CONROE, Texas – Several Conroe ISD librarians requested a level three hearing with members of the school board. Board President Skeeter Hubert, who attended the meeting, said the librarians asked for additional guidance out of concern.
“We have administrators, we have librarians, we have teachers that are going through and combing through books, and they remove them because they’re they are implementing the to the letter of the law, the policy that we put in place,” Hubert said. “But that also includes books that are AP (Advance Placement) exams that, that, you know, books that don’t really break the penal code at all. But our librarians are saying, I don’t want to take a chance.”
The district passed a measure updating its book review policy to include “sexually explicit material.”
This is the first full school year where the policy is in place and Hubert said they’ve noticed a significant problem.
“Some of those books are that would be considered would be books that talk about, rape and incest. Right. So that’s not a pornographic book that is not necessarily sexually explicit,” Hubert said.
Some of the books pulled were advancement place books required for exams for students seeking college credit, including Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize ‘The Color Purple.’ The book centers on Celie, a young poor Black girl in rural Alabama in 1900s raped by her father.
“That is a book that was on the AP test and a AP exam that we have removed from our school,” he said. “So, once again, we want to put a mechanism that says, well, if some of the librarians are saying, ‘hey, this book shouldn’t have been removed,’ then we want to create a mechanism that book can go through a formal review to be considered available for our students.”
Critics of the policy, donned by them as book bans, had feared books would be discriminately removed from districts.
KPRC 2′s Rilwan Balogun asked Hubert about it.
“No, I’m not going to necessarily disagree or agree with that statement. I believe that what we wanted to do as a district was put safeguards in place for our students and for our library,” he said. “We’ve got over a million books in our libraries. And unfortunately, there are some books that don’t belong. They flat out don’t belong. So, in the process of putting those safeguards in, we created a little bit too much of an overreach.”
The board president said there’s a movement of “mama bears” who “are putting their foot down” on books that have anything to do with sexual content.
“The mama bears have put so much fear into administrators and teachers and librarians that librarians, they don’t want to take a chance,” he said. “So, they’re saying it’s got to go and unfortunately, the classics are being removed… and our students are certainly, suffering from it.”
The board will vote on revising the policy at its September board meeting.