Florida schools demand permission slips for Disney and Dr. Seuss movies
And other absurdities from the first day of school
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
This is my third weekend in a row on the road, and as much as I love to travel, I’m now mostly just tired and want to go home and see my kid. I feel some version of that a lot nowadays, because now that he’s 10-months-old, he’s going to daycare three days a week. It means that we have to trust other people — relative strangers, basically — to take care of him and teach him in a safe and kind environment. Thankfully, it’s been so far, so good.
Empathy is hardly exclusive to parents, and as we’re seeing around the country, many parents have a disturbing lack of empathy. But having never particularly enjoyed school myself, this new phase in live has helped me to better appreciate the protective instinct that suddenly kicks in, and how gut-wrenching and enraging it must be to have to send your child to a school that is being made deliberately hostile to their existence.
In tonight’s newsletter, Jen Cousins, the co-founder and former co-chair of the Florida Right to Read Coalition, gives a report from the front lines of Ron DeSantis’s war on public schools, with some details that seem almost too ludicrous to be real.
Note: On Tuesday, we’ll have a new Good News edition of the newsletter, because there’s plenty of positive things being accomplished by progressive activists and lawmakers right now.
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by Jen Cousins and Jordan Zakarin
Thursday was the first day back at school for most of Central Florida, and it was just as exasperating and dispiriting as anticipated.
The day began with a letter from the Florida Education Association, the state teacher’s union, laying out some grim facts: Florida faces a massive school personnel shortage, including a deficit of 7,000 open teaching positions as well as 5,000 support staff roles. As the day unfolded, it emerged that some schools were also without guidance counselors to help students navigate to clarify their schedules, while others were beginning the year with substitute teachers in place of permanent hires.
There is no shortage of reasons why there is such a crippling staff shortage or why the roles are proving so difficult to fill, and almost all of them come back to the fact that working in Florida schools has never been more miserable.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and a pliant Republican legislature have spent the past three years hammering away at public education, turning the state’s school system into occupied territory and testing grounds for the most violent and bigoted right-wing ideologies.
From the extension of the infamous “Don’t Say LGBT+” law and trans bathroom ban to the Board of Education requesting and approving curriculum designed by hate groups, the needs of students and educators have been ignored in favor of the perverted delusions of religious extremists and fringe blowhards.
Both are age-old traditions, revived and poorly concealed with new language for the same paranoias. There are other factors at play as well, including massive deficits in public funding, which helps to extend the staffing problems beyond academics and culture — a bus driver shortage, for example, is causing routes to be extended and thus causing students to arrive late for classes.
The latest wrinkles in the state Board of Education’s reign of terror are administrative in nature, though that description undersells their intended impact.
Some of the administrative hurdles placed before schools and parents are downright stupid, but even those are byproducts of pernicious laws and rules like book banning and other limitations on media. In conservative St. John’s County, middle schools asked parents to give permission for their children to watch Disney and Dr. Seuss cartoons that touch very gently on the environment.
More bleak were the permission slips governing student identity. The “Provision for Deviation from Legal Names,” passed at the a contentious BOE meeting in Orlando last month, the rule requires parents and/or guardians to complete and return a form to their school if they would like their child to be addressed by any name other than what is on their birth certificate.
Orange County Public Schools offered two examples to help parents understand how the new rule works. The first explained that a student named Robert would have to have his parents sign the permission slip if he wanted to be called Rob. That’s an inconvenience for Robert and his parents, collateral damage that Republicans were happy to cause in service of the rule’s real aim: outing or suppressing trans and non-binary kids.
“...if the student’s legal name is Robert, but the student identifies as a transgender girl and uses the name Roberta, the parent may authorize a teacher or other personnel to call the student Roberta. However, while the teacher and other personnel would utilize the name Roberta when requested by the parent, under the recently adopted House Bill 1069, the teacher or other personnel may elect not to utilize the pronoun ‘she/her’ when referring to Roberta.”
Seminole County also released guidance on the so-called “nickname forms” in the days leading up to the first day of school, but most other counties did not bother to do so, leaving many parents stunned and confused. Facebook groups and text chains were full of messages from bewildered parents decrying the new rule, and there was as much sympathy for teachers as families and children.
OCPS’s guidance contained further alerts about other miserable new rules, some of which stem from the “Don’t Say LGBTQ” law that passed earlier this year. As Florida Schools Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr asserted in a deeply bitter and transphobic statement at the July meeting, no teacher or school staff is required to use a student’s pronoun correctly.
In the administration’s ideal world, a teacher can call the transgender girl Robert, refer to her as a “him,” and deny her the right to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
Since HB 1521 became law on July 1st, all bathrooms in Florida public schools are segregated by gender assigned at birth. While some districts, like Orange, had sent out letters earlier this year with locations of single stall bathroom locations, most others did not. One parent posted to a group wondering how they could find a bathroom and place for their trans son to change for PE without being outed and exposed.
Schools that violate this law face up to a $10,000, and with public education already struggling from underfunding, leeway is unlikely to be common. Instead, counties are becoming increasingly conservative, either out of fear of being caught going awry of the new regulations or mandates from hijacked local boards of education. In Hillsborough County, schools said they would only provide kids with parts of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, a reaction to the new law’s provisions that clashed with the BOE’s recommendation of the book during the same week.
It’s hard to blame schools for the caution, considering what Diaz and the state have done and said. Earlier this month, there was a short-lived furor over the popular AP psychology course, which Diaz initially banned over a segment on gender and sexual orientation. He ultimately allowed districts to teach the course, but not before many schools dropped it anyhow.
Tomorrow begins the first full week of school. Parents are terrified of what it may bring.
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This is like a bad movie script, but sadly it’s much worse because it’s real.
For every permission slip sent home about a book or movie, how many books won’t be read or films won’t be shown because the teacher is afraid to do so or doesn’t want the likely friction? We don’t know, but based on my 20 years of teaching, I’m going to guess a very high number.