AUSTIN, Texas – Across Texas, books are being taken off the shelves of public school libraries. PEN America reports that during the 2021-2022 school year, 801 books were removed from 22 school districts across Texas.
Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, has been a part of the movement for more than a year. He was first made aware of “sexually explicit books in schools” when former Republican Rep. Matt Krause sent a letter about it. Shortly after, Rep. Patterson submitted a list of several books that he thought Frisco ISD should remove from its collection. That’s where his three kids are enrolled.
“I am passionate about this issue because I believe in the public school system as an avenue for most children in the state of Texas, and I believe it's worth protecting. But more importantly, I believe that our children's innocence is worth protecting,” Rep. Patterson said.
Now, Patterson has filed HB 1655, also called The READER Act. He described it as a statewide standard to make sure explicit materials have no home in the school library. If it passes, it would also require book vendors to rate sexual materials and provide legal protections for well-meaning schools and staff.
But Rep. Patterson said he wouldn’t call this a “book ban” because parents can still take their kids to a public library or bookstore to get any book that he doesn’t want to see in school.
“I would call it making sure that we’re protecting our kids from being radicalized in the school setting,” Rep. Patterson said.
If the bill passes, Patterson said books would be rated as “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant” material. Sexually explicit books would not be allowed on campus; sexually relevant material could be available to students if their parents allow it. If a book vendor gives a book an incorrect rating, no Texas school would be able to buy from them again. Patterson called it the “death penalty.” Schools would also need to make a list of these books public so parents can opt their children out of having access to them.
“You've got radical sexual content in some of these books. They don't need to be in the schools, and more importantly, my tax dollars shouldn't be paying for this filth. It's just it's completely unacceptable,” he said.
And even though Rep. Patterson acknowledged that not all students have parents who are willing or able to speak to them about these subjects, he said the time and place for kids to learn about them is in the home.
“Parents have the ultimate responsibility there,” he said.
Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, said it’d be hard to define what’s explicit since everyone has a different opinion.
“You get to a point where all you have are books that are acceptable to everybody, and then you end up in a consequence where you have books that are non-existent in the library, and so students can't learn; students can't learn to think. And so as a consequence, we don't have learning taking place in school,” he said.
Other books that have been removed from Texas schools relate to gender and sexuality. Speaking broadly about “book bans,” Rep. Dutton, who was chair of the public education committee at the time of this interview, said he believes students should learn about these topics in school. On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan named Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, chair of that committee.
“Some books are designed to cause you to think, and I think that's healthy for children,” Rep. Dutton said. “Because where else should you find thinking except at school?”
Rep. Dutton would like to appease the concerns of some parents through House Bill 917.
“If parents don’t want their children to read certain books, we’ll put them in a restricted area where you have to have parental permission, and let’s go on,” he said.
A new survey from the University of Houston shows that 90% of Republicans and 54% of Democrats support requiring publishers selling books to Texas public schools to include a content rating.
“I have problems with that too, because who’s going to decide the rating?” Rep. Dutton asked. “I think it's just a political discourse now that's caught fire, because some parents do want to decide what their children can read without first deciding that we're going to do everything we can to help our children learn to read.”
He called book removals “political football.”
“How long have these books been in the library, and why did they all of a sudden just come up now? Some of these books have been in the library for 20, 30, 40 years. And today, they become a problem? And you ask yourself, why? Point me to something that says, ‘Those books, after being in the library for all those years, are now causing a problem.’ They didn't cause me a problem. They didn't cause problems with other children that I can discern. And so I'm just curious as to how that all got to this point. And the only thing I can see is that it's political.”
Instead of focusing on removing books from Texas libraries, Rep. Dutton thinks lawmakers should actually find a way to get students' reading scores up. He said too many students start falling behind in third grade.
“It's the canary in the mineshaft for us,” he said. “Between pre-K and third grade, a child learns to read. After that, the child reads to learn. Well, if they don't ever get to learn to read, then you never get to read to learn. And when you don't learn, that means that businesses, our economic climate, is going to go to heck pretty fast, because we won't have people who are sufficiently intelligent enough to man the industry [and] the technological changes that are going to come. And so as a consequence, we have to end up importing workers into Texas. We have to have a huge budget for social welfare programs, because we’ve got so many people who can't be employed. So I think that where we ought to be focusing now is to ensure that every third grader who leaves third grade can read on third grade level at least; that we never let a child move beyond third grade who can't read.”
Rep. Dutton said he’ll keep saying this loud and clear until other lawmakers and Texans listen to him.