“We educate all students who walk through our doors, and we have to make sure one parent’s views do not override the opinions of others.”

School board members in Buxton-based SAD 6 will spend two weeks reading “Gender Queer: A Memoir” and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender and Sexual Health” before deciding Sept. 6 whether to remove the books from middle and high school libraries. In Dixfield,”Gender Queer” was pulled from the Dirigo High School library by the RSU 56 board. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel, File

That’s how Superintendent Clay Gleason of Buxton-based School Administrative District 6 closed a hearing Monday night on whether the district should ban from its middle and high school libraries two books that some parents find objectionable.

The school board should listen to Gleason, as should all others across the state when they are asked to deny students access to information and ideas that help them understand their lives and the world around them.

They should trust their school librarians to do what they’ve always done: use their skills and experience, as well as long-established protocols, to choose books that are enriching and age-appropriate.

They should remember that most parents support providing students with access to a wide range of information and points of view.

And they should know that students can handle complex issues, and that good learning materials can help them process those difficult feelings.

The books in question in SAD 6 are “Gender Queer: A Memoir” and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender and Sexual Health,” both flagged by parents worried that their contents were too much for students.

Neither is new. But there has been a newfound effort to ban these books and others from schools around the country; “Gender Queer” was pulled from the library at Dirigo High School in Dixfield following complaints by parents.

It’s no accident that the same books have been challenged across the country, and that nearly all of them pertain to gender identity, sexuality or race. In recent years, we’ve gotten better at talking about these issues. We have better, more inclusive language, and a broader and more accurate understanding of history.

These developments have made some people profoundly uncomfortable, and they’ve reacted by trying to shield their kids, and other students, from hearing about those changes. They’ve been egged on by disinformation from right-wing media, which has sicced them on school board members, teachers and librarians across the country.

The pressure is working. In Dixfield, the book was banned even after all five members of a review committee found it was “a well-researched and accurate resource that has value to a subset of the population at DHS.” Previously, a well-known selection aid, School Library Journal, found the book to be appropriate for students age 9 and up.

But the school board listened more closely to the few parents who objected, one of whom called the book “soft porn,” voting 7-2 to remove the book.

It should be noted that the books are not particularly popular. Students are not taking them out for their own prurient interests, but to learn and perhaps answer some of their own questions about themselves.

Now, a Dirigo High student who has questions about their gender identity and sexuality – as many, many do – won’t have the book as a resource to get answers they aren’t getting elsewhere. Because of the ban, there’s one less way they can gain knowledge about the world and themselves. They may not have access to many others.

That’s not to say these books aren’t challenging. It’s difficult for many people to talk about gender identity and sexuality, and even more so outside of the very narrow parameters most of us were taught growing up. It’s hard to read about our country’s ugly history of racism, or about the dehumanization that fueled the Holocaust.

But that’s all the more reason to have them in school, where educators can offer context and guidance, and suggest future readings that round out what students have already learned.

We should be encouraging students to wrestle with challenging subjects. We should want them to learn as much about the world as they can.

Instead, the school districts banning books are telling students that they can’t be trusted – and that some of them are not welcome at all.