In a set of legislative recommendations, the board asked Texas legislators to pass a law next year allowing it to review and rate school library books. Texas’ 89th legislative session begins Jan. 14.
What you need to know
The majority-Republican SBOE voted Nov. 22 to formally request the change from lawmakers. Giving the board control of the book rating process would alleviate the burden on school districts and resolve a legal challenge to a 2023 state law, members said.
“This board knows how to vet material. ... We can create a transparent process to do that work,” board member Tom Maynard, R-Florence, said Nov. 21. “The local school boards really don’t want to do it. They would love for us to take this off of their hands.”
Texas is blocked from fully enforcing House Bill 900, a 2023 state law that would have required book vendors to rate books for sexual content before selling them to schools. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the law in January, siding with booksellers who said HB 900 violated their freedom of speech, and declined to rehear the case in April.
A portion of the law that updated library collection standards for schools remains in effect.
Transferring rating authority to the SBOE would likely end the court case, according to Chris Maska, deputy general counsel for the Texas Education Agency.
“If the booksellers are no longer required to rate [books], then they’ve got no case,” Maska told the board Nov. 21.
The discussion
Some of the SBOE’s Democrats said they were concerned the proposed change would usurp local control from school district boards.
“This is one of those issues that should remain within the local school districts, because they better understand their communities and know what their constituencies need and want, rather than the State Board of Education,” board member Marisa Perez-Diaz, D-San Antonio, said. “I think we’ve got a lot of bigger fish to fry.”
Maynard said the state board would rate books for appropriateness but would not tell schools what to do with those ratings.
“At the end of the day, the local school boards still have to have a local policy based on those ratings,” Maynard said. “So it does not really take local control away, but it does get something off of the plate of local school boards.”
Board member Rebecca Bell-Metereau, D-San Marcos, said she did not know if the board could handle what she called “a Herculean task, to read and rate all of these books.”
“That seems just insane to me,” Bell-Metereau added, “even if we were paid—and we’re not.”
Board Chair Aaron Kinsey, R-Midland, said the SBOE could mirror how it reviews instructional materials, such as hiring and training outside reviewers to examine proposed content.
Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, filed a bill Nov. 12 that would direct the board to create its own book review process and evaluate individual library materials when requested by parents. HB 183 would prohibit students from checking out books the board deemed inappropriate or sexually explicit.
“We’re not talking about reviewing the whole library,” Maynard said. “I mean, we’re probably not going to be reviewing ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ for sexually explicit content. ... There’s a certain number of titles that have been deemed problematic.”
One more thing
PEN America, a free speech nonprofit, reported that 12 Texas school districts pulled 538 books from their library shelves during the 2023-24 academic year. This does not reflect the number of individual titles removed from Texas schools, as some books were cut by multiple districts.
The districts that removed books during the 2023-24 school year include:
- Brownsville ISD
- Conroe ISD
- Fort Bend ISD
- Fort Worth ISD
- Katy ISD
- Keller ISD
- Klein ISD
- Lake Travis ISD
- Midland ISD
- North East ISD
- Plano ISD
- Southside ISD
