Come and Take Them, Dan Patrick

Last Wednesday morning, I welcomed students back into my high school library. Perhaps they were trying to escape the sweltering August heat, but regardless of why they walked in, the first-day-of-school energy in Abilene was contagious. I was sleep deprived from the to-do list running through my head the previous evening, but I felt energized seeing the floor of my library once again full of students.

Part of this excitement was because our whole staff was celebrating an impressive spike in our school’s accountability rating. After several years of hovering in the C-school range, a designation that never reflected what I saw happening on the ground, we had finally achieved a B, and it was an 84, no less. A solid, respectable B grade. 

These scores matter. When good, they give the whole community a boost. What parent doesn’t look at schools when they’re choosing a home to buy? When they’re bad, they can put an entire district at risk of losing local control. The state uses these academic ratings to justify overthrowing elected school boards and taking over independent school districts—as the Texas Education Agency has done in four districts across the state in recent years. 

As the school librarian, I had a front row seat to the blood, sweat, and tears that were poured into raising our campus from a C to a B. I saw administrators make impossible choices and teachers  put in long, grueling hours all in the pursuit of checking off boxes set by politicians who likely haven’t set foot on a high school campus since they graduated. But it paid off. We got the score.

The excitement of that first day took a hit when I pulled up the news and saw that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick had aired an episode of his new-ish podcast featuring Bonnie Wallace in which they discussed school libraries. I am very familiar with Bonnie Wallace. Last fall, she attended our local school board meeting—despite having no real connection to our community—so that she could malign our librarians and claim that we were not following the requirements of Senate Bill 13, a law she claimed in her testimony to have helped write. In reality, we had done nothing that school year but try to bring all of our processes and policies into compliance with SB 13.

Patrick appears to have been fully persuaded by Wallace. After his podcast, he  hosted a press conference with her at the Texas Capitol in which he stated, unironically: “We’re coming for the books.” He declared that, in the next legislative session, he would pass a law to dock school districts an entire letter grade if they failed to remove “dirty” books from their libraries. His statements were followed by the release of a list of 2,200 books that were on his ban list, including Elie Wiesel’s Night, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers of Algernon.

The list is absurdly expansive, and the processes or rationale—assuming there was any—behind its compilation are unclear.

I imagine that most people heard this tirade and saw a blustering politician gearing up for election season. What librarians saw was more alarming. We saw a hostage situation taking shape. 

The message was clear. Take this list that was formed outside of your community, outside of the purview of the parents you serve, outside of the procedures established by SB 13 less than a year ago, and just remove the books. It’s so simple. And if you don’t, we’ll break your school. We’ll punish your whole community. 

It is an impossible ask. The very law they wrote, the guidance they issued last fall for implementing this law, does not allow for quick and easy removal of books. Instead, it calls for a meticulous review process and more cooks in the kitchen than you’d find in a mess hall.

And even if it did, asking librarians to take action on a list that was apparently formed without any thought, nuance, care, nor expertise, is like asking a doctor to perform a surgery without washing their hands. It flagrantly disregards our professional ethics while forcing us to go against all we know about creating enriching school libraries that support a rigorous education.

Were Patrick’s statements last week an empty threat, an effort to distract from more urgent, substantive matters, or the next chapter in the nightmare that has been unfolding for librarians for many years now? I fear it largely depends on how people vote come November. Do we say no to politicians making up rules as they go like a 4-year-old trying to win at cards? Are we tired yet of playing games we can’t win only to watch our state come in and wrest away local control?

My fear is that some collective state of Stockholm syndrome will prevail. But my hope is that our Texas public schools, the hearts of our communities, the reason people all over this country still watch reruns of Friday Night Lights over and over again, will be the one thing that makes people say, “Enough.”

I have faced the looming threat of book bans for some time now, but last week’s developments were chilling in a new way. I am used to people coming for my book shelves, but how dare they come for my school, as well. How dare they try to erase our hard-earned accomplishments for the sake of political theater. Surely, this is the last straw. Surely, we’ve all had enough.