Anti-“smut” board member caught illegally sneaking around high school library

A high school assistant principal and a school board president of a rural Texas town have blasted a far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ board trustee for lying her way into a school library in order to pursue her neverending “crusade against supposed smut in school libraries.”

Karen Lowery, a Board Trustee of the Granbury Independent School District (GISD) board, allegedly lied to the front-desk clerk of Granbury High School on August 2 — telling the clerk that she was there for a program to help disadvantaged kids — in order to gain access to the school library.

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The district is accused of pulling books from shelves that were flagged by a Moms for Liberty activist.

Assistant Principal Danny Guidry later found Lowery and another woman, Carolyn Reeves, in the darkened library examining books with their cell phone flashlights. He told them they were in a restricted part of the building and asked them to exit quickly.

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“Thank you, it will be fine,” Lowery told Guidry, according to The Daily Beast. “I have been asked by the superintendent to come and look at some books.” This statement was allegedly untrue as she had not gotten the superintendent’s permission to access the library.

Earlier that morning, the school clerk had only given the women a visitors’ pass to enter the cafeteria for a back-to-school event featuring free supplies, face painting, and haircuts. Instead, security video showed the women turning off motion-activated lights on their way to the darkened library.

Lowery — who was elected to the school board in November 2022 on a campaign of removing inappropriate school books — had previously asked whether she could “go into any library at any school at any time.” Both Board of Trustees President Barbara Herrington and District Superintendent Jeremy Glenn told her that she could not without their or a principal’s permission.

“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 to Lowery in an email blasting her for her unauthorized presence in the library. The email noted that Lowery suspiciously looked both ways in the high school hallway before leaving the library.

Lowery had spoken about trust and transparency at a July 13 board meeting. Herrington mentioned this in her email, commenting, “Your behaviors in this incident had neither built any trust nor were they evidence of transparency. In my 33 years as public school educator… and more than 18 years on the GISD school board, I have never seen such a blatant breach of ethics in public schools.”

Lowery’s crusade against library books compelled her in July to blast a book that won a Stonewall Award as being “evil.” The award is given by the American Library Association for quality LGBTQ+ books. In May 2022, she also filed a criminal complaint against Granbury high school for allegedly providing “obscene” books.

While Lowery, Herrington, Glenn, and the school board all failed to respond to The Daily Beast‘s request for comment, the publication said that it expects Lowery’s behavior to be discussed at the board’s upcoming August 21 meeting.

Some local residents said that both Democrats and Republicans have grown tired of Lowery’s and other far-right board members’ endless attempts to censor books.

“People are sick of ’em because they just caused so many problems,” local parent Adrienne Quinn Martin told the publication. “They’re hurting the schools. They’re hurting the staff, and they’re beating a dead horse and people are tired of it.”

In June, Texas’s anti-LGBTQ+ Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a ban on “sexually explicit” in schools. The law requires the state’s Library and Archives Commission to create a new rating system to restrict or ban certain library books.

“As book bans escalate, coupled with the proliferation of legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities, the freedom to read, learn, and think continues to be undermined for students,” the free-speech organization PEN America wrote in an April report that noted book banning efforts in the Lone Star State.