The Texas Freedom to Read Project Questionnaire
I submitted the following responses on April 9th to the request I received from the Texas Freedom to Read Project.
First set of questions were my name, email address, phone number, etc. so I skipped that this time. If you’ve been reading these, you don’t need that again. With that said, I’ll include the substantive questions from the request.
Topic 1: I worry about the types of books and materials available in my district school libraries.
Answer: Disagree
Submitted Comment: I trust our librarians and media specialists to curate age-appropriate, high-quality collections for students. These are trained professionals who understand child development, curriculum alignment, and the communities they serve. I do not believe the district's libraries are filled with problematic material, and I am not interested in using a board seat to second-guess the professional judgment of the people we hired to do this work. When concerns about specific materials arise, the district should have a transparent, established review process that takes those concerns seriously without becoming a political exercise. Parents have the right to make decisions about what their own children read. That right does not extend to removing materials from an entire campus or district library based on one family's objection.
Topic 2: I support state funded voucher programs (Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs), public school funds given to families to pay for or subsidize private school tuition, etc.)
Answer: Strongly Disagree
Submitted Comment: The ESA program sends over $10,000 per student in public tax dollars to private schools that are not required to administer standardized assessments, hire certified teachers, or accept every student who applies. The program was funded at a billion dollars in its first year, with estimates approaching $8 billion by 2030. Every student who leaves a traditional public school district takes funding with them while the district's fixed costs remain. For a district like CFBISD that is already dealing with declining enrollment, deficit budgets, and school closures, vouchers accelerate the very problems they claim to solve. If public money is going to be spent on education, public accountability should follow it. A board member who supports diverting public dollars to private schools with no comparable accountability is working against the institution they were elected to govern.
Topic 3: The state legislature needs to increase public education basic allotment funding to catch up to inflation.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: The basic allotment was frozen at $6,160 from 2019 to 2025. The Legislature increased it by $55. Adjusted for inflation, the state needed to increase it by at least $1,300 just to restore the purchasing power districts had in 2019. That six-year freeze forced districts across Texas to adopt deficit budgets, close schools, and hire uncertified teachers because they could not compete for talent. Meanwhile the Legislature found a billion dollars for the ESA voucher program. The priorities are clear, and they are wrong. Adequate funding of public education is a constitutional obligation under Article VII of the Texas Constitution, not a discretionary line item.
Topic 4: A parent's right to restrict or remove access to a book or other instructional resource, extends only to their own child, and not anyone else's child.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: Parents are the primary authority over their own children's education. That is a right I fully support. It does not extend to making decisions for every other family in the district. When one parent's objection removes a book from an entire campus library, that parent is exercising authority over other people's children. A well-governed district respects the difference. The proper mechanism is an opt-out for your own child, not a district-wide removal that substitutes one family's values for everyone else's.
Topic 5: School librarians are valuable and vital and contribute to the overall educational well-being of students in my district.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: School librarians are trained professionals who serve a role that goes well beyond shelving books. They teach research skills, digital literacy, and critical thinking. They connect students with materials that support both curriculum and personal growth. They are often the first adult to notice a student who is struggling or one who needs to be challenged further. In a district focused on student outcomes, librarians are part of the infrastructure that makes those outcomes possible. The board should support and resource them accordingly.
Topic 6: In your opinion, what is the role of a school librarian?
Answer: A school librarian is an educator. They teach students how to find, evaluate, and use information, skills that matter more now than at any point in history. They curate collections that support the curriculum and reflect the diversity of the community they serve. They foster a love of reading, which is foundational to everything else a school is trying to accomplish. They also serve as a resource for teachers and as a safe, welcoming space for students who may not have one anywhere else in the building. A district that undervalues its librarians or treats library staffing as an easy place to cut is making a short-sighted decision that will show up in student outcomes.
Topic 7: School libraries with robust and diverse collection that include age relevant books that address topics like race, social justice, sexual assault, sexual education, consent, LGBTQ+ issues, etc., are important to serving and meeting the needs of our students.
Answer: Agree
Submitted Comment: Students come to school with experiences that don't pause at the library door. A school library that only reflects some students' lives fails the rest. Age-relevant materials that help young people understand the world they actually live in, including difficult topics, serve an educational purpose. The key is trusting trained librarians to make professional judgments about what is age-relevant and developmentally appropriate for the students they serve. That is their expertise. The board's role is to set clear policy, support those professionals, and ensure parents have visibility into what is available, not to curate collections based on political pressure from any direction.
Topic 8: At what grade level is it appropriate for students to have access to the following...
Answer:
Age-relevant books with LGBTQ+ characters: Middle School
Age-relevant books about race/racism: All grade levels
Age-relevant books about social justice: All grade levels
Age-relevant books about puberty and sexual education: Middle School
Submitted Comment: The phrase "age-relevant" is doing the heavy lifting in this question. I trust trained librarians to determine what is developmentally appropriate for the students they serve at each grade level. The board's job is to encourage the hiring of good professionals, set clear policy, and let them do their work. It is not to build a grade-by-grade approval matrix from the boardroom.
Topic 9: Briefly share your thoughts on the recent tide of book challenges, book removals, and censorship in Texas libraries and Texas schools.
Answer: The wave of book challenges in Texas is driven more by organized political campaigns than by genuine concerns about individual children's wellbeing. Parents have always had the right to guide their own child's reading. That is not what this movement is about. It is about one group of adults imposing their values on every family in a district, and using the machinery of school governance to do it.
The practical consequences are real. Districts like Lamar Consolidated and New Braunfels have closed entire libraries or removed hundreds of books under political pressure. That doesn't protect students. It deprives them of resources, demoralizes the professionals who serve them, and sends a message to every kid who saw themselves in one of those books that they don't belong.
A well-governed school board doesn't cave to political pressure from any direction. It sets clear policy for evaluating materials, trusts the professionals it hired to implement that policy, and ensures parents have the ability to make decisions for their own children. The board's job is to protect the integrity of the educational environment, not to become a censorship committee.
My wife spent 30 years in CFBISD schools. She helped build libraries, supported librarians, and watched students grow through reading. I intend to protect that tradition, not dismantle it.
Topic 10: I support revisions in recent years that have changed school library policies to reference the Texas Penal Code's definition of 'obscene' and 'harmful materials.
Answer: Disagree
Submitted Comment: The Texas Penal Code definitions of "obscene" and "harmful materials" were written for criminal prosecution, not for curating a school library. Applying criminal law standards to educational settings sounds reasonable on the surface, but in practice it has given political actors a legal framework to challenge and remove materials at scale. Districts like Lamar Consolidated have removed over 700 books under this kind of pressure. That is not careful curation. That is fear-based compliance. School library policy should be grounded in professional standards for age-appropriate material selection, not in penal code language designed for an entirely different purpose. We already have trained librarians whose job is to make these judgments. The board's role is to support them with clear, educationally sound policy, not to import criminal definitions that turn every book into a potential legal liability.
Topic 11: School district library acquisitions policies and book content guidelines should ensure that when library materials are evaluated for appropriateness, determinations are made by evaluating materials as a whole and in context rather than reducing books to rubrics or checklists.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: Any book can be made to look objectionable if you pull a single passage out of context. That is exactly the tactic that has driven many of the book challenges across Texas. A trained librarian evaluates a book as a complete work, considering its themes, its literary merit, its relevance to the curriculum, and its appropriateness for the students it serves. Rubrics and checklists reduce that professional judgment to a mechanical exercise that strips away context and produces absurd outcomes. A board that adopts checklist-based evaluation is effectively telling its librarians that it doesn't trust them to do the job they were trained and hired to do.
Topic 12: I support the creation of local School Library Advisory Councils under SB 13 that, when adopted by a district, allow for the broad removal of library materials and create restrictions around purchasing new materials.
Answer: Disagree
Submitted Comment: Community input on library collections is not inherently a bad idea. But the advisory councils created under SB 13 have been used in practice as vehicles for broad, politically motivated removal of materials rather than as genuine advisory bodies improving collection quality. When the mechanism results in entire libraries being shut down, as happened in New Braunfels ISD, the tool is not functioning as advertised. Library professionals should be the primary decision-makers on collection development, with community input channeled through a transparent process that evaluates materials in context. A structure that empowers a council to broadly remove materials and restrict future purchases shifts authority away from the people trained to make these decisions and toward a process vulnerable to organized political pressure. The board should ensure any advisory structure supplements professional judgment rather than overrides it.
Topic 13: Our district's library material challenge process should only be open to complaints from parents, community members residing within a district, and verified stakeholders of the district.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: If you don't have a child in the district and you don't live in the community, you have no standing to determine what is on a school library shelf. One of the documented patterns driving book challenges across Texas is coordinated campaigns by outside organizations filing complaints in districts where they have no connection. That is not parental engagement. That is political activism using someone else's schools as the venue. The challenge process exists to serve families in the district, not to provide a mechanism for outside groups to impose their agenda on a community they don't belong to. Limiting the process to parents, residents, and verified stakeholders is basic governance.
Topic 14: School board policies should reflect the full diversity of the values of all community members who reside within a district.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: CFBISD serves families from a wide range of cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Over 40% of our students are in bilingual or ELL programs. Board policy that reflects only one segment of the community fails everyone else. The board's obligation is to the entire district, not to the loudest voices in the room. That means policies grounded in what serves all students, respect for the diversity of values families bring, and a refusal to let any single group dictate the experience for everyone. A board that only hears from the people who show up to meetings is not governing for the whole community. It is governing for a fraction of it.
Topic 15: There is value in allowing students to choose their own age-relevant reading materials.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: A student who chooses a book is a student who reads. A student who reads is a student who learns. The single most effective way to build literacy is to let young people follow their curiosity. Librarians curate collections specifically to provide a range of age-relevant options that students can explore based on their own interests, questions, and experiences. That voluntary inquiry is where a love of reading takes root. When adults narrow those choices based on political considerations rather than educational ones, students disengage. The goal of a school library is to create readers, not to control what they read.
Topic 16: I trust librarians are looking out for the best interest of students and I generally trust them to oversee and curate school library collections in my district.
Answer: Strongly Agree
Submitted Comment: This has been a consistent theme in every answer I've given on this survey and across every other survey I've completed during this campaign. Librarians are trained professionals. We hired them for their expertise. If we don't trust them to do the job, we hired the wrong people, and that's a leadership problem, not a library problem. My wife worked alongside school librarians for 30 years in CFBISD. She saw firsthand the care, professionalism, and genuine love for students they bring to their work every day. The board's job is to support them with clear policy and adequate resources, not to substitute its judgment for theirs.
Topic 17: School libraries are places of voluntary inquiry and not required reading for students. School libraries should, therefore, have books and materials with a multitude of viewpoints and ideas. Removing books from library shelves because of disagreement with or disapproval of ideas or viewpoints within the books is wrong and violates the First Amendment rights of students.
Answer: Agree
Submitted Comment: School libraries are voluntary spaces. No student is compelled to check out a book. That matters because it means the library's role is to offer a breadth of perspectives, not to prescribe a narrow set of approved ideas. Removing a book because someone disagrees with the viewpoint it contains is not protecting students. It is deciding for them what ideas they are allowed to encounter. I support the principle this question describes. I would note that the legal landscape around student First Amendment rights in school libraries is complex and is evolving, and I would not want to make a constitutional claim from a board seat that belongs in a courtroom. What I can commit to is a governance standard: the board should not remove materials from libraries based on political objections to viewpoints, and it should protect the professional independence of the librarians we trust to serve our students.
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