A Conroe ISD Teacher Is Taking The Fight Against Book Removals Into Their Own Hands

A Conroe ISD teacher, along with several community members, has decided to take advantage of the district's direction to file complaints opposing book reconsiderations.A Conroe ISD teacher, tired of seeing so many books taken off the shelves in their district, decided to do something about it and organized an appeal writing campaign.

Alex knew they had to take advantage of the opportunity while they had it. With the assistance of a handful of people from a community-led Facebook group, Alex sent appeals for 26 of the 44 individual titles taken from classroom collections and sent back to the district. Most of these texts had been removed as a result of informal reviews.

“This was really the only option we had,” Alex added. “We’ve got to put the kids first. We really have to say this is for freedom of thought and what’s best for students and teaching and thinking.” According to reports from multiple librarians, these committee meetings occur monthly. Ahead of at least some of the meetings, librarians had not read the books and were not made aware of what titles they would be discussing. Instead, they read reviews by professional literary publications and one “nonprofessional” website —whose reviews are focused on whether or not a title contains objectionable content such as profanity, nudity or sexual content.

They may also discuss older books that are not checked out often and decide to remove these titles. Some librarians disagree with this, arguing that weeding—the routine process of removing outdated, low-circulation titles—is needed, not outright removal of these titles. According to district records, when a committee has to read the books, titles under review are kept 77 percent of the time and removed 23 percent of the time. When a committee does not have to read the books, those reviewed are kept 21 percent and removed 79 percent of the time.

“Maybe education actually works to protect students as well. The group of parents out there banning books just wants to protect kids — and maybe there is something nefarious — but they really are pushing hard to protect kids,” Alex said."Their belief is that the way you protect kids is to wrap them up and keep them from the real world for as long as possible, and it’s just not my opinion of protecting kids.

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