December 2025

DECEMBER 2025

Welcome, SNL members.
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We promised you periodic information with suggestions of action you might take. Here you go.
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4 OUT OF 5 SNL ENDORSEMENTS WON their 2025 School Board Elections:
D1 Felicity Pereyra (unopposed) ELECTED
​D5  Maria Benzon   ELECTED
D6  Mike McDonough   ELECTED
D7  Bridget Wade retained her seat.
D9  Myrna Guidry (unopposed)   ELECTED
​Supporters of strong public schools beyond the state takeover now have more strong voices speaking truth to power.

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Culture of Reading
​“Eliminating school librarians is a form of book banning.” So true, and it is on full display in HISD - but not with the direct goal of banning ideas. Instead, district leadership under Mike Miles has determined that reading only needs test-length passages, that whole books and libraries are distraction to learning. And then we read new research that indicates the opposite: “Reading volume is one of the most powerful predictors of achievement.” And “...students who read for fun on a daily basis score significantly higher in reading assessments than those who rarely pick up a book.” “When reading volume declines due to restricted access, the consequences ripple across a child’s academic life.” These are powerful reasons we should continue to raise our voices.
Dennis, Danielle V. 2025, . “Access Denied: How Banning Books Reduces Reading Volume and Achievement.” Rhody Today (University of Rhode Island). (Full article: International Literacy Association, Reading Today, October/November/December.

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Houston Promise by Suzanne Lyons
Make no mistake.  HISD has been underperforming and managed in a problematic way for years. Multiple superintendents, multiple district initiatives, multiple calls for action. In its purest and most idealistic form, an overhaul through state control might have done the job - but it didn't.  For years, campus administration has had unfettered power in staffing, budgeting and curriculum.  In some instances (inside the Houston Arrow) things were going along well.  In other areas, not so much. (Please continue reading here to see how Miles' idea of “Promise” excludes libraries.)

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Your Brain on AI
I recently heard a presentation by our own Len Bryan -- well, he’s not our own HISD Library Services Director any more but we do miss him. He spoke about the attention schools should be putting onto CURATING AI tools. And he was quite insistent that we NOT use the term AI - this machine manipulation of ideas absorbed from every content source it can access is NOT INTELLIGENT. He prefers to refer to it as a Large Language Model, or LLM. We hope (wish?) HISD is carefully considering which LLM tools to implement, and need to continue to ask questions about their choices.                   
           Readers of this newsletter are more concerned with how LLMs affect you directly, so I offer this blog by a friend from college: Writing and Your Brain (Melissa Ludtke, Let’s Row Together, Aug 22 2025). A writer herself, she is wondering about the impact of these LLMs on her life and our culture more broadly. She quotes from and discusses a podcast "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks." (WBUR Boston “On Point” Aug 11 2025). This paragraph you are reading has become a Russian doll of ideas, but it’s worth your consideration. COGNITIVE DEBT? When our students choose ChatGPT or similar as a way through the information minefield, they are cheating themselves and being cheated by the lack of direct engagement with ideas. That is “cognitive debt.” HISD students are seeing some of these issues in the quality of curriculum in the NES packets, but secondary students may be already using an LLM to help them “write better essays.” Consider please the original definition of “essay”: the French verb “essayer” means to try. Originally it meant a student would engage by pen and paper with ideas by writing about them until they understood them; it was not in the Middle Ages a 5-paragraph system to demonstrate comprehension. Please reflect on what reliance on machine intelligence is doing to thought - how it is the antithesis to current student brains actively wrestling with new ideas. Awareness and understanding of the impact LLMs are already having on students of all ages will support your own decisions about how to apply these much-touted tools in your own lives, and your students’.

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​Confronting the Crisis of Reading Among Children: What Can Librarians Do to Promote Literacy and Intellectual Curiosity? 
​This ALA Intellectual Freedom Round Table webinar last night offered a HANDOUT with books of interest at the elementary level to spark curiosity and empathy. Anyone interested can view the entire hour. In Part 2, other speakers will focus on Teens. As we enter the holiday season, empathy and gratitude seem important values to feature.

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As we enter the holidays, I share this from Facebook. Full and effective Literacy is an exchange of information. A reader absorbs new ideas, digests them and offers the world new understandings from the combination of ideas read and heard. How sad it is to know that many students are not talking about their reading and learning outside the classroom - and in HISD, not so much in the classroom either. It is food for thought. Thanks to Ms Shawna Jent for posting.
IMAGE SOURCE: https://www.keiro.org/features/intergenerational-connections​  (Worth a read.)

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Civics Challenge
from the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute 
​Middle and High School Students! You are invited to take part in the Civics Challenge, a free, nationwide online competition designed to spark creativity and civic knowledge. Submit either a short video (2 minutes or less) or an original song exploring one of this year’s categories found here: OConnorInstitute.org/cc Five finalists in each division—middle school (grades 6–8) and high school (grades 9–12)—will each receive a $500 cash award, totaling $5,000 in awards! DEADLINE is Feb 27 2026. Spread the word!!!
While this is not strictly speaking library related, libraries have a huge role in supporting civic awareness and a knowledgeable citizenry. Encourage your students to engage in this challenge!

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With Thanksgiving in a few days and December holidays just after, SNL takes this opportunity to tell you our followers how GRATEFUL we are for your ongoing support. We share a goal between us to regain school libraries on every campus in HISD. It won’t be as soon as we would like (yesterday?) or at all easy to accomplish, but together we will keep the pressure on both HISD administration and Texas Commissioner Mike Morath, not to mention our many legislators who continue to need to be educated. Thank you all for persisting with us here at Students Need Libraries in HISD.

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