After the school district banned the annual reading event, parents across the district are putting matters into their own hands.
Parents in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD held a book fair over the weekend. They organized the fair after their school district refused to work with book fair vendor Scholastic any longer.
Inside the Grapevine Convention Center, 4th grader Ruby Arnold was wide-eyed grabbing books and keeping a stash of all she hoped to convince her mom to buy.
"I chose this one because it reminded me of me," said Arnold of her book choice.
The book fair, a longtime staple in schools across America was banned from Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.
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The district, said their vendor Scholastic, wouldn't give them an inventory of every item being sold ahead of time.
An email NBC 5 obtained also pointed to a social media post by an editor of the company as a concern, shortly before ending the fair.
"It's a book fair and I don't understand how books and book fairs in school could be considered a bad thing," said Joanne Cuneha, a GCISD parent who visited the fair Saturday.
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It has been a handful of graphic images found in libraries across the country that fueled elections to replace board members and ban books, but some districts like Grapevine-Colleyville ISD have gone further banning book fairs and enacting policies on everything from how LGBTQand race are taught to how board members are elected.
It's why several parents joined together and hired Scholastic on their own and put on this private book fair.
"I haven't been plugged into a lot of this stuff and the books were just something that were really important to me," said Carrie Manantob, a GCISD parent who volunteered at the fair after being disappointed with the district's decision.
Many of them saying, they're conservatives but felt the actions of their new school board went way too far to the right, and they wanted to make their voices heard.
"It was a unifying issue I think a lot of people in our community may not agree 100% on all of the different policy changes that are happening in our district or don't know how they feel about the policy changes, but books seemed to be that one unifying thing we all agreed on," said Kimberley Barber Davis, a former school board member in GCISD who helped organized the fair.
They registered voters, planned other events, and outside supporters of the newly elected board members who banned the book fair, erected their campaign signs even though they're not running. It's all contentious, frustrating, political back and forth, all about the choices our children make on what to read.
The group raised $10,000 which they will ask the district to take as a donation
The school district says book fairs will return with a new vendor and the board members whose signs were posted didn't return our requests for comment.
