Under Threat from State, Florida Public Schools Are Banning These 55+ Books Without Review

Despite the legal precedent of “local control” in Florida’s statutes related to book bans in public schools, the State Board of Education has been threatening legal action against districts that don’t remove 55 books they deem inappropriate. It began with Florida’s Education Commissioner and Attorney General writing letters to leadership at Hillsborough County Public Schools. The Education Commissioner’s letter stated that the district had two books deemed “pornographic” in the collection that needed to be removed immediately. The two books are Call Me By Your Name and Jack of Hearts and Other Parts. The Attorney General’s letter added four more titles: Choke, Beautiful, What Girls Are Made Of, and Breathless, which he called “patently pornographic.”

The removal of those six books–done without formal review per both school policy and state policy–then led to the agreement by the Hillsborough County Schools superintendent to pull 49 more books without review, following a heated meeting with the state Board of Education. Among those books was a title that the district had already had a challenge to and that went through the formal review process. It had been retained for certain grade levels.

Targeting Hillsborough was intentional. Florida’s State Board of Education has taken on the role of statewide book censors, despite not having the legal mechanisms in place that states like Utah and South Carolina do. While Florida’s Department of Education requires that each school submit to them books removed from their libraries and why annually, those lists aren’t used to then demand removal of those books from additional schools (as in Utah).

The threats made toward Hillsborough were meant to make other districts not-so-silently remove titles before they, too, became state targets. The Commissioner of the Board has gone so far as to use Twitter to demand book removals and issue threats against state school districts.

The Florida State Board of Education is appointed by the governor. The new Commissioner, Anastasios Kamoutsas, was appointed in June by the governor.

Now, just weeks after the gross overreach by the state into policies at the local school district level, eight additional Florida public school districts have capitulated. Each has agreed to remove any of the 55 titles on their shelves deemed to have “sexual content.” Removals will be done without formal review of the titles.

These eight districts represent only those on the record having agreed to the removals. It’s likely others have agreed or will remove the titles quietly so as not to catch the attention of the State Board of Education. The districts who have agreed to removals publicly include Hillsborough, Broward, Columbia, Escambia, Orange, Osceola, Pasco, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and St. Johns. Each district joining in the effort to ban books without review is another district bowing to a state-level committee, rather than meeting the needs and interests of their own community. Each district joining in the effort to ban books is another district making clear they’re more interested in showing their loyalty to the state than their obligations to taxpayers.

Escambia County remains one of the most censorious districts in the nation, and it is currently defendant in two separate lawsuits over book bans.  

It comes as no surprise that the majority of books on the list of 55 are by or about queer people and/or people of color. The same books that have been in the crosshairs from the start of this wave of book censorship remain there. Here’s the full list of books being banned right now in Florida schools, despite the state not having the authority to demand their removal at the district level: