Threats to librarians, trans students, and public education mark the start of Georgia’s legislative session
The Rise of Book Bans and the Threat to Librarians: SB 154
Over the past few years, book bans have taken the South’s libraries — both school libraries and public — by storm. In districts like Cobb County, titles like “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and “Flamer” have been torn from school shelves after a few parents (and a few outside conservative groups, like Libs of TikTok) have decried the novels as inappropriate for consumption by students, even when white cisgender male-authored “classics” just as explicit — like D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — remain.
The recently proposed Senate Bill 154 would further threaten the jobs and judgment of media specialists. The bill, first brought to the Georgia legislature last session, moves to remove the discretionary protection of librarians; under the bill, they’d be open to criminal charges for the distribution of books that parents or public officials deem “harmful.” SB 154’s intentional (and alarming) vagueness — with no elaboration as to what titles could fall under “harmful materials” — would make the jobs of librarians suffering through this era of rampant literary censorship even more difficult. If enacted, we’d likely see librarians removing the most conventionally contested content, often that which features overtly queer and minority themes, and often written by authors of those same minority identities, from shelves out of fear of prosecution, vastly reducing young Georgians’ access to diverse literature.
An Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill: HB 936
Every day, young transgender Georgians must already contend with a culture of discrimination and dehumanization. In many Georgia schools, transphobia runs amok among both administrators and students. Outside of school and in their communities, transgender youth are forced to face the life-altering repercussions of legislation like Senate Bill 140, which raised national attention last year when a judge halted the legislation amid legal filings by organizations like American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center. This year, the Georgia legislature has already made clear to transgender youth that they are unwelcome. The newly proposed House Bill 936 closely mirrors the “bathroom bills” that have passed in Republican-run states like Idaho, where a bathroom bill was put into effect despite legal pushback. Under the guise of “protecting students,” Georgia’s HB 936 delineates requirements for schools to have separate school facilities, like bathrooms and changing rooms, where students are separated strictly based on assigned sex at birth. In the bill, it is clear that trans students wishing to use facilities that match their gender identity do not fall under accepted exceptions, with the bill’s text stating, “a reasonable accommodation under this paragraph shall not include allowing such individual to access a restroom or changing area that is designated for use by members of the opposite sex while members of the opposite sex of the individual are present or may be present in the restroom or changing area.”
Education Funding Inequities and the Battle Over Cobb’s Districts
Over the past few years, efforts by student-run advocacy groups like the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition have fought against the inequalities present in Georgia’s public education system, specifically the shortcomings of Georgia’s decades-old public education funding system, the Quality Basic Education model, which is in dire need of revisions to better assist low-income students. However, rather than address inherent education inequalities, Governor Brian Kemp in his 2024 State of the State address focused on efforts to create a $104 million permanent school safety fund. The fund would provide for the hiring of additional school resource officers; a concerning development in an already contentious atmosphere of statewide efforts to stop the construction of Atlanta’s “Cop City” police training center.
Furthermore, in a hit to already-struggling public school districts, Senate Bill 233 is back on the agenda after failing in a vote last year. The bill, one of many “voucher bills” that have swept Southern Republican legislatures in recent years, would create a fund (estimated to reach $150 million) from which $6,500 stipends would be doled out to school students in the lowest performing school districts, encouraging those districts’ students to move to private schools. In his speech, Kemp lauded the bill as a fulfillment of his free market theory of education, pitting private and public schools against each other to boost competitiveness, and thus lead to a better education for students within both school systems. However, not only would the money for the school choice fund be siphoned away from public schools, but the stipends for many low-income students would likely be ineffective in covering the high ticket price of Georgia’s best-performing private schools. Furthermore, the bill would allow for wealthy parents districted for low-performing schools to use the stipends even if they don’t need them.
In terms of legislative districts, recent developments in Cobb County have spurred uproar. We live in a country where gerrymandered districts are pervasive, especially those which conspicuously group minority populations into a few noncompetitive districts. The Cobb County School District lines are no exception. In December, federal judge Eleanor Ross identified Cobb County’s current district map as a likely candidate for unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, with large swaths of Black and Latino voters clumped into only three of Cobb’s seven districts. Ross ordered the maps to be redrawn, and now a battle rages between Democratic and Republican lawmakers to see which map will be used in the next Cobb elections.
Nonetheless, some bright points in education funding have shone through. An additional $205 million has been proposed for improvements to school transportation systems, allowing for the replacement and revamping of deteriorating buses. Furthermore, the newly proposed House Bill 81 aims to change the requirements for additional grant funding for Georgia’s most at-risk districts. If the bill passes, schools that have been in the lowest-performing public schools anytime in the past three years, rather than just the past year, would be eligible for additional state grants.