Texas Legislature seeks to restrict LGBTQ education in public schools

The 2023 Texas legislative session is nearing its end. Issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and school curricula have been at the forefront of many proposed bills in Texas. 

With Greg Abbot winning the reelection last year, Texas has seen bills being proposed to the legislature that targeted towards the removal of specific topics being taught in classrooms across the state and weaken an already struggling public school system. 

One proposed bill is that of Senate Bill 8 authored by Republican Senator Brandon Creighton, which would give parents around $8,000 in vouchers paid for by taxpayer money that would help pay for a student’s private school tuition fee by placing it in an educational savings account. 

This law is labeled as protecting a parent’s rights to choose what education their children are receiving; many lawmakers who represent rural areas have criticized the bill claiming that it disproportionally affects rural school districts that are already suffering a lack of funding. The bill does make an exception for rural districts that would potentially lose students from this bill by fully funding school districts with less than 20,000 students. 

Public schools that are in the more urban areas of the state are the ones that would suffer more from the passage of this bill whereas private schools are more prevalent in cities. With students possibly switching to private schools it would drastically reduce the amount of funding public schools would receive. 

House Bill 631 and House Bill 1155 are two bills that have the same wording within them but are proposed to take into effect at different times. LGBTQ rights have seen attacks by Republican officials with most of these efforts targeted at school curricula. Laws that make efforts to dissuade the discussion of LGBTQ topics, Flordia’s House Bill 1557, or what critics have dubbed “Don’t say gay law” prohibits schools from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to the third grade. 

House Bill 631 follows the same terminology in that gender and sexuality information cannot be discussed by educators until the fifth grade. House Bill 1155 extends this deadline to the eighth grade, the bills are presented as protecting the parents’ rights to choose what their children are taught in schools. 

The bill also would also prohibit the type of lessons being taught to at any grade level, HB 1155 does not define what is age appropriate for subjects to be taught in various age groups and HB 631 requires the lesson to align with state standards but also does not define what those standards are. 

Texas has banned more books than any state, with over 801 books banned in 22 school districts. The common themes shared among these books are that they share either LGBTQ or racial issues in their content.