'It's absurd': North Fort Myers teacher resigns after school removes in-class library

Over Mike Andoscia’s eight years as a social studies teacher at North Fort Myers High School, he’d grown his classroom library to more than 600 books.

When he came into school on Jan. 16, they were gone.

The next day, so was he.

Andoscia resigned after the school boxed up his library, placed the books in “administrative lockup” and told him to take them home, Andoscia said in an interview.

“[Principal Debbie Diggs] asked me why I just didn’t keep the books covered, and I said it’s absurd and it’s fascism and I’m just not going to participate in that,” he said.

Andoscia’s resignation is the latest flare-up over HB 1069 – a state law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, that requires school districts to restrict books that are deemed age-inappropriate or describe “sexual conduct."

Proponents of the bill say the law is intended to protect parental rights, not broadly ban books. But in practice, districts across the state have pre-emptively removed thousands of books to avoid potential criminal liability.

The Lee County School District declined to comment for this story.

More: How do Collier and Lee schools decide which books to ban? Here's what we know

For years, Andoscia had allowed his high school students to check out books from his library without complaint. The collection consisted of history, social studies, philosophy and fiction, and he would typically lend out 20-30 books per school year, he said. – though that number had fallen in recent years.

But in May of last year, Lee County told teachers they would have to enter all materials in classroom libraries into a digital database so that media specialists could review them. Andoscia spent 12 hours scanning his collection into the system, he said.

“What we were told was that by the time school started in August, all of the books would have been vetted and we would know what books to put on our shelves and what not to put in our shelves,” Andoscia said.

But that didn’t happen. By the time of the school’s annual parent open house, all his books remained in administrative limbo. Administrators told him to cover up the books, so he hung red project paper over the shelves before parents arrived.

“It looked absolutely ridiculous,” Andoscia said. “I put a snarky sign up on my books that said these books have not yet been vetted by the state.”

The News-Press requested data last week on classroom library reviews from the Lee County School District. That request has not yet been answered.

Andoscia, who had been teaching for 30 years, was already thinking about retirement. He knew it would be a “long year,” he said, but his daughter was a senior and he resolved to stick it out until she graduated.

He was not, however, willing to censor the library for his students, who were primarily upperclassmen taking advanced classes in sociology, economics and philosophy.

“I did not want to communicate to the kids that this is OK,” Andoscia said. “That it’s perfectly reasonable to cover books up.”

So he took the project paper down before school started – a move that the administration tolerated until last month. Just one student checked out a book this year, he said – the George Orwell classic “Animal Farm.”

Andoscia said he asked why the vetting process was taking so long, and was told that the reviewers were backlogged and hoped to catch up by the end of the year.

But by January, less than 10 percent of his library had been reviewed, he said. A few books were rejected, including “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” But Andoscia said he appealed the rejections through the online system and they were then marked “approved pending review,” so he put them back on the shelves.

When he arrived in class on Jan. 16 to find his shelves empty it was the final straw, Andoscia said. The next day he drafted a resignation letter and handed it to Diggs while she was in a meeting.

Andoscia, who last year was named a teacher of distinction in the Foundation for Lee Public School's Golden Apple teaching awards, said that Diggs asked him not to resign in a phone call that afternoon. But his mind was made up.

To complicate matters, after Andoscia resigned he got a call from the district saying that he was under investigation. And in a letter sent that evening, Lee Schools Professional Standards Director Fernando Vazquez warned Andoscia that his resignation could have financial consequences.

“There is a possibility that you may not be entitled to your sick time/personal time if you resign in the midst of an investigation,” Vazquez wrote.

Andoscia said the district did not tell him what he was being investigated for.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Florida high school teacher resigns after in-class library removed