It’s been more than a year since the Florida legislature passed HB 1069. That’s the bill that caused many books to be restricted in Florida schools. According to PEN America, Florida accounts for 40% of banned books in the US, and that is thanks in part to this law. Collier County, for instance, banned 300 books, including many classics, at the start of the current school year.
On October 13, 2023, Chancellor Paul Burns of the DOE, who oversees K-12 public schools, sent a memo to school superintendents. It was meant to guide book curation for libraries, but unfortunately it conflated the criteria for objection and discussion with the criteria for removal from a collection. School staffers erroneously believed that all library materials should be free of any sexual conduct.
Stephana Farrell of the Florida Freedom to Read Project says this is where some of the problems started.
"It’s this interpretation of the law that caused Escambia County to pull things like dictionaries, and why Collier County is pulling Hemingway and Tolstoy and Zora Neale Hurston. We’re seeing so many classics now getting removed. They are just interpreting the law the way that the memo and the guidance from the Florida DOE would have them believe it must be interpreted,” Farrell said.
This caused many Florida schoolchildren to lose access to books at school. Former Collier County media specialist Marge Cox says that, despite what some legislators say, these restrictions are not in the interest of parents’ rights.
“Parents always have had the right to say, ‘I don’t want my child to read X,Y,Z. And they weren’t allowed to check it out then. What this has permitted is for a person to say, ‘I don’t like this book, I’m going to file a complaint. Nobody can have access to it.’ That’s not parents’ rights; that’s infringing on parents’ rights,” said Cox.
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