Let's Talk About Spring Branch ISD
I added Spring Branch ISD, in Houston, to The Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2023 School Board Elections this morning. I don’t want you to miss the headlines: Yes, there are book-banning candidates running for the board in Spring Branch ISD: Courtney Anderson, who says that one of her priorities is “removing the radical indoctrination the education system is succumbing to,” and Shannon Mahan, who hasn’t said much about her platform but—like Anderson—does have the support of Spring Branch Families First, the well-funded, well-organized group that’s behind most of the district’s recent censorship efforts.
And, yes, there are great candidates running against them, David Lopez and Becky Downs, and a great group, Families 4 Every Child, that’s fighting as hard as they can to resist the extremists’ board takeover. They absolutely need your support!
So in many ways, SBISD is like the other districts I’ve tracked. But there’s more going on in Spring Branch than just book challenges, and I wanted to take a few minutes to outline those other things.
Spring Branch is where I started my teaching career, way back when I was 21 years old. I taught for five years at the Spring Branch School of Choice, an “academic alternative” school for students at risk of dropping out. We were housed in the old Spring Branch High School, and my first teacher trainings were held in the building now called the Wayne F. Schaper, Sr. Leadership Center, which just happens to hold the board room where many of the district’s board meetings take place. So this bit of research hits close to home.
What you need to know about Spring Branch is that SBISD is really two districts duct-taped together, reflecting two wholly different realities. My students came (mostly) from the district’s north side, a relatively poor, largely brown and black enclave within Houston’s city limits, where housing was overwhelmingly apartment complexes. But the south side was home to Memorial High School and Stratford High School, with two of the wealthiest student bodies in Houston (and the country). Sometimes I would drive to work down Memorial Drive, past palatial estates and through the Memorial Villages, some of the wealthiest incorporated communities in Texas. Then I would turn right, take Voss Road under I-10 (the dividing line between the district’s north and south) and minutes later find myself leading classes of students who sometimes told me they had been kept awake the night before by shootings in their apartment buildings.
I’ve researched urban districts, and I’ve researched wealthy suburban ones. I’ve seen lots of districts with swathes of poverty and pockets of wealth, and districts with swathes of wealth and pockets of poverty. But I haven’t seen a district that’s as clearly divided between a rich side (south of I-10) and a poor side (north of I-10) as SBISD.
Here’s what I wrote about the district in last year’s guide:
Spring Branch is like two districts mashed into one: a relatively poor district of mostly brown and black students north of I-10 and a wealthy (disproportionately white) suburban district south of the freeway. The school board has been dominated by candidates from the south. In fact, though the district is only 27% white, SBISD has never had a non-white trustee.
How does that happen? Well, the answer provides a nice look at how structural racism works.
Spring Branch’s board seats are all at-large rather than geographically based. While the north is the population base of the district, the south is where the money resides, where folks have time to campaign and volunteer, and where there are more regular voters and fewer non-citizens. So the south wins the elections. I don’t know why the district decided long ago to use at-large rather than geographical seats, or if race had anything to do with it. But it’s clear that maintaining that system when there are other models available amounts to a decision to dilute the power of the poorer (again, less white) parts of the district.
Last fall, school board candidate Virginia Elizondo sued the district to try to force it to move to either geographically based model or a hybrid one (like Houston ISD has & Richardson ISD recently adopted). Predictably, parents in the southern part of the district balked. Also predictably, the loudest voices in that fight are the same folks who want to ban “CRT.” In other words, the people who benefit from structures that privilege some groups over others are the same ones who don’t want their kids learning about structural racism.
Most of that still holds up, though voters did elect a Mexican-American candidate, John Pérez, to the board last year, bringing to an end the dubious distinction of having never elected a person of color to the board. And I’m told gentrification is coming to the district’s north side, so it’s possible those geographic boundaries will one day break down as the district becomes whiter and non-white families move farther out into the suburbs. But for now, the divide is as stark as it was 20 years ago, when I was teaching there.
And today I want to zoom in on that last sentence: The people who benefit from structures that privilege some groups over others are the same ones who don’t want their kids learning about structural racism.
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Last May, Spring Branch Families First elected three new trustees to the SBISD board, creating a majority block with board president Chris Earnest that opposed more equitable board elections.
The new majority also favored tight restrictions on what books would be available to district students.
Those two issues are related.
This January, that majority voted together in one of the most insidious rulings on a book I’ve seen since I started paying attention to book challenges in Texas. By a vote of 4-3, the board decided to remove Frederick Joseph’s The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person from all district middle schools, and to restrict access in high school libraries to students with opt-in permission from their parents. In doing so, they overturned unanimous decisions by a district book review committee and level-2 district administrators.
Why was this ruling so egregious?
School boards usually turn to Island Trees School District v. Pico for guidance in book challenges, which says that districts can remove a book that is “pervasively vulgar,” but can’t remove a book for its political viewpoint. As a result, debates at book hearings usually focus on whether or not a given title is pervasively vulgar, and what specifically that means.
But no one in SBISD alleged that The Black Friend is pervasively vulgar. Instead, the ruling majority banished it on the basis that it was “educationally unsuitable,” a vague term that turned out simply to mean, as trustee Chris Gonzalez put it, “that we are considering restricting [the book] just because we don’t agree with his point of view.”
“I did not find that this book unified children,” said Lisa Andrews Alpe, who suggested students could learn same lessons about racism by reading To Kill a Mockingbird.
“It’s not unity to me, it’s activism,” said John Pérez.1
“It is the presentation of his memoir and the injection of what I’ll call activism or politicization of this issue [racism],” said Earnest.
Like Earnest, trustee Caroline Bennett gave the game away, saying, “I find it shocking that no one, out of two—the reconsideration committee and in the level 2 decision making that no one had any of these issues come up or thought that any part of this book was politically charged or had any thought about CRT or racism.”
Put simply, the board majority didn’t like the ideas expressed in the book. One-by-one they revealed that their objections were political.
The complainant argued that the book expressed “critical race theory,” by which she meant ideas that have been expressed in Black literature from Langston Hughes to MLK to James Baldwin—ideas like the existence of white privilege and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. Those concepts have been banned from classroom instruction by the Texas legislature, but that law did not relate to self-selected library books.
That didn’t matter to the board’s majority. To them, any book that might lead students to think about changing the status quo—particularly regarding issues of race—is inherently suspect.
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I won’t say teaching in Spring Branch ISD radicalized me, because I’m one of the least radical people you’ll ever meet. But my first teaching job did challenge my belief that success in this country is based wholly on merit, or that opportunities are meted out equally across racial and ethnic groups. And it opened my eyes to the persistence and structural nature of inequality in the US.
Those same dynamics are at work in the make-up of the current school board, and they’ll play a role in the election on May 6th of this year. And there’s a perverse irony in the fact that today the Spring Branch school board is trying to expel from its libraries ideas that are visible to anyone who drives through the district.
For the record, “activism” is not one of the reasons a school can remove a book under Pico. If it were, nothing by Martin Luther King, Jr. would be allowed in Texas schools. It’s painfully evident that by “activism” these trustees meant “encouragement in political ideas that make us uncomfortable.”
This is such a good read! Your insights shed a lot of light on what was felt but hard to describe and understand when we lived in Spring Branch before our kids were school aged. Thank you!!