Books that some parents are calling obscene continue to be made available to students in campus libraries at Dallas Independent School District (DISD).
Tami Brown Rodriguez told The Dallas Express that she and other parents and community members have been attending DISD school board meetings for months to voice their concerns and demand the removal of the allegedly obscene materials.
“I personally have been at almost every DISD meeting for a year-and-a-half pleading with the trustees to take action,” she said.
Rodriguez showed The Dallas Express a long list of titles that allegedly contain sexually explicit content, and even “pornographic” material, which the district currently has available on library shelves.
The Dallas Express confirmed the availability of many of these books using DISD’s online library catalog, including:
- Being Jazz: My Life as a Transgender Teen by Jazz Jennings;
- Freakboy by Kristin Elizabeth Clark;
- Beloved by Toni Morrison;
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; and
- Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager.
While Rodriguez claimed that trustees have not reached out to her or other community members over the matter, some of the books they have been protesting have been pulled off DISD library shelves after sometimes-dramatic confrontations at school board meetings.
Two works in particular drew the attention of Rodriguez and her friend Cyrena Nolan: Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe and Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) by Lev A.C. Rosen.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, Gender Queer is a graphic novel focused on “gender identity” and sexuality. It contains at least one illustration of two adolescents engaging in a sex act with a sex toy.
Rodriguez and Nolan printed the image out on a poster and brought it to a DISD school board meeting in October 2021. Ironically, according to Rodriguez, officers with the DISD Police Department stopped them at the door.
“DISD police said it was pornography and would not let us into the meeting,” said Rodriguez.
On another occasion, concerned community members read a passage from Jack of Hearts during the public comment portion of a board meeting. Rodriguez said the passage described a young boy learning to seduce an adult into having anal sex.
“If it had been a movie, it would be rated X. It’s offensive and completely inappropriate for our children,” Rodriguez said of the passage.
Both Gender Queer and Jack of Hearts currently do not appear in a search of the DISD library catalog. It is unclear when the titles were pulled from shelves.
Widespread controversy over what materials are appropriate for students in public schools led Texas Education Agency (TEA) Commissioner Mike Morath to release new guidance in April 2022 on how school boards should select library books. The move followed a request by Gov. Greg Abbott for the agency to configure a standard for screening for obscene content, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
Rodriguez said the DISD Board of Trustees has yet to adopt the TEA’s new guidelines.
While many books may indeed contain sexually-graphic content, some feel that the movement to remove obscene books from public school libraries is an attempt to suppress any support or mention of LGBTQ people and relationships.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas recently filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that the movement “seeks to erase transgender and non-binary identities.”
In a complaint against Keller ISD, which adopted some of the policies Rodriguez is advocating for, the ACLU wrote:
“[Such guidelines seek] to suppress … all access to information [in public schools] that it is possible for a person to be transgender or non-binary. In other words, the policy attempts to erase the existence of transgender and non-binary individuals … [barring] for every student in the district, access to information about the existence and experiences of transgender and non-binary people, and access to any work of literature that features a transgender or non-binary individual — even if a student’s parents want them to have access to such books.”
For its part, DISD has published what seemingly amounts to the district’s ethos on removing controversial library materials:
“Students’ First Amendment rights are implicated by the removal of books from the shelves of a school library. A district shall not remove materials from a library for the purpose of denying students access to ideas with which the district disagrees. A district may remove materials because they are pervasively vulgar or based solely upon the educational suitability of the books in question.”
While hardworking and sincere teachers try to provide Dallas’ next generation with quality education, the repeated involvement of the Board of Trustees and district leadership in such controversies, along with other accusations of mismanagement, make success immensely difficult for the educators in the trenches, contributing to poor student outcomes across DISD.
Last school year, only 41% of DISD students scored at grade level on the STAAR exam, and almost 20% of the Class of 2022 failed to graduate high school on time.
The Dallas Express reached out to DISD’s Board of Trustees to ask whether they plan on complying with the TEA’s recommendation for approving library materials and whether they are interested in grappling with this issue.
No response was received by press time.
Still, the issue could jeopardize three trustees’ chances of reelection in May, when Dustin Marshall, Joyce Foreman, and Joe Carreón have to defend their records at a time when student academic achievement is in the tank and district voters are demanding more transparency and accountability from DISD, at least according to two polls conducted by The Dallas Express.
Over the last year, The Dallas Express has reported on school boards across North Texas faced pressure from parents and community activists on both sides of the issue, squaring off in Frisco ISD, Keller ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, McKinney ISD, and Granbury ISD.
Updates to screening protocols at some school districts have drawn complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, which in turn prompted an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it would be investigating Granbury ISD over the activist group’s accusations.