ago, and have included a graphic of the "blue shirts" and a link to hear me speak my speech from the previous meeting.  I'm trying to see if I can get others to see this before your meeting tomorrow, November 10, 2026.

  • ALA Bullies Another Community: The Readington Letter


Let me add, here's the ALA President bragging to membership how Martha Hickson used ALA's tools to get out over 400 people to pressure a single North Hunterdon-Voorhees school board meeting where an inappropriate book was kept in the school library:


  • ALA Details How It Controls Communities Nationwide: The Quiet Part Out Loud Now In Transcript Form

"And so we know that people are battling back and we are using that platform to pull people together. I was at a a conference and uh Martha Hickson was there who some of you may know as school librarian in New Jersey. And when she faced a challenge at her school through that UABB platform, and other forms of organizing, 400 community members came and joined her to sign, to to stand with her in that moment. [00:35:30] So the United Against Book baba Bans platform facilitates that. Our state chapters are using uh OneClickPolitics®, a tool that comes from our Chapter Relations Office and from uh the Washington Office to organize locally. We know that local organizing is what wins the day, that ALA can't come in and save places, but what we can do is provide the tools to the people who are on the ground doing that kind of organizing work. We continue to look for ways to expand our work in uh the Office of Intellectual Freedom."

Thank you.


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Location: 52 Readington Rd, White House Station, NJ 08889, USA

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