Fearing DeSantis's wrath, a Florida county just took every book off school shelves
Fearing DeSantis's wrath, a Florida county just took every book off school shelves
Thousands of kids are. suffering
Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.
To follow up on Wednesday’s newsletter, Democrats in the New York State Senate held strong and voted to reject Gov. Kathy Hochul’s conservative nominee for chief judge of the state’s top court. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Hector LaSalle for nearly five hours, unearthing damning evidence that further built the case that he was unfit for confirmation by a Democratic supermajority.
Hochul hasn’t publicly ruled out suing the Senate to get LaSalle a full-floor vote, which has further stoked bad blood between the corporate centrist and progressive wings of the party. As I wrote, this is a proxy battle for the entire party, so the drama is very high stakes.
Today, though, we have a very disconcerting scoop from one of our correspondents in Florida, where Ron DeSantis’s new school laws are causing a true catastrophe.
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by Jen Cousins
On Thursday night, Florida Freedom to Read Project, the advocacy organization that I run, was inundated with messages from distressed parents and teachers from Manatee County.
They all called with some version of the same grim news. The hostile right-wing takeover of Florida’s public education system had just touched down in the small Gulf Coast county, rendering in an instant what once seemed unthinkable: Every K-12 public school teacher was ordered to immediately close down and pack up their classroom libraries until further notice.
The mandate, which was confirmed by the Manatee Board of Education on Friday evening, was implemented in response to new legislation intended to heavily censor teachers and school systems. Florida House Bill 1467, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, allows conservatives to weed out books and classroom material that they find offensive.
The law also requires that school districts adopt a process to vet and certify that the material in their library media centers do not violate laws against teaching students about racism or acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Public school librarians and media specialists must take an hour-long online training program developed by the Florida Department of Education, during which they are warned over and over again that they cannot stock library shelves with pornography, lest they face third degree felony charges and loss of their license.
(Thanks to the two Moms for Liberty members who were installed on the work group that helped develop this training, the Webster’s Dictionary definition of pornography is now listed in the training slides.)
DeSantis’s Department of Education decided unilaterally that all classroom libraries should be considered media centers, and therefore all books that are in classroom libraries now must be vetted by a media specialist before it can be part of a teacher’s own collection.
In many places in Florida, the vetting will be an incredibly lengthy process that will likely drag on through the end of the school year; budget cuts have led some districts to forgo hiring librarians or media specialists, and some teachers have hundreds of books in their personal libraries.
There are now thousands of kids in Manatee County who do not have any books to read at school. Florida ranks in the bottom 10 states in the country for literacy rates, and only about 50% of Manatee’s elementary students are reading at grade level. For all of DeSantis’s rhetoric about “protecting” children, he has essentially forced local schools to abandon their students writ large; the governor likes to tout that Florida is the “freest” state, but mass government-mandated book bans are not indicative of a state that values freedom.
It should be a national scandal that a hard-right governor is implementing statewide censorship of books that educate children about civil rights and guide them through the questions that they may be afraid to ask their parents. Instead, it’s likely to be considered a minor front in Ron DeSantis’s ongoing holy war against public education and multiculturalism.
After a first term spent obsessing over kids’ genitals and muzzling teachers, DeSantis has spent the early weeks of his second term engaged in a hostile takeover of Florida’s public education system. In initiating his war on “wokeness,” DeSantis has launched a culture war that seeks to obliterate modern culture itself while turning public schools into ideological training grounds for new generations of far-right combatants.
Shortly after his second inauguration, DeSantis commanded all public state colleges and universities to conduct an itemized audit to determine how much money they were spending on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and CRT (critical race theory) programs. He then sent another directive to the same colleges and universities asking for the statistics on enrolled students who sought medical treatment for gender dysphoria. Again, the opposite of freedom.
Then, as has been covered here at Progress Report, DeSantis appointed six new ultra-conservative members to the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school known for its individualized study programs and large population of LGBTQ+ students.
Led by some of the United States’ most prominent racists and homophobes, including Chris Rufo and a dean of Hillsdale College, the new board has already telegraphed its intention to rip apart the bookshelves at the NCF and make it a model for higher education in Florida, as well.
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