SAN ANTONIO – Texas lawmakers in 2023 passed HB 900 the READER Act, which restricts explicit and adult related education resources in public school libraries. The law requires books vendors to rate materials.
School districts are required to recall books that are deemed explicit. Some districts are doing better than others in their transparency with the books.
A group of parents have been showing up to school board meetings to ask districts to have more oversight. Some of them showed up at the North East ISD board meeting in the spring.
NEISD Director of Library Services Terri Sanchez said the library has a process in which it works with vendors to provide professional reviews for books. But with thousands of books already on the shelves, some books that may have been OK in the past might still be on the shelves.
“A little bit of material that maybe we might have been more cautious about. But then, because of the literary value of the book, overall books stayed in the collection. Now, if there’s any material in there that’s explicit, we we have to remove those materials,” Sanchez said.
“I can’t say that we have a perfect system because, you know, we have millions of books in our collection. But we do our absolute best,” she said. “As I’m made aware of books, that are of concern or our librarians are made aware, you know, we, there’s dialog, emails are sent, and we contact each other and make sure that we take a second look at those books.”
Sanchez said books that are out of date, or no longer relevant are routinely “weeded out” as part of a process to keep the shelves fresh.
On the district’s website there’s a link to the Transparency in Libraries tab, where parents can submit complaints about books they have concerns about and see their child’s check-out history. There’s also an “Opt-out” form that parents can fill out to prevent their child from checking out books they deem inappropriate. There’s also a link to see how many books have been challenged since 2007. Only one book was challenged, “Black Boy Joy,” which was removed from elementary schools.
Sanchez said parents with questions are encouraged to reach out to the school’s librarian or her office directly.
Northside ISD officials said they have a process to weed out books, too, but they did not provide a number of how many have been removed. Here’s a statement they sent to KSAT regarding book transparency:
Our Guidelines for Selection, Evaluation, and Reconsideration of Library Materials states, “Operational responsibility for the selection of library materials is assigned to the Director of Library Services and the school librarian on each campus.
Our librarians routinely assess their collection and remove items based on age, usage data, etc. And, occasionally a campus librarian might look at a book in their collection and realize that, despite our best efforts to ensure that we’re ordering age-appropriate materials, it doesn’t align with our selection guidelines. That’s part of our collection development process. These types of collection development decisions are not tracked.
We prefer to take concerns about books through the reconsideration process which includes convening a committee of educators and parents. That process gives our community a voice and ensures that we are following the policies we have in place. In the past two years, we’ve had action taken on 3 titles after parents requested the reconsideration of a library material maintained in a Northside ISD Library. Those three titles are below:
All Boys Aren’t Blue - Johnson, George M. - Remove
The Leak - Petty, Kate Reed - Remove ES, retain MS and HS
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - Andrews, Jesse - Remove MS, retain HS”
SAISD pointed to its online district website where parents can see the Library Catalog. Officials said the purchasing of books is done by certified librarians with the use of professional reviews.
Due to Rightsizing, SAISD removed more than 111,000 books from 15 schools that were closed. The books that are weeded out from libraries are due to the following reasons.
- Condition - The book may be a newer book but in very poor condition.
- Relevancy - The book is no longer relevant to the reader. This applies to both fiction and non-fiction.
- Redundancy - Due to rightsizing, books may be weeded as there are too many copies of a book.
- Lost - Books may be weeded from the overall collection once they are lost.
SAISD said in a statement, “We have not had any books challenged through a formal process in the past two years. Parents can ask for a reconsideration of a book in the library through both an informal and formal process.”