As others have said elsewhere here before me, the Houston ISD “plan” to close libraries and create “discipline centres” is abhorrent. And in a way that others haven’t yet mentioned, as awful as the selective and racist enforcement in US schools.
Poor neighborhoods are often described as food deserts because of the absence of supermarkets. People either have to travel long distances (if they can afford a car), or end up eating junk food.
Those neighborhoods can similarly be described as book deserts, too. It’s unlikely that public libraries are nearby, public transit rarely serves poor neighborhoods, and the poor usually can’t afford to buy books. For children of poor families, the school library is often their only access to affordable reading material. And now the racists and classists want to board up that window to education.
Libraries are (and I’m speaking from experience) sometimes the most important thing to help kids start learning, to find their own motivation to try hard in schools. It’s place with no pressure, no expectations. For some kids, finding their own reasons to learn is what turns them into better students.
And now those scumbags want to take away that one source of books from the kids who need it the most.
I wish there were a way to place Little Free Libraries in neighborhoods like those. But knowing how racist and classist governments behave, they would likely rip out and destroy any attempt to create one, calling it a “public hazard”.