Autauga-Prattville library director fired for revealing info to media amid book ban uproar

The governing board of the Autauga-Prattville Public Library Thursday voted to fire Director Andrew Foster after a 20-minute executive session.

“Let me make a statement to the media,” said Ray Boles, a member of the board and the board chair. “I have a written statement, which you may have. There will be nobody talking to the media other than the written statement.”

The action Thursday raised a yearlong controversy over the leadership of the library and the materials available to the public to a new level. The board members bolted from the dais to the jeers of several in the crowd. One person said “You put yourselves in the national media now.”

The two-sentence statement said that Foster was terminated “for revealing confidential information to the press.”

Scrawled on the paper containing the statement was an arrow, starting underneath the word “press,” and continuing underneath the statement which read “and violation of criminal law.” The Board did not provide any evidence of wrongdoing.

Foster said the “confidential information” the board referred to involved a records request that he fulfilled featuring emails between himself, the trustees and Laura Clark, an attorney hired by board members last month.

“I was never directly told that information was not go out,” Foster said. “I shared the information because that was included in the range of the request, and again I have not tried to hide. I am not ashamed of anything I have done. Sharing has been my policy since the very beginning of starting this position in July.”

Members then added a second transgression, “violation of criminal law,” during the executive session when Foster said he recorded the conversations that took place. He said he did so to “try and protect myself by recording, (which) seems to have backfired.”

Patrons visiting the Autauga-Prattville Public Library were turned away after staff prematurely closed the facility and locked the doors in protest over the termination of the library director, according to Adrienne Barringer, a library associate, who spoke with people just outside the library entrance doors.

“The library staff will not stand for this,” she said. “We will not.”

Foster said it appeared that members of the board had already decided to have him terminated even before the vote took place.

“I think over the last few months things have deteriorated in the relationship between me and the board,” he said. “Before everything that has happened, I have tried to be open, especially with our community and keep that information because I, as the director, have not been trying to hide what we are doing, our position.”

A battle over email

The series of emails at the heart of the termination reflected a conversation over some of Foster’s concerns with the policies trustees adopted in February. In a March 5 email, Clark responded to a question from Foster about removing books without a vote of the board members at an open meeting.

“The short answer is that books may be removed without a meeting of the board subject to the Open Records Act,” Clark said.

She said in the email that books may be removed at the request of a patron who elects to go through the material reconsideration process, or through the “normal course of weeding.”

If a book is removed at the request of a patron, then the process involves convening a meeting that is subject to the Open Records Act.

“If it is done through the normal course of weeding, then a meeting is not required,” Clark wrote in her email.

The email asked Foster to remove books that violated policies that trustees voted to adopt in February.

Board Chair Ray Boles included examples of books that Foster needed to remove from the shelves.

“Thus it is not necessary the whole board meet to discuss this and be subject to the Open Meetings Act,” Clark said in the email.

In an email sent March 6 sent to Boles, Foster said that “I do still have concerns with this clarification.”

The process Clark described involved removing books from circulation or weeding, but it didn’t touch on “the process of moving books between different sections of the library.” He wrote that the new policies did not state that the books that were “red-tagged” needed to be moved to a different location.

Foster expressed other concerns with the policy.

“I agree with Laura’s statement that the library board has the right to exercise ultimate discretion over the book collection,” Foster said in his email. “However, the process that has been discussed so far does not fall under weeding.”

A lengthy battle

The Feb. 8 meeting was the first time the board had convened after new members were selected to serve, mostly by the Autauga County Commission, in response to a mass resignation by former trustees of the library late last year.

The battle over the library began last year when a parent borrowed a pronoun book from the children’ section without realizing the book contained inclusive pronouns other than male and female. The mother expressed concerns that the collection contained such materials and began to complain to other parents.

The controversy escalated when like-minded parents began to challenge other materials within the library’s circulation claiming them to be sexually explicit. They formed a group, Clean Up Alabama, and attended county commission and city council meetings, and read passages from materials they believed to be inappropriate.

Another group formed, Read Freely Alabama, to oppose Clean Up Alabama, whose members have also attended meetings and spoke to officials hoping to convince them to retain the books on the shelves.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to what appears to clearly be retaliation,” said Angie Hayden, spokesperson for Read Freely Alabama, on Thursday. “We are asking for the reinstatement of Andrew Foster, and that the city and county attorneys review and investigate the events that have brought us to this moment.”

Clean Up Alabama has managed to install enough people on the board through a county commission sympathetic to their cause.

The trustees wasted little time in reshaping the library, adopting new policies that aligned with Clean Up Alabama. The question is whether the policies violate free speech, with some First Amendment experts suggesting that the policies may go too far for a court.

“They are so nonrepresentative and so vaguely written that pretty much any book on the shelves of the Prattville library, in the children’s section, goes against the policy they have written,” said Matthew Lane, president of the Alabama Library Association, in support of Foster. “They have called for any books that deal with gender identity, or sexual orientation, they say go against their policy.”

Foster said that is why he wants to have a meeting so that the board can outline the process that aligns with the policies that were adopted.

“There has been a lack of communication,” Foster said in his interview. “For today’s meeting, I was not told what was the purpose of the meeting.”

Foster said Thursday he would appreciate “some time to rest and decompress.”

“I hit the ground running in July and I have had very little breathing space,” he said.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, an independent nonprofit website covering politics and policy in state capitals around the nation.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Autauga-Prattville library director fired for revealing info to media