Our heroic State Senator Charles Perry recently graced a Lubbock ISD board meeting to save our youth from the ultimate threat to West Texas society: paper pages bound together by glue. Perry stormed the trustee meeting to wave around excerpts of a “trash” book he refused to name publicly—because giving credit to the author would apparently summon a demon—and threatened to rewrite state laws or slap the district with financial consequences if they don’t purge the shelves faster.
As it turns out, the scandalous text in question is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a 2012 young adult novel about a kid making a movie for a classmate with cancer. Naturally, LISD Superintendent Kathy Rollo immediately scrambled to agree that the book is completely inappropriate for children, but pointed out a minor legal hiccup: it is quite literally against the law for her to personally march into a library and play Gestapo with the bookshelves. Instead, the district has to use their legally mandated Student Library Advisory Committee (SLAC)—a group formed because librarians apparently used to buy books in Costco-style “bundles” without looking at them.
But here is the absolute best part of this entire local panic: nobody is reading these books anyway. Rollo openly admitted that physical book circulation is utterly dead because teenagers are glued to their smartphones, and this specific controversial book was checked out a whopping six times a year since 2012. Even better? The school district noted that they aren’t even getting complaints from actual students or parents. Instead, it’s just bored, pearl-clutching community members who apparently have nothing better to do than flag books they found on political websites, completely ignoring the fact that the exact same book is sitting on the shelves of the Lubbock city-county library right now with zero protestors in sight.
But hey, let’s definitely spend precious legislative hours threatening school funding and rewriting state statutes to wage a holy war against dusty paper that Generation Alpha doesn’t even know exists. After all, if there’s one thing Lubbock teenagers are famous for, it’s ditching TikTok and Snapchat so they can sneak into the high school library for some rogue 12-year-old contemporary fiction, right?
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