11/29/2023 0 Comments Stacks of books with school suppliesGlenn had asked you to come and look at some books,” Herrington noted. “You were completely untruthful when the assistant principal confronted you and told him Dr. “Instead, you chose to violate every standard of ethics for school board members by using a very busy activity at the high school to enter the high school and misrepresent why you were there,” Herrington wrote. Herrington noted that district superintendent Glenn was at the school supplies event and could have given Lowery permission if she had actually gone to the cafeteria. She conveyed her conclusions in an email to Lowery with the subject line: “Results of Investigation of Your UNauthorized Presence in Library.” Herrington reminded Lowery that she had been told at the July meeting that she needed to call a principal to make an appointment to go to any library. “She continued to attempt to see in the room and open the storage room door, but it was locked and window was blacked out.”īoard President Herrington subsequently viewed the video and the written statements by Guidry and the front-desk clerk. “I informed her that was the storage room for computer carts and textbooks,” Guidry reported. She paused and asked what was inside a storage room. Guidry says that he asked them to “please exit as soon as possible” and that Lowery replied, “OK, thank you, it will be fine.”īut Reeves was not ready to just leave. His report quotes Lowery saying, “I have been asked by the superintendent to come and look at some books.” Lowery and Reeves slipped into the darkened library, where they were confronted by Guidry. There was also face-painting and free back-to-school haircuts. Reeves was given a visitor’s pass indicating she was authorized to be in the cafeteria, where various school board members, teachers, and parents were giving kids backpacks full of school supplies. The clerk reported that Lowery displayed her school board ID. “I thanked both of them for volunteering for the day’s duties during the disbursement of Operation School Supplies,” a front-desk person would report in an email to the district office. The clerk would report in an email that she told the people at the front desk that she and her companion were there to participate in a program to aid disadvantaged kids. And she inquired of her fellow members if she had the right to “go into any library at any school at any time.” Board of Trustees President Barbara Herrington and District Superintendent Jeremy Glenn told her that she should first make an appointment with the principal of the particular school.īut Lowery does not seem to have made any such arrangement when she arrived at the high school on the morning in question, accompanied by Reeves. She expressed concern that there was still what she considers smut in the high-school library, despite an exhaustive review by an independent committee. “We have opened the door for the evil to come through.” “Stonewall is a bar in New York,” she said. She was elected in November and continued to raise the specter of smut sullying the shelves.ĭuring a July 19 executive session of the board, a recording of which was obtained by The Daily Beast, Lowery gave some insight into just how far to the right she is when she spoke about a library website touting a book that won a Stonewall Award. Lowery then made the supposedly obscene books the focus of a successful campaign for the school board. County Constable Chad Jordan-who reportedly once urged all law enforcement officers to join the far-right extremist Oath Keepers and who is said to have enlisted Lowery to sign on as a complainant in the smut case-dispatched deputies to the library to commence an investigation that is described as “ongoing.” In May of 2022, Lowery went so far as to file a criminal complaint alleging the high school was illegally harboring obscene books. Classic books have been banished from schools across the country and librarians who have protested have been publicly scorned or even fired. As The Daily Beast reported just a few days ago, a Republican politician’s wife in Arkansas has bragged of swapping out books in free little libraries for Bibles. If Lowery was on a hunt for books with words or ideas that she doesn’t like, she has plenty of company. The school board president accused Lowery of lying to gain access to the library and declared that she had “never seen such a blatant breach of ethics in public schools.” Security video would show that she and another woman, Carolyn Reeves, had entered the library an hour and a half earlier, around 8 a.m., repeatedly switching the lights off when a motion detector turned them on.Įxactly what the two were doing there remains a mystery, and they have failed to respond to requests for comment, as has the school board, the school board president, and the school superintendent.īut Lowery has been on a crusade against supposed smut in school libraries. Lowery is indeed a member of the Granbury Independent School District board.
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