In what intellectual freedom advocates have seen coming for months, a Texas school district has just shut down access to all secondary school libraries for students due to the regulations of the state’s Senate Bill 13. New Braunfels Independent School District (NBISD) voted yesterday, Monday, October 13, to shut down all but elementary school libraries in the district in order to ensure their collections are compliant with the law.

Senate Bill 13 (SB 13) requires that school libraries remain free of “harmful material,” “indecent content,” and “profane content.” All three of these designations lack any legal definition, opening wide the door for interpretation and undermining the federal standard of the Miller Test in determining obscenity. Laws like SB 13 have been appearing in state legislature nationwide, with the intention to dismantle shared understanding of obscenity in favor of partisan-flavored interpretation of what does and does not constitute “inappropriate” material in books.

SB 13 goes further than requiring schools remove such materials. It gives the power of selecting what materials may be added to public school libraries to either the district’s board of trustees or to parent-led committees called School Library Advisory Councils (SLACs). Districts can choose which method they’ll take to oversee the collection, though local parents can petition districts who don’t elect to go with the SLAC options to do just that.

New Braunfels ISD has elected to keep decision making with the school board. This week’s announcement that they are shutting down access to all middle and high school libraries comes as they seek to weed out any materials that may be outside the approved topics of SB 13.

Per the school’s announcement:

Board has directed a comprehensive review of the district’s collection, which includes more than 195,000 books and resources. Secondary schools have a collection of more than 50,000 titles. Books that are found to violate SB 13 will be removed from the library’s collection. Secondary library services will remain suspended during this review but elementary school libraries services will not be suspended. NBISD administration is allocating resources to expedite the review process and ensure secondary libraries are accessible to students again as quickly as possible.

NBISD offers no framework for how they’ll be completing this comprehensive review of over 50,000 books across district secondary schools. The district also offers no timeline for when students will have access to their own school libraries–facilities that their family tax dollars go to operate. NBISD’s decision to shut down the libraries in order to complete a review of materials based on vague language showcases how quickly and easily public schools are and will continue to cower to far right politics infiltrating communities throughout Texas.

The school already has a robust collection policy outlining the types of materials they acquire and where and how they remove materials. SB 13 takes away the control that this district has over its available materials. The bill purposefully introduces lies about the kinds of materials available in school libraries. As with any other public school library, there is no such thing as “harmful material” in the collection. “Harmful material” is a subjective term, alongside “indecent” and “profane” content. They’re meaningless and serve only to create panic and discord in school districts, while costing them untold amounts of taxpayer money through charades like these wide-scale reviews.

In an update about SB 13’s impact on NBISD, the district outlined how they were handling implementation in September. This was before the decision for a total shut down. Among the district’s plans:

• Removal of any books deemed in violation of SB 13, pending further review. This is a book ban, whether or not the book ultimately gets removed from the district. Again, there are no standard definitions of any of the terms in SB 13. It’s open to political interpretation and creates the type of chilling effect where any book that could possibly be interpreted as against the law will simply disappear.
• Allowing parents to see every book their child has borrowed from the library. This wild infringement on student rights makes them less likely to borrow materials, especially of those materials are of a personal or sensitive nature–and of course, that surveillance is the entire point. It’s intended to be punitive and encourage students to simply not borrow materials from the library.
• Requiring all book vendors to be in compliance with SB 13. This is one of the sticking points with previously-passed legislation in Texas called The READER Act, that still remains on pause following a lawsuit against its legality. How and where vendors are to be in compliance with vague language and no method of interpreting what materials are or are not appropriate remains to be seen (and that’s, of course, the point).
• Deciding how future book purchases will be reviewed by the school board. Of course, elected school board officials work to keep their positions, meaning that their voting record on books allowed into school collections will either help them keep or lose their positions. That doesn’t start to touch on the fact that most school board members have zero experience working in, operating, or curating the materials in a library. This is intended to further deprofessionalize librarianship. In Texas, school librarians are not only certified as librarians. They’re also certified educators with classroom experience.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, broad and overreaching methods by which public institutions in Texas respond to this bill and its sister bill, Senate Bill 12. Just two weeks ago, Leander Independent School District’s administrators asked educators to 40 books–as identified through Artificial Intelligence–in compliance with that law. Among the titles were classics like To Kill a Mockingbird. All but four of those titles have been returned to shelves as of writing.

SB 13 is a bill that removes local control from public schools across the state of Texas and puts the power of what books are or are not available to students into the hands of politicians. The bill tells educators and librarians that they’re unable to do their jobs correctly, despite being trained, educated, and experienced in the field.

As it’s playing out in New Braunfels right now is what we’ll begin to see pop up in more schools in Texas: outright removal of access to libraries for students, period.

The next meeting of the New Braunfels school board is November 10. Information about that meeting is available on their website, but readers are encouraged to begin drafting letters to the board now addressing its decision to shutter access to secondary school libraries in order to conduct large-scale book banning. This is also the time to hold the state’s elected officials accountable. SB 13 was cosponsored entirely by republican legislators, all of whom are listed here. Texas residents are urged to not only tell those representatives what this bill is doing but to reiterate that those legislators work for the people and that they know this law works in conjunction with SB 12 to rid public schools of materials their party disagrees with. This isn’t about protection. It’s about eradication.

Something else advocates for the right to read can do if they’re local is keep an eye on the library’s catalog. What books are going to disappear from the collection over the next several weeks quietly? One way to do this is to consider pulling together some of the most commonly banned books over the last year and seeing if they’re currently in secondary library collections at NBISD and monitoring their status through the closure of those libraries.

Another meaningful action? Write letters in support of the school’s libraries and library workers to those individuals and to the board itself. SB 13 is intended to make library workers feel like criminals and intended to further deprofessionalize the field.

Read more about the dangerous precent being set by SB 13 at the Texas Freedom to Read Project.