A trio of Houston-area school districts accounted for nearly half of the 1,781 books banned in Texas over the 2024-2025 school year, making the Lone Star State second only to Florida for the most book bans in the nation, according to an annual report from a free speech nonprofit.
Almost 25% of the book bans nationwide — or 6,870 — came from seven Texas school districts, according to PEN America, an organization that tracks banned books by reviewing district websites, news reports and school board minutes. The organization only counts a book as banned when a district takes it off a library shelf.
“This is still a severe undercount as big as the numbers seem because we’re not counting the ‘do not buy lists’,” said Sabrina Baeta, senior program manager on the Freedom to Read team at PEN America. “There’s so many different ways to ban a book that we may not necessarily be counting in our data.”…