MARFA — Marfa ISD School Board members voted to approve a new school library policy this week relating to HB 900, a controversial bill signed into law this past legislative session aimed at preventing “sexually explicit” materials from entering Texas’ public school libraries and requiring parental consent for any “sexually relevant” materials.
The Big Bend Sentinel was unable to obtain a copy of the new library policy that school board members approved, leaving it unclear if any immediate changes will be made to how the school library operates.
The enforcement of the READER — Restricting Explicit and Adult Designated Educational Resources — act has been the subject of an ongoing lawsuit between several booksellers and the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Booksellers sued over the bill’s requirement that they rate books for sexual content before selling them to schools, claiming the law was vague, impossible to enforce and could harm business.
On January 17, 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the TEA cannot enforce the rating system for booksellers, siding with the sellers’ claims HB 900 violates their First Amendment rights, meaning that part of the law is effectively moot. What local districts across the state are now required to comply with is the remaining part of the law involving school libraries’ collection development policies and parental consent.
While Alpine and Fort Davis ISDs await a policy update from the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) coming this summer to review the issue, Marfa ISD proceeded with adopting its policy — called “EFB local library materials” — this week.
Alpine ISD Superintendent Michelle Rinehart said she is anticipating the EFB local library materials policy being one of 10-12 policy updates TASB will present to school boards this summer. She said smaller districts without legal departments rely on TASB’s guidance when adopting new policies in order to stay in compliance, as the entity stays abreast of legislation and ongoing court cases.
“They’ll do a lot of the legwork of understanding what the Legislature means — working on how to translate that into the language of effective policy — that’s one of the reasons that we contract with them,” Rinehart said.
Marfa ISD Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez told school board members in a meeting on February 19, when the library policy was first considered, that they could wait to adopt it along with the other TASB updates. In a meeting Monday, he explained again it would be a part of their routine, upcoming legal updates, but several board members were under the impression the policy needed to be adopted now, and it was put up for a vote and passed.
All districts will eventually be required to adopt a new local library policy. What is unclear is exactly how the broad, new rules about excluding “sexually relevant” material from collections will be enforced locally at a time when Texas leads the nation in book bans, and books often targeted by bans include texts on LGBTQ+ experiences, sexuality and health.
Shirley Robinson, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Library Association, said, for now, her agency is recommending school librarians stick to their existing collection development policies, which all public school districts already have in place.
She said one of the main differences under HB 900 is the standardization of collection development language. The law seeks to prevent school libraries from carrying “sexually explicit material” which it defines as any written, illustration, photographic image, video or audio material that “describes, depicts, or portrays sexual conduct” in a way that is “patently offensive.”
“Those collection development policies and selection guidelines were more generally based on locally accepted standards and meeting those community needs,” Robinson said. “Now everyone across the state of Texas will be subject to the same, very broad collection development policies.”
Another change brought about by HB 900 is the requirement that parental consent be obtained if a student wishes to check out a book deemed “sexually relevant.” The “sexually relevant” rating would have been determined by vendors, but now that that part of the law was struck down, it is unclear who will be making those determinations, Robinson said.
“It should not be the librarian, it should not be the school board, it should not be the school administrator — because of how subjective those definitions are,” Robinson said. “It could really open up all of those entities to a lot of risk and liability and would really end up spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on frivolous lawsuits.”
Robinson said because the school library policy is vague, it opens up the floor for broad interpretations of content, and her agency is already seeing books being pulled off of shelves by self-censoring librarians and disagreements amongst districts about which books are appropriate for which students.
“I think that in trying to legislate, we’re running into really complicated scenarios where one district’s interpretation of sexually relevant might be something that is just completely benign and not even in that category to someone in another district,” Robinson said.
Two of the Top 10 books to be challenged in 2022 included Gender Queer and Flamer, autobiographical texts about the LGBTQ experience, according to the American Library Association. While a provision of the law prohibits the removal of material based solely on the “ideas contained in the material, personal background of the author or characters in the material,” Robinson said that’s “not what’s going to happen on the ground.”
“That language exists, but in practice, in reality, it’s definitely a concern,” Robinson said.
Calls for book bans across the state have increased significantly since October 2021, said Robinson, when Texas lawmaker Matt Krause released a list of 850 books — now coined the Krause list — that he said could make students feel uncomfortable. She said efforts to remove books from school libraries are often led by small, politically-motivated groups.
Parents’ involvement with their children’s education, and what they are reading, is important and needs to continue, Robinson said. Libraries have long served as a place for readers to find materials that speak to them and help “expand their worldview,” she said, but decisions about what is acceptable for a young reader should be made on an individual basis.
“We can talk to our children and help them choose what is right or our family’s beliefs, but we can’t choose those same books for someone else’s family,” Robinson said.
Marfa ISD Librarian Crawford Marginot was not present for either of the board meetings in which the school board members discussed adopting the new library policies. In an email to The Big Bend Sentinel, Marginot said she and Interim Superintendent Alferez had talked about whether the district’s library included any controversial books.
She said the past couple of years Scholastic, Inc., one of the district’s book vendors that hosts book fairs, implemented an automatic pop-up message in its cash registers that halts a purchase to make sure an elementary student isn’t purchasing a book “with content more appropriate for high school students” but the feature wasn’t really needed. “My observation is that our staff quickly gets attuned to parents’ wishes about which subjects are or are not appropriate for their children,” Marginot said.
Robinson said the new, difficult-to-enforce school library policies under HB 900 only make things more complicated for public educators in the state of Texas, who already have a lot on their plates. “Their jobs are immensely more difficult now in 2024 than they were even after the pandemic started, and by legislating and mandating these kinds of requirements and trying to navigate these different new laws, we’re taking our focus off of serving the students of Texas,” Robinson said.