CLAY COUNTY, Fla. — Clay County has remained Northeast Florida’s focal point for book restrictions in public schools, according to a state report that says book removals last school year were nearly nonexistent in many counties.
The Florida Department of Education’s 35-page report inventoried material that was “removed or discontinued” in 2023-24 under a state law letting residents object to material that’s pornographic or “not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend.”
The report released this month listed 287 titles removed or discontinued from Clay County schools while identifying 44 county school districts ― including Duval, Baker, Nassau and Putnam ― that it said didn’t pull anything from their shelves.
Regardless of the report’s findings, Duval schools’ website says a school district committee has recommended pulling a handful of volumes year after year, faulting the titles for inappropriate gore or violence, occult material or being “offensive to teachers.”
Florida’s Legislature has revisited pieces of state law controlling which books belong in schools for each of the past four years and numerous times before that.
One of those laws required the education department to circulate this month’s report to school districts. A state report for 2022-23 reported 489 book objections in Clay County and 177 removals, but it’s not clear whether those categories overlap completely with the “removed or discontinued” standard used this month.
Clay County has been an outlier in the number of books removed, much of it driven by objections from a sole parent, but the effort has also found support in the county’s school board.
“We have done a bang-up job,” board member Michele Hanson said during a meeting last year where officials discussed adding new “filters” to identify books as unacceptable. “We need to spread the word that what we are doing is right. We need to help educate people who are calling us liars and book banners. And we need to do it louder than they are doing it.”
Florida school systems have seen a series of lawsuits over book restrictions and have been frequently criticized by free-expression advocacy groups such as PEN America.
But groups concerned about books circulating in Duval school libraries have argued that books that state law should ban are still on local bookshelves.
In November 2023, a series of speakers at a Duval school board meeting read passages out loud from Identical, a best-seller by novelist Ellen Hopkins that included descriptions of incest. A man who was instructed to stop reading but continued was escorted from the meeting room by police. The incident was cited later by incoming board member Tony Ricardo as a factor in his decision to run for the board’s District 1 seat, which he’ll be sworn into on Tuesday.
A school district spokesperson said in December that the book would “undergo the reconsideration committee review and recommendation process.”
The state report listed Hopkins’ book being pulled from shelves in Volusia and Indian River counties, but didn’t mention Duval County.
A page of Duval schools’ website listing earlier book reconsiderations also doesn’t mention the Hopkins book but said four titles were recommended for removal in 2023-24. Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl was recommended for removal for gore and violence; Teen Titans, a D.C. Comics title, and Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Hahn were flagged for occult content; and Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School, about a 30-story school with just one classroom per floor was labeled “offensive to teachers.”
The same titles were on the website with removal recommendations each year since 2020-21.
This story was first published by The Florida Times-Union.
