DENVER — A bill that would make it harder to get certain books banned from school libraries in Colorado cleared a major hurdle in the Senate Wednesday.
Across the country, including here in Colorado, book bans have been a hot topic. In some high-profile cases from around the state where books have been banned, it's been because they include LGBTQ+ topics or characters.
Senate Bill 25-063, officially known as Library Resource Decision Standards for Public Schools, would make it more difficult for schools to ban books with those themes or any others that involved protected classes of people, including individuals based on their race or sexual orientation.
"We're trying to make sure that kids throughout the school system in Colorado have access to a wide variety of reading materials and are able to expose themselves to all kinds of different things that can help engender empathy and understanding and make kids feel seen and feel like they belong," said one of the bill's prime sponsors, Democratic Senator Lisa Cutter, who represents Jefferson County.
The bill would require all school districts and charter schools to write up a specific policy that outlines a clear process of steps on how to remove materials from the library. The policy itself is up to each school district to create, as long as it follows anti-discrimination laws.
It also requires any request to remove a book to be public information and the person filing the request must have a student at that particular school.
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"Schools were seeing parents from outside of the district, and sometimes even outside of the state, requesting these books be removed, which is not okay for a number of reasons," said Cutter.
The bill also outlines that it would be unlawful to demote, fire, or discipline a school library employee for refusing to remove material before the formal review has been completed.
An argument frequently used in book bans is that books include content and themes that are not age-appropriate. Craigh DeRoche, the president and CEO of the Family Policy Alliance and Foundation, a Conservative Christian Ministries group, issued a statement echoing those sentiments, saying in part, "The first exposure to porn is coming from school libraries."
"What Coloradans need to understand is too often, the first exposure to porn is coming from school libraries and while Netflix, Google and Facebook are facing huge pressure to remove porn exposure for children, this bill seeks to not only keep it going, but to expand porn access to minors, and hide it from parents and school leaders. Pornography public health crisis for kids under 18 is precisely because of policies like SB 25-063. Family Policy Alliance strongly opposes this policy and encourages every parent in Colorado to call their legislators to oppose what should be more properly called the Porn Proliferation Act of 2025."
Cutter believes the concept of age-inappropriate books landing on school library shelves is a myth.
"I think it's very, very, very, very rare that any kind of material would actually be age-inappropriate. We have to trust educators and librarians who go through a number of different hoops to select books and put them on the shelves for kids," she said. "If [parents] are really concerned about something, there's a process. Because we've mandated that there has to be a process, and they can request it to be removed, and then it'll be evaluated on its merits."
The bill now heads to the House Education Committee.
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