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Board members voted nearly unanimously Monday to remove a total of 13 chapters from textbooks used in courses such as biology, environmental science and earth systems. The Houston-area district will need to replace some of the materials with in-house curriculum at a time when it is reducing staff in response to an impending budget shortfall.
State Rep. Jon Rosenthal worked as a mechanical engineer before entering politics, and his father was a mathematics professor at the University of Texas. So studying science, and teaching it, are endeavors that are important to him.
The Houston-area Democrat, who attended the Cy-Fair ISD board meeting on Monday night to speak about the $138 million budget shortfall it is facing for the 2024-25 school year, said he was taken aback by something that happened later in the evening. Trustees for the third-largest school district in Texas, which is served in part by Rosenthal, voted to omit a series of science textbook chapters that address subjects such as climate change, vaccinations, cultural diversity, depopulation and humans’ impact on the Earth and its ecosystems.
Those topics were referred to as “controversial” by multiple Cy-Fair ISD board members, whereas Rosenthal said there is a “strong consensus around all of those topics” within the global scientific community. The five textbooks in question also have been approved, in their entirety, by the State Board of Education.
“All these folks that engage in that sort of, I don’t know, anti-science or anti-expert movement, science and expertise is what allows us to put a man on the moon, what allows us to have the cell phone I’m talking to you on, or microwave ovens or automobiles,” Rosenthal said. “Vaccines eradicated diseases that killed hundreds of thousands of humans.
“To me,” he added, “it’s just insanity.”
Trustee Natalie Blasingame, having reviewed 25 textbooks as part of a committee, made the motion to remove a total of 13 chapters from five of those books, used in the subjects of biology, environmental science, earth systems, health science theory and principles of education and training.
She and five other board members voted in support of the motion after discussing it, with Todd LeCompte saying, “I can’t support anything about teaching our kids depopulation,” which refers to the reduction of people living in a certain place or region.
Julie Hinaman was the lone Cy-Fair ISD trustee to vote against omitting the materials, saying she did not understand “why one board member chose to override the recommendation of our highly trained educators who selected these materials for next school year.” Hinaman also pointed to the fact that Cy-Fair ISD is reducing staff positions in response to its budget crisis, which has drawn the ire of community members.
Linda Macias, the chief academic officer for the district in the northwest part of the Houston region, said it would need to replace some of the omitted materials with curriculum created in-house so Cy-Fair ISD can adhere to statewide standards as part of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
“We are literally in the process of reducing our curriculum and instruction staff at the same time we’re recommending that they’re doing additional work,” Hinaman said. “We need to be considerate of that.”
Public school districts in Texas have local discretion over their curriculum but “must ensure coverage of the TEKS standards,” according to a spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency.
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But whether they can legally omit chapters from otherwise-approved textbooks does not mean they can practically do so, according to Duncan Klussmann, a former superintendent for Spring Branch ISD who now is an assistant clinical professor in the University of Houston’s College of Education. He also said the way Cy-Fair ISD went about making this decision seems “strange.”
The related item on the school board agenda said, “The board will consider approving the district instructional material recommendations for the 2024-2025 school year,” without indicating that chapters from textbooks might be removed. No community members spoke about the issue during the board meeting, including Rosenthal, who said the eventual action taken “was a surprise to us.”
The item was discussed and voted on near the end of a five-hour meeting when few members of the public were still in attendance.
“I have questions around the whole transparency of it,” Klussmann said. “It’s the third-largest district in the state of Texas that’s been extremely well-run by their board in the past administration. This is just not the way effective boards typically handle these situations. The key is the board needs to be transparent with the work that they’re doing.”
Rosenthal, whose two children graduated from Cy-Fair ISD schools, called the decision to omit materials about climate change, vaccines and diversity “definitely misguided and short-sighted.” He said Houston-area residents have historically moved into the district because of its reputation as a quality district, but he wonders if that might change.
“It will put our students here at a disadvantage, especially for the ones that want to pursue higher education in STEM fields,” Rosenthal said. “They’re choosing to not prepare them for the possibility of entering the scientific community or even understanding some of the stuff that drives our modern science and medical profession now.”
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