Mapping One Semester of Texas School Book Bans

Here’s what SB13, SB12, HB900, and SLACs have done to school libraries in a few short months.

I’ve written a lot about book bans in 2025, and I’ve shared even more reporting (here and on my social media) from my colleagues at Texas Freedom to Read Project.

But I worry that the individual, sensational stories might overwhelm the big picture, that readers might focus on the shocking incidents and lose track of the whole scale of what’s going on in Texas.

So I put together a map to help readers get a sense of the most recent effects of new Texas laws and, more generally, the book-banning frenzy that has overtaken Texas. It’s an interactive map, so you can click on the blue pins and see what’s going on in these districts, as well as documentation, in the form of either links or PDF records. And I’ll keep adding to the map (and it will be pinned to my social media accounts), because more information comes in every week.

Some important notes before I highlight some themes and trends:

First, this map just includes what has happened since the end of last school year—June 2025.¹ Remember that these book removals come on top of four years of book bans, restrictions, and challenges. So you may not see some of the most notorious book banning districts on here, districts like Keller and Katy ISD. In part that’s because they got rid of so many books in previous years.

Second, this is not even close to a complete index. Think of it more as representative. In the first place, this only what we have been able to document and what we can share without getting teachers and librarians in trouble. On top of that, Texas is a big state, with around 1200 school districts, so while we’re working to get information from all around the state, for now assume that every pin on the map represents other districts where similar things are happening.

Themes and Trends

1. Schools are reporting increased book removals. The number of books being pulled off shelves this year is staggering—higher even than the elevated numbers we’ve seen over the past few years. 455 books removed for further review in New Braunfels; 271 books permanently removed in Conroe; around 200 in Hays Consolidated ISD.²

2. Schools are removing shocking individual titles.³ Texas Freedom to Read Project warned lawmakers that the bills they were passing in the last session would result in classic, quality, and innocent books getting pulled from the shelves. We were right. We can break these books down into a few categories:

A) Silly kids’ books.

Our post on Lamar CISD’s removal of Pinkalicious received more than X millions views on Instagram, but it is far from the only case of an innocuous book for kids getting caught up in the wave of fear around books and sex and gender and whatever else. We also reported on Carroll ISD’s SLAC banning Shannon Hale’s Pretty Perfect Kitty Corn and La Grange ISD forbidding the purchase of the third book in Kari Lavelle’s silly (and popular) Butt or Face? series.

B) Classic works of literature.

The temporary removal in Leander ISD of To Kill a Mockingbird, The House on Mango Street, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass received international attention. But the removal of classic books is another phenomenon that appearing around the state. New Braunfels ISD used an AI program to pull books from its libraries to review for compliance with new laws; the district’s list includes A Streetcar Named Desire, Moll Flanders, On the Road, Brave New World, Madame Bovary, The Big Sleep, and the collected poems of Walt Whitman. McAllen ISD removed Richard Wright’s 1942 novel Native Son. North East ISD in San Antonio removed The Canterbury Tales.

C) Books on Art, Art History, and Mythology

Western art is full of depictions of the nude human body, and ancient mythology often involves tales of rape and sexual immorality. It shouldn’t be surprising then, that books on art, art history, mythology, and folktales are getting the axe as districts fret about the legal ramifications of anti-book laws. Last year, North East ISD quietly removed dozens of these books, including books The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology, Ancient Greece and Rome: Myths and Beliefs, Rembrandt: His Life and Works in 500 Images, and A History of Western Art.

3. Stories by and about LGBTQ people are disappearing from our schools. In the 89th Legislature, SB13 specifically targeted school libraries, but Senate Bill 12, the so-called “parental rights,” “anti-DEI” bill is also causing large-scale censorship. That law contained a provision that forbids instruction, guidance, activities, or programming on gender identity or sexual orientation—as well as “policies, procedures, trainings, activities, or programs that reference race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

SB12 was the bill cited in Leander ISD’s temporary removal of To Kill a Mockingbird and The House on Mango Street. It also seems to be the main driver behind the removal of LGBTQ books around the state. Over the summer, Conroe ISD removed 271 books with LGBTQ themes in response to its new EMB local policy, which was fine-tuned for alignment with SB12. In October, librarians in Argyle ISD received directives to remove books related to LGBTQ themes. Librarians in elementary and 6^th-grade schools were told they could have “NO books with LGBTQ+ characters or references”; middle and high school library books could contain references to LGBTQ people, but not “books about the journey or the relationship.”

Again, this is happening in districts all around the state, often surreptitiously. Hays CISD maintains a list of books it has removed due to formal challenges, but it also has quietly “weeded” around 60 books on LGBTQ topics from its libraries, with the reason given as “internal reconsideration.” North East ISD’s weeding list also includes dozens of LGBTQ books, with titles like Body and Mind: LGBTQ Health Issues and Love Makes a Family.⁴

4. School libraries are having trouble ordering books, period. We don’t know the full impact of SB13 on school library purchases yet, but librarians repeatedly told lawmakers the law would make it harder for them to get books into students’ hands. That has come to pass, as Alyssa Fields explained for the Dallas Observer: As of November, the average North Texas school districts was waiting to order 2900 books.

5. Students are losing contact with books outside of school libraries, too. Harlingen Consolidated ISD has canceled Scholastic Book Fairs and suspended student access to its Epic Reading App. A kindergarten teacher in Boerne ISD was forced to cancel a planned book exchange as part of a holiday party.

I’ve written before that SB13 (like HB900 before it) is resulting in the closure of classroom libraries, and the harm that effect will have on literacy in the state. But SB13, SB12, and the rest of the new Texas anti-book laws are creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in schools, leading administrators to do everything they can to avoid putting students into unsupervised contact with books.⁵

That’s a lot.

Not all of the stories outlined on the map are bad. The SLAC in San Marcos CISD has rejected so far all of the book challenges one community member has filed there, despite pressure from book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty and Citizens Defending Freedom. And Abilene ISD’s SLAC has provided a model for thoughtful community involvement in its deliberations on library collections.

Still, the first half of the 2025-2026 school year has been devastating for reading and books in Texas schools.

I think my mantra for the new year will come from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, one of the books Leander ISD pulled from shelves in September. In that book, Baldwin wrote, “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.”

The authors of the devastation of Texas schools do not know, and do not want to know, what they have done to our kids. But I’m not going to let them off the hook. The new year brings us multiple chances—the March primaries, the May school board elections, the midterms, the things we write and say to them and to everyone around us—to hold them accountable. Let’s do it.

1. The exception is the marker for North East ISD. Its weeding report for 25-26 includes book removals from last school year, but that was the most recent information I had for the district, and the mass of book removals in that district needs attention.

2. The number for Hays CISD includes both the books that have been pulled due to formal challenges (around 150 with results pending) and the books that appear in the district’s most recent weeding report as having been removed due to “internal reconsideration.”

3. Shocking only if you haven’t been paying attention. If you have been paying attention, you know these removals were entirely predictable.

4. The reason given for the weeding of LGBTQ books in North East ISD is HB900, but HB900 doesn’t forbid schools from maintaining LGBTQ-themed books in their libraries—just books that are “sexually explicit,” “pervasively vulgar,” or “educationally unsuitable.”

5. That sentence makes me want to tear my hair out.