Book Riot: “How South Carolina school librarians are rising to the challenge of statewide book bans and why they retain hope in these challenging times. Three U.S. states have provisions in their state law that allow for removal of books from all public schools under certain circumstances. These are South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah. Tennessee has yet to trigger this, though given how broadly school districts in the state have been banning books, it’s likely we’ll see this sooner than we think. Meanwhile, both Utah and South Carolina have been engaged in these state-wide bans since implementation. State sponsored book bans in Utah and South Carolina work differently from one another. In Utah, a book is banned from all public schools if it has been banned from three public school districts or two public school districts and five charter schools statewide. The bill went into effect July 1, 2024, and it started with 13 titles on it. Utah’s bill is retroactive, meaning that titles which met the state’s guidelines prior to the bill’s start date were included on the list. Right now, there are 18 titles on the list. South Carolina’s law allows anyone in the state who has children in a public school district to raise objections to a title to their local school board and then onto the State Board of Education. This means they can bypass decisions and/or appeal the decision made at the school district level right to the state. Right now, South Carolina leads the country in state-sanctioned banned books at 21 titles total. Nearly all of them come from one parent who didn’t get her wishes granted in Beaufort County Schools. Read that again: one parent in the whole state of South Carolina has been responsible for nearly all of the books no students in public schools have access to. So much for “local control.” Ten of the 21 books banned in South Carolina landed on the list in May 2025. None of the book bans in either Utah nor South Carolina have gone down without a fight. In South Carolina, because the battle happens in state-level committee and then the full state board of education, the public pushback has been visible, documented, recorded, and shared widely. This is important for many reasons, including the fact it has become easy for far too many people to simply believe that red states and their access to knowledge and books doesn’t matter the same way it does in “good” blue states…”