State Board of Education says it wants more control over public school library books

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

A majority on the Republican-dominated State Board of Education said Thursday that it wanted more control over whether school library books are considered sexually explicit or not.

Ten members on the board responsible for determining what Texas’ 5.5 million public schoolchildren learn in the classroom voted to call on the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, to pass a state law granting them authority to determine what books are appropriate for school-age children. Local school districts currently manage that process.

Republican members said granting the board control would alleviate the state’s more than 1,200 public school districts of the burdensome task. They also said it could offer a solution to a recent court ruling stopping Texas from fully enforcing a state law requiring booksellers to rate their materials for appropriateness — based on books’ depictions or references to sex — before selling them to school libraries.

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

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

The proposal received immediate pushback from some of the board’s Democrats, who argued that the process should remain under the purview of local school districts.

“They better understand their communities and know what their constituencies need and want rather than the State Board of Education,” said San Antonio Democrat Marisa B. Pérez-Diaz. “I think we’ve got a lot of bigger fish to fry.”

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, a Democrat from San Marcos, questioned whether the board could handle what she considers “a Herculean task to read and rate all of these books.”

“That seems just insane to me, even if we were paid — and we’re not,” Bell-Metereau said.

Republican Aaron Kinsey, chair of the board, said the book review process could mirror how the body oversees instructional materials, an undertaking that includes using outside reviewers to help sort through school lessons.

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

“They could have their own communities involved in what they want in their libraries, but the standard has been set to alleviate confusion,” Brooks said. “There is a lot of confusion at the board meetings, even though the law is very straightforward. It’s just been a very muddy area.”

Under House Bill 900, books are considered “sexually relevant” if the material describes or portrays sexual activity and is part of the required school curriculum. Books are considered “sexually explicit” if the material describing or portraying sexual behavior is not part of the required curriculum and portrayed in a “patently offensive way,” defined by the state as going against “current community standards of decency.”

Schools are required to remove “sexually explicit” books from library shelves, while students seeking to check out books with a “sexually relevant” rating require parental consent.

Earlier this year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, blocked Texas from requiring booksellers to rate their materials. The court agreed, in part, that complying with the law would pose an undue economic burden on the vendors.

The enforceable part of the law, however, still prohibits school libraries from acquiring or keeping “sexually explicit” materials on their bookshelves.

But conservative advocates have still shown up to State Board of Education meetings in recent months to raise complaints about the presence of such materials in their school libraries and what they describe as inaction by local school districts.

The discussion over what entities should control the book review process comes as Texas officials have sought to exert more control over what materials children are exposed to in public schools. The state has passed legislation limiting how schools can talk about America’s history of racism and its diversity, while proposing other bills to ban classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Ahead of the legislative session, Rep. Jared Patterson of Frisco has already filed House Bill 183, a bill that would grant the State Board of Education its wish by giving the curriculum-setting body the authority to prohibit school districts from using library materials it considers “inappropriate” or “sexually explicit.”

Texas banned 538 books during the 2023-24 school year, according to PEN America, an organization tracking bans throughout the country. More than half of the books outlawed across the U.S. included sex or sex-related topics and content, while 44% included characters or people of color. Thirty-nine percent included LGBTQ+ characters or people.