{"id":590925,"date":"2023-09-12T22:52:55","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T19:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/florida-school-districts-removed-roughly-300-books-last-school-year\/"},"modified":"2023-09-12T22:52:55","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T19:52:55","slug":"florida-school-districts-removed-roughly-300-books-last-school-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/florida-school-districts-removed-roughly-300-books-last-school-year\/","title":{"rendered":"#Florida school districts removed roughly 300 books last school year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Florida school districts removed app<\/a>roximately 300 books from library shelves last school year, according to a list of \u201cremoved or discontinued materials\u201d that was quietly released by the state\u2019s education department late last month.<\/p>\n

The removals were prompted by more than 1,200 objections raised by parents of public school students or other Florida residents, according to a 16-page Florida Department of Education document that included the book list<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The discontinued titles include dozens of books containing LGBTQ themes or characters, including the award-winning memoirs \u201cGender Queer\u201d and \u201cAll Boys Aren\u2019t Blue,\u201d as well as the illustrated children\u2019s books \u201cA Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo\u201d and \u201cAnd Tango Makes Three.\u201d Other books on the list include Toni Morrison\u2019s Pulitzer-winning novel \u201cBeloved,\u201d Bernard Malamud\u2019s National Book-winning novel \u201cThe Fixer\u201d and Margaret Atwood\u2019s Booker Prize-winning novel \u201cThe Testaments.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to an email from NBC News<\/a> seeking comment on the list and referring to the removed titles as \u201cbanned books,\u201d Caily Myers, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, said, \u201cFlorida does not ban books.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe list comprises information provided by each school district of the books they removed based on objections from a parent or resident of the county using their district\u2019s process,\u201d she said, adding that this is the first year the state\u2019s education department has collected information on the book objections school districts received.<\/p>\n

Out of Florida\u2019s 67 counties, school districts in 21 counties removed books in the last school year, with five districts removing more than 10 books. Clay County, in the northeastern part of the state, banned the most titles, with 177 removals, followed by Martin County, in the southeast, with 98 removals.<\/p>\n

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Jennifer DeShazo, a spokesperson for the Martin County School District, said the district removed the books in order to comply with the implementation of the Parental Rights in Education act, which critics have dubbed the \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay\u201d law. The measure, which took effect in July of last year, restricts the instruction of LGBTQ issues in the state\u2019s schools.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While schools in Martin County cannot offer students any of the 98 books on the district\u2019s list, DeShazo said students are permitted to bring their own personal copies from home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Clay County School District also cited Florida\u2019s so-called Don\u2019t Say Gay law along with Florida House Bill 1467 \u2014 which permits parents or residents of a Florida county to submit challenges to school books and was enacted last year \u2014 in response to a request for comment regarding the district\u2019s 177 book removals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The spokesperson, Terri Dennis, said in an email that one county resident was responsible for \u201capproximately 94%\u201d of the book challenges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the School District of Manatee County, which removed 25 books from its schools\u2019 shelves last school year, also pointed to House Bill 1467 in response to a request for comment regarding the removals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Representatives for the two other school districts that removed more than 10 books \u2014 Flagler Schools, which removed 11 books, and the School District of Osceola County, which removed 21 titles \u2014 did not immedia<\/a>tely reply to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

The Parental Rights in Education act, which was signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, prohibited the instruction at public schools of sexual orientation or gender identity \u201cin kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.\u201d The law was expanded this year to ban the instruction in prekindergarten through eighth grade.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for DeSantis, who is currently travel<\/a>ing the country in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation\u2019s second-largest teachers union, condemned the state\u2019s efforts to remove books, saying that the bans are \u201churting the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople ban books in this kind of way when they are afraid of knowledge and when they are afraid of people learning about each other and learning about differences,\u201d Weingarten said. \u201cWhat they\u2019re doing is they\u2019re saying that one small group of people who want to turn back the clock to thwart knowledge are more important than the vast number of parents who don\u2019t want this to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

At least two lawsuits have been filed against Florida school districts that have removed books containing LGBTQ content. In May, a group led by the publishing company Penguin Random House and PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, sued the Escambia County School District for removing 10 books related to race and LGBTQ identities. And in June, a group of students, parents and authors sued Lake County\u2019s school district for removing \u201cAnd Tango Makes Three,\u201d a children\u2019s book about two gay penguins who raise a baby penguin together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Book bans go beyond Florida, with the the American Library Association\u2019s latest book censorship report finding that 2022 had the highest number of attempted book bans since the organization began tracking such attempts in 2001. The association found that more than half of the 13 books on its \u201cMost Challenged Books\u201d list last year \u2014 including three of the top four \u2014 were challenged for having LGBTQ themes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Florida school districts removed approximately 300 books from library shelves last school year, according to a list of \u201cremoved or discontinued materials\u201d that was quietly released by the state\u2019s education department late last month. The removals were prompted by more than 1,200 objections raised by parents of public school students or other Florida residents, according…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":590926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com\/image\/upload\/t_nbcnews-fp-1200-630,f_auto,q_auto:best\/rockcms\/2023-09\/230912-banned-books-mn-0905-3c3ce1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}