The state of Texas has now passed a law called The READER Act to regulate book vendors and library catalogs for public schools and charter schools. 

The READER Act says that book vendors who sell to Texas public and charter schools will have to rate materials either “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant” if they have any sexual content. “Sexually relevant” materials are related to the required curriculum and “sexually explicit” materials are not.

Book vendors are going to have to assign these ratings and public school libraries are going to have to refrain from buying books that are “sexually explicit,” but are allowed to buy books that are “sexually relevant.” Those books must require parental consent if a student tries to check them out. 

Under The READER Act, book vendors cannot sell materials to schools unless they assign a rating to the material. Vendors have to submit the ratings of the library materials every September of the year, to the state. 

Vendors who do not comply with the state’s law for Texas’ public schools will be placed on a ban list. Vendors are allowed to appeal this. 

The criteria for deciding if something like a book is sexually explicit or sexually relevant will depend on the graphicness or explicitness of the sexual conduct, what is the predominant material inside the work, and how the reasonable reader would view the work.

“To determine whether a description, depiction, or portrayal of sexual conduct contained in a material is patently offensive, a library material vendor must consider the full context in which the description, depiction, or portrayal of sexual conduct appears…” says the bill.

The bill clarifies that Texas public schools and charter schools cannot ban books for ideas alone. It is how much sexual content is within a work that will determine its prohibition or not. For materials rated sexually explicit already in a public school, the vendors must issue a recall for those materials.

Ratings that vendors give will be filtered through the Texas Library Archives Commission and the State Board of Education. The State Library and Archives Commission, along with the State Board of Education, will make standards for public school libraries to follow. These standards must be updated and reviewed once every five years.

The standards will have a collection development policy that prohibits harmful or sexually explicit material. The policy also recognizes obscene material is not protected under the First Amendment, parents are the primary decision-makers in their child’s education, and schools communicate with parents on the library collection. The policy does however protect materials that become banned based on ideas and/or personal background of the author or character. 

This policy will be required for all public school library catalogs. On January 1st of every odd year, the school districts must review the library catalog.

Over the past several years in Texas, local officials around the state have had crackdowns on what types of books should be in public schools. It started with books targeted that promoted critical race theory, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Some books were prohibited based on their content which was predominantly sexual and should not have been in the vicinity of K-12 students. On the other hand, some books were targeted based on their ideas alone.