State Board of Education says public schools want more control over library books

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The majority of the Republican-dominated State Board of Education said Thursday it wants more control over whether books in the school library contain sexual content.

Ten members of the board responsible for determining what Texas’ 5.5 million public school children learn in the classroom voted in January to urge the Texas Legislature to pass a state law giving them the authority to determine which books are appropriate for school age. children. Local school districts are currently managing this process.

Republican members said giving control to the board would ease the heavy burden on the state’s more than 1,200 public school districts. They said that they could also offer a solution to the problem. last court decision Preventing full implementation of Texas a state law Requiring bookstores to rate their materials for appropriateness based on books’ depictions or gender-related references before selling them to school libraries.

“This board knows how to review the material. We have processes. We know how to do it. We can create a transparent process to do this job,” said Florence Republican board member Tom Maynard. “I know we’d get a lot more emails, but I think it’s … it really needs to be done.”

The board, which has moved further to the political right in recent years, will formally ask the Legislature to grant it “discretion to establish rules, procedures, and timelines” for the book review process and to amend existing state law, known as House Bill 900. To streamline the process, according to advice proposed Thursday.

The proposal drew immediate pushback from some Democrats on the board, who argued the process should remain within the purview of local school districts.

“They understand their community better and know what their constituents need and want rather than the State Board of Education,” San Antonio Democrat Marisa B. Pérez-Diaz said. “I think we have bigger fish to fry.”

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, a Democrat from San Marcos, questioned whether the board could handle what she saw as “the Herculean task of reading and rating all these books.”

“That seems crazy to me, even if we were getting paid — which we don’t,” Bell-Metereau said.

Republican Aaron Kinsey, the board chairman, said the book review process may reflect how the institution vets educational materials; this is an initiative that includes using external referees to help rank school subjects.

Evelyn Brooks, a Frisco Republican, said she supports creating uniform rules for all school districts to follow when selecting books for their libraries.

“They can get their communities involved in what they want in their library, but the standard is set to alleviate confusion,” Brooks said. “Although the law is very clear, there is a lot of confusion in board meetings. “It was a very muddy area.”

Under House Bill 900, books are considered “sexually relevant” if the material describes or depicts sexual activity and is part of the required school curriculum. Books are considered “sexually explicit” if material that describes or depicts sexual behavior is not part of the required curriculum and is depicted in a “patently offensive manner,” defined by the state as contrary to “existing standards of community decency.”

Schools must remove “sexually charged” books from library shelves, while students who want to purchase books with a “sexually relevant” rating need parental permission.

Earlier this year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative courts in the country, blocked Texas from requiring bookstores to rate its materials. The court agreed in part that complying with the law would place an undue economic burden on sellers.

However, the applicable part of the law is still bans school libraries for obtaining or storing “sexually explicit” material on bookshelves.

But conservative advocates continue to attend State Board of Education meetings in recent months to voice complaints about the presence of such materials in school libraries and what they describe as inaction by local school districts.

The debate over which agencies should control the book review process comes as Texas officials are trying to exert more control over the materials children are exposed to in public schools. There is a state adopted legislation It limits how schools can talk about America’s history of racism and diversity. other legislative proposals Banning classroom education on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Before the legislative session, Representative. Jared Patterson Frisco has already applied House Bill 183A bill that would grant the State Board of Education its request by giving the curriculum-setting body the authority to ban school districts from using library materials it deems “inappropriate” or “sexually explicit.”

Texas banned 538 books in the 2023-24 school year. According to PEN AmericaAn organization that monitors bans across the country. More than half of the books outlawed across the US contain sex or sex-related topics and content, and 44% feature characters or people of color. Thirty-nine percent featured LGBTQ+ characters or people.