In June, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 13 into law, giving Texas school districts months to completely alter their library book approval process. The bill requires librarians to submit book requests to the district rather than purchasing them themselves. The district is then responsible for voting on each title, which could be thousands. Or, a school district can appoint an advisory council made up of parents and community members to assume the oversight process. The council meets only twice a year to develop a recommendation list on which titles should be allowed. The board then decides whether or not to adopt the recommendations at a regular meeting.
Coppell Independent School District is one of the many districts that has elected to form a hand-selected council voluntarily. Because of a technicality provided by TOMA, despite operating as a public school district entity, the Coppell ISD SLAC members had their first meeting, behind closed doors, where they enjoyed snacks, conducted an ice-breaker activity and had some super secret book-talk.
“What is good for Texas?” said Philip Kingston, a Dallas-based attorney and former Dallas City Council member. “Is it good for Texas to have secret committees to select our books?”
The 12-person council, of which five members are non-voting district employees and the remaining seven are parents and one community member, met for just an hour and a half to discuss more than 1,260 books requested by the district’s librarians. Their recommendations will be reviewed and voted on by the Coppell ISD school board at a later meeting. The district, in compliance with the law, provides a digital form for feedback on potential library titles, available to anyone. But in application, the council has near-total control over library content.
“Their job is to review every single title,” Laney Hawes, co-founder of Texas Freedom To Read Project, said to the Observer in August. “We're talking tens and tens of thousands of books a year. It's ridiculous. It's absurd.”
Are These Meetings Supposed To Be Open?
Except for executive sessions, governmental bodies can rarely meet behind closed doors. According to the statute, this is a “fundamental philosophy of the American constitutional form of representative government. " Unless real estate matters, legal counsel, or personnel items are being discussed, the general public has access to every meeting.But like all good legal policy, there’s a loophole. If a council, whether behaving on behalf of the district or not, is strictly advisory and makes no final determinations, it may close its meetings. This rule applies to SLACs and resulted in the Observer being removed from the Coppell ISD first council session.
But, like all bad legal policy, there’s a loophole to the loophole. If it can be proven that a board is “rubberstamping” the recommendations of an advisory council, then TOMA rules apply.
“It’s an incredibly stupid risk to close those meetings,” said Kingston, who explained that challengers would likely win based on the sheer volume of work taken on by SLACs, and districts could be found in violation of TOMA and potentially fined.
But SLACs are in their infancy, and no board has been presented with any recommendations yet. Whether the recommendations come as an itemized presentation of each recommended title with summaries and reasonings or a grander, summarized package with a “check yes” box is yet to be known, but it would seem unlikely that a board of trustees would sit through the hours it would take to sift through each title.
“It’s not just funky, it’s stupid as hell,” said Kingston. “If I were advising the district, I would be setting up as many alarm bells as I possibly could. Why is it good to have public decisions hidden from the public? How does that help you? What is in the public interest that the public shouldn’t see?”
Kingston recommends that school districts stay on the safe side and keep their meetings open to avoid any future legal challenges.
“[The law] doesn't say explicitly they have to be open to the public, but it doesn't mention the Open Meetings Act, which means the Open Meetings Act applies,” he said. “If somebody is taking the bait on SB 13 and saying, ‘we don't have to comply with open meetings,’ they are being fooled. I don't know who is tuning up to challenge these, but I don't think SB 13 has a lot of life.”
At Least One Accountability Measure For SLACs
In accordance with the law, councils are required to post the location and time of their meetings, as well as an agenda, 72 hours in advance. They have 10 days to post a recording of the meeting online, which is an accountability measure Hawes is grateful for.“We have every intention of watching these SLAC meetings to see if discussions are happening where students' rights are being violated,” said Hawes. “It's going to make it very easy for us to [see if they’re] pulling these books off of shelves because they all collectively decided they just didn't like it. You can't do that.”
Before the recommendations are presented, little to no input is received from anyone other than the council that the district has selected, other than the online feedback form.
The application to join Coppell’s SLAC was made available by Google Form on the district website. The district did not respond to inquiries about how many applications were rejected. The five non-voting members are all district librarians, but they are limited to offering professional insight.
Allen, Coppell, Plano, Denton and Arlington Independent School Districts have formed SLACs. Dallas, Frisco, and Fort Worth ISD have not.
SHACs Set The Groundwork
The SLAC model is based on legally required school health advisory councils, or SHACs, that have been in place in Texas school districts since 1995. The councils, which are similarly built from parents and community members appointed by the district, meet four times a year in closed meetings to discuss the health curriculum within districts.“The SHAC was created years and years ago,” said Hawes. “It was created for the same political reason, but it was about sex ed curriculum and human sexuality curriculum… If you look at the SHAC language, it's very, very close to the SLAC language. But there's a really big difference, and that is that SHAC has very, very few responsibilities.”
SHACs make recommendations related to bullying, nutrition, recess, sexual education, and general student wellness and provide their recommendations to the district. However, their items are generally topical rather than an endless list of books that may not have ever been read by a single voting member of the council.
The recommendations offered by SHACs are simply that—recommendations, not a stamp of approval on content. But it’s important to note that in a 2023 FAQ sheet, the Texas Education Agency clarified that SHACs, in their advisory role, are not required to comply with TOMA, though they get asked about it a lot.
SHACS aren't just guided by legislation. Texas Health and Human Services provides a clear guide for effective SHACs that dictates how to present recommendations, write bylaws, and run efficient meetings. They’re well-oiled machines. But SLACs lack the same level of guidance, and applying the exact same rules has left a lot of confusion.
“Everyone is confused,” said Hawes. “Everyone is angry agree, and what we can all agree on is that this is going to harm our students at a time when we know our literacy rates are the worst they've been in decades.”
Several districts have built their advisory councils and scheduled the meetings, but whether they are open or not is about as clear as the law that formed them.
“It’s impossible to know whether [districts are] following bad legal advice, or ignoring good legal advice,” said Kingston. “Someone has made an error.”
