That aside, these stats are not surprising. Anyone from outside the US knows just how bad the education system is within. With red states outright banning books and knowledge, that number may just continue to climb.
People who claim that removing some books from a library is akin to banning or will have any affect on the actual dissemination of knowledge are fools at best and liars almost surely.
Education is like everything else. If you believe it is someone or something else’s responsibility, you won’t have much of it.
Searching 'book banning' on news.google.com still returns a lot of results with towns still doing it.
I think what I was actually thinking of though, was I think Mississippi (I think) deciding to defund all libraries in retaliation for the library suing over book bans.