Protesters Want 212 Library Books Removed

According to San Angelo ISD, more than 200 book challenges have been submitted by a handful of individuals this year, seeking removal from school libraries.

Based on policies currently in place, parents of SAISD students have two ways to control what their children read.

First, they can sign up for email notifications every time their child checks out a book, and they can sign in to the SAISD Library online and proactively restrict titles they don’t want their children to read.

According to information from the district, administrators and librarians are available to assist parents and answer questions about the process, but so far, no parents have signed up for either of those options.

Changes to the Rules

Senate Bill 13 was passed to grant parents more control over the books available to their children at school, and while SAISD already had a policy in place permitting book challenges prior to passage of SB 13, the law added new procedural requirements for districts to follow as part of the challenge process.

Now, any community member — whether they are a parent of a student or not — may request removal of a title already in the library, commonly called a “book challenge” or a “challenge”.

According to information from the district, five community members initially submitted challenges to hundreds of books in the school libraries.

According to initial information from the district, those individuals submitted a total of 71 challenges to local libraries through the end of February. Since the end of February one person submitted another 141 book challenges. It is not known if this is a sixth person or one of the five who submitted the original 71 challenges.

Some of the more well-known titles challenged include:

• Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• A Game of Thrones by R.R. Martin
• The Kite Runner: a graphic novel by Khaled Hosseini
• Slaughterhouse Five: a graphic novel adaptation by Kurt Vonnegut with Ryan North
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
• The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
• An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Beartown by Frederick Backman

According to district staff, each reconsideration request must be submitted on an approved state form that specifically asks:

• Have you read the entire book?

• How is this book unsuitable educationally?

Assistant Superintendent Farah Gomez, speaking during a board meeting, said individuals submitting these challenges did not state affirmatively on their forms that they had read the books in their entirety, and they also failed to specify how the books were educationally unsuitable, opting instead to merely cite SB13.

According to library professionals, books are constantly weeded out as part of a regular process that takes place in school libraries, where librarians ensure their collections are relevant to the student populations they serve, pulling books deemed outdated, or seldom checked out, along with books that are old and damaged.

Libraries and Reading Have Changed

According to library experts, the number of physical books needed in today’s school libraries dropped significantly because of the internet and other technologies, with several acknowledging it’s difficult to get a modern student to read an actual book.

Some of the books challenged are part of the state-mandated curriculum and trustees will have to decide whether they should be excluded from the library when the district is required to teach them.

The topic will be up for discussion at the March 26 meeting, which begins at 5:45 p.m. in the SAISD Administration Building’s second-floor board room, 1621 University Drive.

Any person wishing to make public comment on this or any other topic on the agenda will be asked to sign up before the meeting begins.