Senior Counsel Mary Catherine Martin testified before the Missouri Senate Education Committee regarding Senate Bill 276, introduced by State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, R-Arnold. Missouri SB 276 seeks to protect children from accessing sexually explicit content through digital library catalogs, which are provided by school districts to students and accessed through e-library apps. The proposed law would ensure that school districts take responsibility for filtering and monitoring what content is accessible through the digital catalogs, and empowers parents to flag and challenge inappropriate materials.

Martin's testimony highlighted how e-library apps currently in use by Missouri schools are severely flawed and allow access to sexually explicit content—meaning that the same content is required by law to be filtered on school devices and could not be shelved in physical libraries, is still accessible through the e-library app due to lack of filtering and monitoring mechanisms. Martin continued by describing how SB 276 addresses this issue and creates enforcement mechanisms for maintaining a safe environment for Missouri's children.

Following Martin's testimony, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins announced on March 10 that he is suspending funding for taxpayer-funded e-library application OverDrive, amid allegations that it gives minors access to inappropriate materials. A spokesperson for the secretary of state said the move was in "direct response to the bill," the Missouri Independent reported.‍
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‍Below is a transcription of Mary Catherine Martin's testimony, with added clarifications in brackets, delivered on March 4, 2025.

Thank you, Senators. I am Mary Catherine Martin from the Thomas More Society and this is the bill [SB 276] that I came here to testify about. I’m an attorney. I graduated from Harvard in 2003. I clerked in New York City and came to St. Louis to raise seven Missourians, and I’ve been writing appellate briefs during that time. In the last five years, as [the children have] gone to school, I’ve been able to go full time with a national civil rights law firm and take on the cases of some of the parents in the St. Louis area who are trying to assert their primary right to educate their children.  

As Senator Coleman referred to, a lot of these parents are extremely vigilant in guarding the materials [schools are using] and watching what was happening at their school district. And, through a lot of individual reporting of individual materials, [they] had some success in removing things that the school district would agree was illegal. They would get [these materials] removed from the library, then they discovered a few years ago with the advent of this app, that they would not take the same responsibility for monitoring what was in the app, even if the same texts that they had had removed were now available.
 
And, in fact, one of the advantages people touted about this app is that students can see it privately, that parents are not able to see a physical book, so that if they want to access materials with privacy without their parents seeing, then they would be encouraged [to do so]. This app actually facilitates that. So, this is something that parents really have to rely on the [school] administrators to monitor.
 
So, I would add to what Senator Coleman said only to say that there are three enforcement mechanisms in this bill.  

The first one is something I think a lot of people don’t even realize is not already part of our  law is that the materials that are available in this app—if you click on this button on the school computer—are not filtered, so you can actually go into the app and get to materials that, if you brought them up (most of what you’re seeing in the examples that we gave you today), those would be filtered if you went directly to them in a browser on a school district website.  
 
The law requires them to be filtered, but if you go to the same materials through the app, no filter applies. So, one of the things that the bill does is require that school districts and public libraries apply the same filters to this app that they apply to what comes up through their browser.

And then there are two other enforcement mechanisms. One of them is to take something that most school districts have—which is a reporting mechanism—a resource challenge policy, and that would be any resource, including those in the app. Parents generally can go to the [school] district and challenge its appropriateness for children, and this would require that the results of [that challenge] would be posted—even if the parents do not get their way—so that the school district would have to stand by its decisions about resources and parents would have the ability to judge the judgement of the district in terms of the resources that will be provided to their children.
 
And then finally, the third enforcement mechanism is something that models after the Sunshine Law in that it makes school districts responsible to choose one person—an administrator, whose responsibility is to fulfill the school district’s obligation to screen these texts, and to apply the law. And the reason that is important is that parents cannot monitor all these titles. And in fact, I think that’s what the school district would say in opposition to this bill, “we can’t just monitor all these as well!” If the school districts can’t, parents can’t either.
 
And so, parent reporting is not ideal in these situations, because generally, it comes after the child has already been exposed to the material. So, what we need is an enforcement mechanism that requires school districts to get ahead and gives them the obligation of screening things before they hand them to the children, which is, of course, what they’re obliged to do with every other resource that they give to kids.
 
And in closing, to echo what Senator Coleman said about the cost of providing this program, the cost of anything is actually the cost of what it requires to operate that thing legally, right? If I wanted to buy a car, but I did not have the resources to license it, to insure it, to register it, and to pay taxes on it, then I do not have the resources to own a car legally—and so I do not have the resources to have a car.
 
And that’s true in everything—that someone might require reviews. A school district that does not have the resources to review every title in these apps should not be using an app of that scope. This shouldn’t be the end of the world. This just turns back the clock—what, three years to the entire history of public education?—where we provided resources as they were being used, one to one, to students. It doesn’t even prevent resources being provided electronically. It’s just one benefit from the state that a school district would not be able to use.  

And I would add that the same provider that provides the Secretary of State this app for use in schools provides a public library app that’s available to every Missouri citizen. So, parents who would be frustrated by this [resource] being removed from school computers have the freedom to have this app and monitor it themselves already. This is really just a matter of whether the school district has the capacity to responsibly use it. Thank you.

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