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The fight for parental rights in Texas continues with a bill in the Texas House that could be another major victory for those who want to keep harmful and often pornographic material out of their kids’ school libraries.
HB 183, filed by State Representative Jared Patterson (R-Frisco), would allow parents to challenge books that they believe to be inappropriate with the State Board of Education. This would make it easier to enforce the READER Act, which requires sexually explicit books to be removed from school libraries.
Activist Bonnie Wallace says the ability to challenge books would be a major win for parents because, "If that book is determined to be inappropriate, it is then removed from every school library in Texas."
She says that would be a major step up from the system we have now, which requires parents to work one school at a time to get books containing adult themes removed. And while she says she has had some success already, the process has been painfully slow-going due to the fact that Texas has nearly 10,000 public schools.
Wallace gave an example of how poorly this system works, saying, "Austin ISD has 16 high schools, I think. You would have to challenge at each high school. The process would take my entire lifetime."
According to Wallace, this is one of the many reasons that despite the passage of the READER Act in 2023, there are still a number of highly explicit books available to children in school libraries across Texas today. She says passage of HB 183 would go a long way toward correcting that.