Recess in the schools of Abilene, Texas can be cancelled for any number of reasons. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. The students broke all the rules that day. Baby rattlesnakes were spotted by a custodian on morning duty.
That last one is fairly common at my children’s school. I’ll admit that when my in-laws from Ohio visit, I play up this fact. There’s something about saying, “My kids couldn’t go to recess today because rattlesnakes were spotted around the playground equipment,” that makes me feel very Texan.
Despite an origin story that would suggest otherwise, I haven’t always felt Texan. I grew up in Menard, right on the edge of the Hill Country. My father was born on the second floor of Menard City Hall, and he raised me two blocks from that very location. My great-uncle, Nicholas Pierce, wrote The Free State of Menard 80 years ago, and it is still considered an important historical text in the area.
Yes, I should have felt Texan, but I never owned a pair of cowboy boots, I tended to trip up doing the two-step at London Dance Hall, and I always knew that if I was ever to have a chance at fitting in, I would need to keep my opinions to myself. It is possible I would have fit into Ann Richards’ Texas, but I was born too late to ever know.
Like so many misfit kids, I found belonging in a library. In the early 2000s, no figure at Menard High School loomed larger than the librarian, David Fondersmith. His towering height was matched only by the bushiness of his eyebrows. Anytime I finished an assignment early, I asked to go to the library where I was met with the deep, rumbling voice of Mr. Fondersmith, a dictionary opened to whatever word he was curious about that day, and shelves upon shelves lined with books I could not get enough of. There were Pulitzer Prize winners, bestsellers, and classics. I didn’t know Young Adult literature was a thing, but I was reading what Mr. Fondersmith provided, and it was a rich canon. I read books by Wallace Stegner, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood. I crafted my first 20-page paper on Walt Whitman using Mr. Fondersmith’s collection to study the great poet who happened to be (gasp) gay.
After high school, I left Texas, hoping that the beauty of Kentucky’s trees or the rolling hills of southern Oklahoma would fit me better. My husband was a minister, and I poured myself into building community in these foreign lands. What I found was the same cultural purity tests I’d failed all my life, but with lower quality barbecue and Mexican food.
So I returned to Texas—not because I expected to fit in, but because it is home. And through a circuitous career path, I found myself a librarian sitting at the circulation desk of a high school library in Abilene. I am my campus’s Mr. Fondersmith, only shorter and with less impressive eyebrows. Also, my collection pales in comparison to his. I can’t have many of the books I loved in high school. Modern collection development policies and state laws don’t allow for it.
I entered this profession just as the storm clouds of the current book-banning push were starting to gather, but I enrolled in a librarian certification program hoping it would pass over me like lamb’s blood was painted on my doorframe.
And for the first three years, wishful thinking worked. No challenges. Just me and my colleagues planning programming to get high schoolers reading, inviting authors to visit, and crafting displays for all the National months and weeks and days people don’t even know exist until they walk into a library.
In late summer last year, I received a message from my fellow librarians. We’d all been watching the legislative session as Senate Bill 13, which regulates school library materials, made its way into law. We arranged to meet at a local coffee shop a few weeks before school would start to discuss the bill, strategize, gnash teeth, and gird our loins. The upcoming school year had officially become unchartered territory.
There were so many things we didn’t anticipate because we simply didn’t understand the full implications of the law. A handful of words could change everything. For example, SB 13 made it mandatory for all districts to now accept book challenges from residents who had no children attending their schools. Before, best practice was to limit who could challenge books to the students, staff, and guardians of students within a district. Now, a person only needed a local address to issue challenges.
SB 13 also neutered a librarian’s authority over their collection. I no longer determine what goes into my collection. I make recommendations, and a council of parents called a School Library Advisory Council (SLAC) decides whether or not to recommend approval of my list to the school board. Ultimately, the school board decides if a book will be in my collection. In many districts, AI is being used to assess the lists of books turned in by librarians.
With this new law looming over high school libraries, it didn’t take long before Tammy Fogle, the leader of our local Moms for Liberty group, issued 27 book challenges. She had no children attending our schools, but SB 13 had opened the door for her. The broader group began showing up to our school board meetings, reading passages from our books. There was no nuance, no context; just scene after scene read with the assertion that only an evil person would expose a high school student to this paragraph, this sentence, this word. Outside of the meetings, their social media platforms became single-mindedly focused on the two large high school libraries in our district, one of which is my own. The comments called for mine and my colleague’s arrest while questioning our integrity and faith. Local news played along, posting salacious headlines for clicks and platforming the key book challenger.
After two months of sitting through board meetings dominated by Moms for Liberty, the librarian at the other high school, Kate Stover, and I began inviting parents to come and voice their own perspectives, and a group formed who now attend regularly. They are grateful for the diversity of our collections, the opportunities their children are given for growth in their school libraries, and the effort our district has made to keep parents in control of their child’s individual access to books. Kate and I also speak monthly, taking back the narrative around our libraries.
Meanwhile, our district’s SLAC processed the book challenges, making a concerted effort to read the books in full, have honest discussions about the content of the books, and make decisions that reflected the values of our community. A few books were ultimately taken off the shelf, but more books were kept, and a few were limited to only 11th and 12th grade students. Each
member devoted dozens of hours of reading and meetings to the process, and our school board honored their service by upholding all of their recommendations.
Just as I was ready to reshelve the challenged books, appeals were issued by the book challenger. Once again, our board upheld the choices of our SLAC. SB 13 requires that two years pass before a book can be rechallenged after an appeal fails. We all breathed a sigh of relief. For now.
But this past week after failing to win her appeal, the challenger has filed a 15-page petition to the Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath asking he order the removal of the books our district voted to retain. Headlines began popping up in conservative Texas media lauding her efforts. In interviews, she seemed offended that people had organized and resisted her efforts.
As I write this, spring break is a week away. When we return to school, the remainder of the year will spend itself in a flash of recitals, award ceremonies, and sentimental goodbyes, and just like that, the hardest year of my professional career will come to an end. School will be out for the summer. The rattlesnakes can have the abandoned playgrounds, at least for a little while.
I don’t know how the story of this year in my library will end. Will the commissioner respect the choices that resulted from layers of local governance? An elected school board voted on members of a committee to vote on what books to retain for our students. Committee members spent hours upon hours reading these books and engaging in good-faith discussions about their
content. The elected school board upheld their decisions. Will our state government tread on their choices?
And if the state chooses to overthrow our local choices, will we be silenced? It is widely known but nonetheless fun to share in small talk that most people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death. Each time I stand up to speak at a school board meeting, my knees shake, my voice catches, and I feel certain that this will definitely, most certainly be the time I don’t survive public speaking. It isn’t that I’m more afraid of public speaking than death; it is that public speaking feels like it could cause my death. But I do it every month because I am a high school librarian in the state of Texas in times such as these.
In fact, it is only now, at the age of 41 and after six months of concerted advocacy for my library, that I finally feel like a true Texan. Looking at the snake raised and ready to strike on the Gadsden flag never spoke to me when I saw it waving in the yards of my neighbors. Like the not-Texan-enough Texan I am, I’ve never owned a gun. But when we’re talking about the public schools where my children attend, where I manage the library with as much pride and care as the legendary Mr. Fondersmith, where the students I love and serve choose their next great read, I feel it. I feel my jaw clinch and my gut tighten and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” pulsing through my veins.
I was told my whole life that being a Texan was about the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, and the party you voted for. I wish someone had told me in high school that Mr. Fondersmith, wearing his cardigans and with a worn book in hand, was as Texan as any cattle rancher. I wish I’d seen in him that no one cosplayed their way to being a Texan. Mr. Fondersmith embodied intellectual freedom, trusted his teenage students with the grittiest and richest of books, and infantilized no one. He was a badass librarian, and what could be more Texan than that?
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