At what point, guys, do we say, “This is not our job. I can't do Molly's job”?
Chair Matt Hymas · after the board added a member-written questionnaire
Aug 6–7, 2026
The meeting turns to who runs the agency.
Nine hours into the Aug 6 meeting, discussion of the library review shifts to a dispute over who runs the state education agency: the fifteen elected board members or the superintendent they hired. The chair hands off the gavel and steps away.
Aug 7 The board's Standards and Assessment Committee hears Utah's first appeal to the state over a local book removal. It can order the district to repeat part of its review process. It cannot order the book returned to library shelves.
Hear this exchange
“You don't belong to Molly anymore. You belong to us, all 15 of us. That's not fair to her. That's not fair to Molly. It's not fair to any of these other staff members back here.”
Hymas · before stepping away from the chair
“We have 15 members. And honestly, I have 15 boards. I don't have one board. So that's very hard to manage.”
State Superintendent Molly Hart
Two statements, same meeting3:36
Chair Matt Hymas, then Superintendent Molly HartAug 6, 2026
Edited excerpt. These are two separate statements about four minutes apart, not a back-and-forth. About four minutes in the middle are cut, and the speakers stay in the order they spoke. Captions were checked against the recording, and the quotes above use that checked wording.
The ballot in one glance.
The state board has 15 seats. Eight are on the Nov 3 ballot. Four sitting members are running again. Four seats have no incumbent seeking them: three where the sitting member chose not to run, and District 2, where Joseph Kerry resigned on Sep 14 and dropped his re-election bid. Five of the eight races have two candidates on the state list. The other three have one.
8of 15 seats on the ballot
5races with more than one candidate
4seats with no incumbent running: Districts 2, 8, 11 and 14
277votes decided the June primary in District 11. Count not yet certified when captured.
A correction, and why it is easy to get wrong. Three state board races held a June primary, not two: Districts 8, 11 and 14. Utah's statewide results site shows only two, because it publishes only races that cross county lines. District 8 sits inside one county, so its numbers are reported by that county instead. If you count primaries off the state results page you will get two. If you count them off the state candidate list, where Trina Christensen is marked out in the District 8 primary, you get three.
See the eight November races
D1
Jennie Earl (R) · Cathy Callow-Heusser (D)Sitting member running
D2
Kacee Weaver (D) · Joseph Kerry (R)The seat is vacant. Kerry resigned from the board effective Sep 14, 2026 and said he was dropping his re-election bid, giving a family move as the reason. The state candidate list still carries him as an election candidate; it was last updated Sep 8, six days before he quit. His name still prints on the November ballot in Weber County: its certified sample ballot, last modified Sep 18, lists him for District 2. The other District 2 counties were not checked.
D4
LeAnn Wood (R)Sitting member running, and the only candidate the state lists. One Democrat filed but did not get out of her party's April convention. The state list said otherwise until it was updated on Aug 24.
D5
Sarah Reale (D)Sitting member running, and the only candidate the state lists. One Republican filed and then withdrew; his signed withdrawal is stamped May 7. The Utah Republican Party's own candidate page, last changed in July, still showed him. The certified November ballot settles it.
D7
Erin Longacre (R) · James Martin (D)Sitting member running, by appointment. Special two-year term
D8
Nicole McDermott (R) · Araueni Olivares (D)Open seat. McDermott won a June Republican primary that the statewide results site does not carry.
D11
Tracy J. Nuttall (R) · Lacey Peterson (D)Open seat. Nuttall won the June primary by 277 votes.
D14
Linda Hanks (R)Open seat, and the only candidate the state lists. Hanks won the June Republican primary; no Democrat is on the ballot.
Decisions the next board will face
Three groups, three different roles.
Lawmakers, the State Board and districts have different powers over school books. These records follow who chooses them, who pays and who answers a complaint.
What each group can do.
Lawmakers and legislative auditors. Lawmakers can pass a law; the auditors can only recommend. They have been circling school library purchasing since 2022.
The state school board. Fifteen elected members. They set policy for the state and can spend their own discretionary money. In Aug 2026 they spent $60,000 of it on a review of how school libraries buy books.
A local district. Davis removed Fight Club. The state board can review how a district ran that decision, but it cannot reverse it.
These decisions happened on separate schedules. The public records reviewed for this page do not show that the groups coordinated them.
What the meeting search found about Emily Green. A search of 749 recorded state board meetings from 2022 through 2024 found no board member raising the purchasing question before Green did, in Apr 2024. Three meetings in that window had no captions and so were never searched: the Apr 4 board meeting, its opening session, and the Apr 5 Finance Committee. All three were transcribed on Sep 2, 2026 and checked. None of them contains the question. What they do contain is ordinary business that looks similar and is not: a research-software subscription, student-records vendors, and curriculum adoption timelines.
Two limits remain, and they are real. The search began in Jan 2022, so it says nothing about earlier years. And Green is not the first Utah official to ask: Jennie Earl, then the board's vice chair and now a candidate in District 1, asked lawmakers “where are these books coming from?” in Feb 2023, fourteen months earlier, at the Legislature rather than at the board.
Legislature & auditors
State school board
Local district
Elections
Study how books get bought.
They funded: a statewide study of how schools choose and buy library books, and where the money comes from. $60,000, running to December.
They did not decide: whether any book stays on a shelf.
Do that vote over, in public.
They sent back: Davis's Fight Club decision, to be voted on as its own item that the public can see and comment on.
They did not decide: whether the book goes back on the shelf.
Lawmakers ask where the books come from.
At a legislative committee, Sen. Lincoln Fillmore asks how books get into school libraries in the first place. State Board staff answer that the point of the new selection rules is no more “the publisher sent extra copies so we're just gonna put them on the shelf, even though we haven't read these.” Rep. Ken Ivory tells the committee he has “a bill file open that deals with acquisition”, meaning he intends to write a bill about buying.
This is where the purchasing question enters the public record. It enters at the Legislature, four years before the board spends money on it.
A line in an audit, easy to over-read.
The Legislative Auditor General's Report 2022-12 is about curriculum, not libraries. On page 28 it says in passing, in a sentence the report itself marks as outside its scope, that a district's difficulties “could have been mitigated were stronger proactive procedures in place for vetting library materials.”
That is an aside, not one of the report's recommendations. The report itself says one line earlier: “Although a review of library books was not within the scope of this audit…”
I checked whether anyone picked that line up. The report circulated immediately: it was presented to the Legislature in Oct 2022, and a member of the public quoted it to the state board weeks later. But they were citing its recommendations on standards and guidance, from page 49. Across every state board recording and legislative transcript held for 2022 through 2025, the library sentence appears exactly once, in the report itself. Nobody took it up for three years.
That is a stronger fact than silence. The report was read and quoted within weeks, so the reason this line went nowhere is not that the report was ignored.
Green wins District 14.
Emily Green wins the State School Board seat covering parts of southern and central Utah, beating Libertarian Richard Jensen. She takes office in Jan 2023 for a four-year term.
The result itself is not in dispute, but I am not quoting a margin. The vote counts are missing from the linked material. The signed statewide count is on file, but its District 14 table could not be read in the scanned copy.
The question reaches the board.
In two Standards and Assessment Committee meetings, on Apr 5 and Apr 16, Emily Green asks an early version of the purchasing question. Staff offer to set up a briefing for her with a librarian.
Apr 16 is solid: Green is named on the recording roughly twenty times. Apr 5 is not. That recording carries no speaker labels, and she is identified as the speaker by matching the voice and the phrasing to the Apr 16 exchange. It is a strong match, not a certainty. Whether the briefing staff offered ever happened is not recorded anywhere.
This is the board picking up a question the Legislature and the auditors had already been asking for two years. It is where the board's own involvement starts, which is not the same as where the question started.
The election changes who is in the room.
Eight State School Board seats were decided. The official statewide count, signed by the state's canvassing board, lists Matt Hymas, Cole Kelley, Randy Boothe and Carol Barlow Lear among those elected, along with four other new or returning members. Three of the eight races sit inside a single county, so they were counted and certified by that county instead of statewide.
Incumbents who returned · 4
D6 Carol Barlow Lear · D7 Molly Hart · D10 Matt Hymas · D13 Randy Boothe
Incumbents who did not return · 4
D3 Brent Strate → Rod Hall · D9 Natalie Cline → Amanda Bollinger · D12 James Rex Moss → Cole Kelley · D15 Kristan Norton → Joann Brinton
Green is not part of this turnover. District 14 was not on the 2024 ballot. She had won it in 2022 and kept her seat through all of this. Her Apr 2024 questions came before this election, not after it.
Why Molly Hart appears twice on this page: she won the District 7 board seat here, then in 2025 became State Superintendent, the person who runs the agency day to day. So by Aug 2026 she is speaking for the staff rather than sitting as a member, and District 7 is being filled again for a short two-year term.
Official 2024 election records, incl. the statewide canvass ↗
The Speaker orders the audit.
Two weeks after the election, House Speaker Mike Schultz moves to make an audit of “the process used to remove books in public schools” a priority. That request becomes the Jun 2025 library audit.
The written minutes of that meeting do not mention it. They do list the three other audits Schultz asked for in the same breath, which is how we know the minutes are incomplete rather than the request imagined. Two separate transcriptions of the audio agree on his words.
So the legislative audit has a named person on tape asking for it. The board's $60,000 study, funded almost two years later, is a different thing on a different track that happens to ask a similar question.
The first 2025 audit lands, asking a similar question.
The auditors publish Report 2025-11. Its second recommendation asks lawmakers to “consider the policy question of whether to require Local Education Agencies to have a policy for library book selection processes.” A Local Education Agency is a school district or a charter school. In plain terms: should every district be required to have written rules for choosing library books?
At the hearing, Senate President Stuart Adams says the “front end is a big deal”, meaning how books are chosen matters more than fighting over them later. The report is handed to the Legislature's education committee to take up.
A second audit, this time about the books themselves.
The auditors publish Report 2025-28, “A Review of School Library Books: Questionable Content Shows the Need for More Robust Oversight.” Where June's audit looked at how districts handle challenges, this one looks at what is actually on the shelves.
It restates the buying question and sharpens it. The auditors write that they had already reported “that librarians are often left to make difficult purchasing decisions without sufficient guidance or support,” and say this report's findings reiterate that.
Nobody was ordered to do anything. This report contains no recommendations for the state board at all, and the June one carried “no required audit responses or designated chief officer”, which is the auditors saying in their own words that no official had to reply. Both reports ask the Legislature to consider a question. Neither tells the board to act.
Superintendent Molly Hart answered for the board on Oct 6, 2025. She noted the report made no recommendations for them and committed to keep offering districts “guidance, technical assistance, and professional development.” She did not promise a review.
So this is the closest thing in the record to the question the board takes up ten months later, and it comes from the state's own auditors. It lands one month before a legislator raises the same concern and two months before Green says she has been calling librarians. Nothing in either audit required the board to act. But when Green writes up her review the following August, she points back at these two reports as the reason for it.
A legislator repeats what librarians told her.
At the Legislature's education committee, a member describes what she heard visiting schools: “many of the librarians are like, we just ordered this box of books and it's just a collection and we don't have any say over what's in it.” The people with no say, in her account, are the librarians. She asks the auditors whether districts could order differently. They answer that they “heard about that process but we didn't look into whether it would be possible to go outside that process.”
The same concern was raised in two places. The public record does not show a connection between them.
Green says she has been calling librarians.
At a board study session, Green says she has spent time reaching out to librarians to understand how schools buy library books.
The Board is now asking who picks the books, pays for them and answers challenges.
Source: the board's own recording of the Dec 5, 2025 study session, held in the research archive. There is no stable public link to that single meeting, so none is given here rather than pointing you at the wrong one.
Candidates file for eight seats.
Filing closes with candidates in Districts 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11 and 14. The state's own form lists the office as partisan, so candidates run with a party label and go through party conventions and primaries.
Party delegates pick Hutchinson. Signatures keep Nuttall in.
At the Republican convention, Terry Hutchinson beats Tracy Nuttall for the District 11 nomination, 63.8% to 36.1%.
Utah gives candidates two ways onto the primary ballot. Win enough support from party delegates at the convention, or collect enough voter signatures to qualify directly. A candidate can do both. Nuttall lost the convention and qualified by signature instead, turning in 2,220 valid ones against a 2,000 requirement. That is why losing the convention did not end her campaign.
In District 14, both Linda Hanks and Nichole Beecher Isom reach the primary. Emily Green, whose questions run through this page, did not file for re-election in 2026.
A committee asks staff to study how schools buy books.
This is the Standards and Assessment Committee, not the full board. Green moves that staff carry out “a comprehensive review and audit of public school library materials selection and acquisition practices in Utah.” Her motion lists what she wants looked at: where the money comes from, how the buying is done, which vendors and publishers are involved, how librarians are trained, how much sway distributors have, and what role professional library organizations play.
Before the vote, the motion is changed so staff will first come back with a schedule for doing the work. It passes with no votes against.
It stopped being an audit. Green's motion used the word, but staff pointed out on Jul 14 that Utah law defines what an audit is: “this would not be an audit. There would not be auditors participating… we've shifted that language from audit to monitoring.” What the board actually funded is a staff study. Three different things on this page get called an audit, and only the Legislature's is one.
The chair names the number: $60,000.
Back at the Standards and Assessment Committee, Green moves the study forward with a request for money. The figure does not come from her. Board Chair Jennie Earl suggests it on the recording: “Why don't you do 60,000.”
It was a range before that. Staff had floated “$50,000 to $60,000 from our discretionary funds” and the motion fixed the higher end. Nothing in the record explains what set the ceiling.
This vote was not unanimous. It passed 4 to 1, with member Sarah Reale against.
A warning if you go checking this yourself. The board's own Jul 14 summary of actions misdescribes this vote. It reprints the May 18 wording under a Jun 5 heading and calls the result unanimous. The recording is the reliable record here, not that summary.
Voters overturn the delegates in District 11.
Tracy Nuttall beats Terry Hutchinson by 277 votes, 50.68% to 49.32%. The convention delegates had picked Hutchinson by nearly two to one; the wider primary electorate did not agree. In District 14, Linda Hanks beats Nichole Beecher Isom 68.77% to 31.23%.
District 11
Nuttall 10,297
Hutchinson 10,020
District 14
Hanks 21,646
Beecher Isom 9,830
District 8 also held a Republican primary the same day, won by Nicole McDermott. Its numbers are not on the state results page, which carries only races crossing county lines.
All precincts had reported when these results were saved, but Utah still labeled them unofficial. They are that day’s published totals, not the final certified count.
A second committee signs off on the money.
At the Law and Licensing Committee, member Rod Hall moves to adopt the schedule and set aside the $60,000. It passes with no votes against, and sends the package to the full board in August.
Green describes what she was after, naming supply chain, market structure, approved vendor lists and collection development, then: “there is a very specific lane that we want this review to be in. And so I've named kind of the industry words and that's what we're looking for.”
Source note: this comes from the meeting's automatic captions, which carry no speaker names. It is attributed to Green because the chair recognizes her by name immediately before it and she speaks continuously through the passage.
The full board funds it, over objections.
The board takes six recorded votes. Three of them decide what the study will actually be.
The two votes that matter, in order. Green had written a questionnaire to send out as part of the study. First the board voted on whether staff should merely consider using it. That softer version failed, 6 to 9. Then the board voted to include the questionnaire outright, and that passed, 10 to 5. So defeating the first motion is what made the questionnaire binding rather than optional. Reading the numbers alone, it looks backwards.
The final package passed 11–2, with one abstention and one member absent. The chair announced “ten in favor” on the recording, but the filed minutes list eleven yes votes. I use the filed minutes for the tally. I found no public explanation for the votes by Sarah Reale, Carol Barlow Lear, or Matt Hymas, and I have not asked them.
Is $60,000 a lot for this board? No. Two months earlier, on Jun 4, the same board voted $350,000 out of the same discretionary account to hire outside investigators, and that passed unanimously with no argument. At the same meeting it approved $120,000 for playground equipment, which came from a different pot, federal mineral lease money, and that one was close: 9 in favor, 5 against. So the $60,000 is neither the biggest thing this board spends nor the most contested.
What is unusual is not the amount. It is that the questionnaire attached to the study was added on the floor by a 10-to-5 vote, against the objection of the board's own chair, who then abstained on the final package. The money was routine. The instrument was not. The records reviewed here do not say how much remained in that account.
The study runs about 26 weeks, to early December, and is budgeted at roughly 680 hours of state board staff time. It also asks about 789 hours from local school districts, which the $60,000 does not pay for.
What the questionnaire actually asks. The draft is dated Aug 4 and lists Green as its contact. It would collect three years of records from 12 school districts and 3 charter schools, from four people at each: the business administrator, the purchasing director with legal counsel, the library supervisor, and the superintendent.
It asks what schools buy, from whom, with whose money, and under what contract terms. It uses the book trade's own vocabulary on purpose, terms like approval plans, standing orders, opening-day collections and shelf-ready processing, so that, in the draft's words, questions “cannot be answered around.” It asks districts to attach the paperwork: purchase orders, contracts, vendor manifests, training logs.
Two things in it go further than the review's own outline. It “follows the money in both directions”, asking not only what districts spend but what flows back to them from vendors and professional organizations as dues, conference travel, incentives, grants and donated books. And a separate optional section would put questions directly to the vendors, the major distributors and platforms, so their answers can be checked against the districts'.
Green's memo grounds all of it in the two state audits, saying the review “supplies the acquisition-side evidence base those recommendations call for.” The draft labels itself “DRAFT — For Board discussion and staff refinement. Not an adopted USBE document.”
What the money buys is information: a statewide picture of how schools choose and buy library books, and who influences that. No book was voted on.
The Aug 6 votes, on the recording ↗Official USBE packet, 1,611 pages ↗
The first state appeal ends in a do-over.
Davis School District removed Fight Club. Someone appealed to the state, the first time that has happened in Utah. The state committee found unanimously that Davis handled the vote wrongly by putting it on the consent agenda, and sent it back to be voted on as its own public item.
What a consent agenda is. A batch of items a board approves in one vote, with no discussion, because they are meant to be routine. Superintendent Molly Hart described the problem with it on tape the day before: “Consent agenda is designed to be quick. It's designed to be things that are operational, noncontroversial… Well, that's not what our consent calendar has turned into.” Removing a book from school libraries was on one.
What Davis said, and lost
“A consent item is a business item that is considered by a full vote of the board. Board members have the opportunity to request discussion for each item that's on the consent agenda. In this case, board members did not request opportunity to discuss those items, and it was approved by a majority of the board unanimously, indeed, in an open public business meeting.”
Assistant Superintendent Logan Toone argued the district followed its own rules, that the removal decision “was not made based on solely violence alone,” and asked the committee to “uphold the decision that was made and dismiss the appeal.” The committee ruled against him. These words come from an automated transcript, not a transcript checked against the recording. The committee vote is documented in the official record.
Note what this did not do. The state committee can correct how Davis runs the process. It cannot put the book back on the shelf, and it did not try to.
Where that leaves voters
What is actually on your ballot.
Three seats change hands and five sitting members face voters. The board they join has an unsettled argument running through it: fifteen elected members, one superintendent, and no agreement about where the board's oversight stops and the staff's job starts. The August meeting is what that looks like from the inside.
An honest limit on this page. Not one candidate in these eight races has said anything publicly about the library study, the questionnaire, the $60,000, or the Davis appeal. Nobody asked them, including me. So this page cannot tell you how any of them would vote. It tells you what the board has been doing, so you can ask them yourself.
What would show this page is wrong. Both of the tests this page set for itself have now been run, on Sep 2, 2026, and both came back supporting what it says. The three Apr 2024 recordings that had never been searched were transcribed: none has another board member raising the buying question. And the 2022 audit line was checked against every state board recording and legislative transcript held for 2022 through 2025: it appears once, in the report itself, even though the report was quoted to the board within weeks for other reasons.
So the sequence here is not resting on gaps. What it still cannot tell you is why: nothing in the record explains what moved this from an ignored aside in 2022 to a funded review in 2026, and this page does not guess. The honest test left is anything before Jan 2022, which no sweep has covered.
This page does not rate candidates, and it does not treat two things happening near each other as proof one caused the other.