Conroe Independent School District has banned over 120 books in recent years and, with a board composed of conservative, self-proclaimed, ‘Mama Bear’ members, book banning shows no signs of slowing down. Read Between the Lines, a recently developed advocacy organization, aims to raise awareness about and address book bans throughout the district. 

“[We want] to let people know this is what’s happening so that they can inform themselves and make their own opinions and hopefully understand why things need to change,” Bailey Fischer said. “The second thing we want to do is restore some of the community that a lot of people have lost because of book bans. Things like book clubs [and] school classroom conversations have been shut down because of book bans. We want to give back that community and space for teenagers, especially to be aware, but also to advocate for themselves.”

The dampening of spaces and dialogue amongst high school students and youth is something which Fischer experienced first-hand, inspiring her to start the organization.

“I just found … certain topics were becoming more and more taboo to talk about. For example, freshman year, the librarians hosted a school book club, and that ended up being disbanded by sophomore year. But we read books like Speak. We read books that talked about important issues and, by now, books like that have been banned in classrooms and such … When I started to notice this more, I started to do more research and decided that’s when I wanted to start Read Between the Lines,” Fischer said.  “The first goal working on is trying to challenge the idea of the informal book review process and just make book bans have to go through more of the formal process so that they can be more clear and more challengeable by the general public.”

While formal book reviews tend to be more holistic and rigorous in their decision whether to ban a book or not, challenging a book through informal review tends to be a much more lax process, leading many to believe it makes banning books too easy. Out of 15 formally challenged books, only five were restricted from high school students on some level, a 33% restriction rate, and out of 151 books informally challenged, 120 were restricted, around an 80% restriction rate.

Through formal reviews individuals must submit a claim to be voted on. However, through the informal review process, “an overview of a book can be initiated by anything as simple as an email from anybody,” Fischer said. “Because they don’t really have a way to regulate who the emails are coming from … which means there’s a lot less clarity over why books get banned or not, and there’s a lot more book banning.” 

This lack of clarity about how schools and librarians handle books is a leading factor in the increasing number of book challenges and bans.

“Without book banning, librarians already do have cycles where they go through and they consider their catalog and their books, and they review the material and see if it’s appropriate or not even without members, the community challenging it, and without book bans,” Fischer said.

But, just like any recently created organization, Read Between the Lines is first focusing on establishing themselves within the community and learning more about the issue before they adopt a more direct approach to enact change. 

“We definitely plan on being involved in board meetings and such,” Fischer said. “But first, we kind of just need to build a foundation in the community and also just learn more because there’s so many things that are hard to get access to … So I’ve been in contact with the administration, the higher ups, librarians, to try and get access to the full criteria [for banning books].”

Information, being an important factor for change, is not just something Read Between the Lines is trying to obtain, it is also something the organization is trying to spread.

“I feel like the more we can educate people on how the library system works without book bans, the system of book banning itself [and] what it does for different students, the more people will understand the problems with it,” Fischer said.