The Firsthand Report ⌗4

In this issue: New rules bolster public libraries against book challenges, personal finance and climate education to be required for New York K-12 students, national Archivist nomination, media radar

☞ New York public libraries have some new rules. Amendments to the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education adopted this week REQUIRE LIBRARIES TO HAVE BOARD-APPROVED POLICIES ON THE SELECTION OF LIBRARY MATERIALS, reconsideration of library materials, public use of library spaces, codes of conduct, and confidentiality of library records.

The rule change is a response to recent efforts to have books removed from libraries, usually in children’s collections and mainly due to sexual, political, or ideological content.

You can read all the details in this March 8, 2026 presentation given to the Board of Regents by state library officials. It notes several recent Long Island “Freedom to Read challenges” that sought to remove books, including “Materials with pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian viewpoints for adults and children, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and book lists distributed by politically-motivated organizations.”

The new rules seem to be designed to bolster a library’s position when faced with such challenges. They don’t specify what individual library policies should include, but the March 8 presentation notes these elements of a good policy:

• Taxpayers have a right to challenge materials that have been purchased with their tax dollars.

• Libraries have a responsibility to ensure such challenges don’t overwhelm administrative capacity or interfere with others’ Freedom to Read.

☞ The New York State Department of Education achieved something rare this week: With a single regulatory amendment, it adopted a rule change that should make both diehard MAGA voters and No Kings liberals happy, along with one they’re (as per usual) deeply divided on.

I’m talking about the NEW REQUIREMENTS FOR PERSONAL FINANCE AND CLIMATE EDUCATION adopted this week. People across the political spectrum see financial education as beneficial, while the main point of agreement on the climate change debate is that the world is ending, with liberals attributing that to climate change and conservatives pointing to liberals as the cause.

The requirements will be rolled out over several years to students from kindergarten through grade 12, starting next school year. The details about what will be included in these new subject areas aren’t yet clear.

☞ President Trump nominated Bradford Pentony Wilson to be the new national Archivist earlier this month. “Who cares,” you say? Well, consider that every kind of document, email, text message and cocktail napkin sketch created by federal agency employees in connection to public business is considered a federal record under the Federal Records Act. And THE ARCHIVIST IS IN CHARGE OF MANAGING FEDERAL RECORDS.

Record management expert Don Lueders pointed this out in a 2025 article in The Federalist, calling for the next Archivist to be someone with the deep technical knowledge required to put our national documentation house in order. According to Lueders, the record management tools our government agencies have now are so unusable that workers just haven’t been archiving documents properly for a long time.

That means records can get lost, destroyed, or not destroyed when they’re supposed to be, posing both privacy risks and problems for FOIA requests and historical record keeping.

Lueders warned in his article against nominating a “mild-mannered historian” with no technical background—which seems like a pretty dead-on description of Bradford Pentony Wilson. However estimable his accomplishments as a scholar may be, information technology expertise is not on his resume. Working as an archivist doesn’t seem to be either.

MEDIA RADAR

📡 Speaking of archivists, Transcriber B, the unofficial archivist of COVID-era dissent, has been featuring some 2022 City Council testimony on New York City’s vaccine mandates by NYC workers recently. Transcriber B has been transcribing and archiving all manner of censored and dissident speech on COVID-19 and related policies since 2021.

📡 New York medical freedom advocates held their annual lobbying day in Albany this week, kicking it off with a rally at the Empire State Plaza. Speakers included several NYC medical freedom advocates and workers adversely affected by COVID-era policies. Children’s Health Defense livestreamed the event, and NYC media outfit Cafecito Break was in Albany to cover it too.