Orange school district pulls 673 books from teachers’ classroom shelves

A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.

The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.

The books run the gamut, from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem “Paradise Lost” to John Grisham’s 1991 New York Times bestseller “The Firm.” John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” made the list, too.

The list also includes popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd and Jodi Picoult, classics like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Jude the Obscure,” and “Madame Bovary,” and award-winning books like “A Thousand Acres,” “Beloved,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

The rejected books include ones teachers say were once regularly taught in high school classes, such as “The Color Purple,” “Catch-22,” and “Brave New World.

Read it yourself: All 673 books removed from Orange classrooms

The list contains books found in teachers’ classroom collections, not in school libraries. Many likely were not part of required instruction but were available to students for independent reading. The district said it could not yet provide a full count of how many books have been removed from school libraries this year.

The books pulled from classrooms represent “over censorship” by media specialists operating under “great fear” because of the new state laws that hold them responsible for every item on a shelf, said Karen Castor Dentel, an Orange County School Board member as the board discussed the list at its Dec. 12 meeting.

“It’s creating this culture of fear within our media specialists and even teachers who just want to have a library in their classrooms, so kids have access,” said Castor Dentel, a former OCPS elementary school teacher.

Parents, she said, can restrict what their own children read, making it hard to justify pulling so many books from classrooms. “They’re in a pile of we’ll-get-to-it-later and in the meantime, no one can read those books.”

The harm of so much censorship far outweighs the benefits of finding “a book or two that is offensive,” Castor Dentel added. “Look at all the chaos that has been created. It’s not worth it.”

New Florida laws (HB 1069 and HB 1467) require media specialists — who are teachers with additional library training — to review and approve all books in classroom collections and school libraries and to exclude those that include pornography or “sexual conduct.”

New state training for media specialists warns them to “err on the side of caution” when approving books and warns that they can face criminal penalties and the loss of their teaching certificates, if they approve inappropriate books.

The new laws were approved by Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 and 2023. They aim to protect children from inappropriate material and pornography and give parents better information on the books in their children’s schools and easier ways to challenge them ones they do not like.

State leaders pointed to several school library books they found offensive — among them “Gender Queer,” a comic-book style memoir by a non-binary author that included drawings of sex acts — as proof the laws were needed.

OCPS had five copies of the book in four of its high schools, and after a complaint two years ago, administrators determined “Gender Queer” was too graphic for school shelves and ordered it removed. That happened in the fall of 2021, before the new laws were passed. The book appeared on the list of 673 rejected titles, apparently because a teacher had a copy in a classroom library.

Florida’s new laws have fueled school book bans across the state, making Florida the national leader in books removed from public schools last school year, according to PEN America, a free speech and expression group. PEN America and other critics argue the book removals stem from some books being wrongly labeled as pornographic and the faulty assumption that any description of sexual conduct makes a book automatically inappropriate for high school students.

“This is yet another disastrous consequence of Florida’s disastrous education policies,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read project, in a statement. “Hundreds of books have now been removed from Orange County shelves under HB 1069, and we continue to be alarmed by the magnitude and scale of censorship following the implementation of this law.”

School districts across Florida have wrestled with reviewing books and handling book challenges, with the Hernando County school district even removing children’s picture books that showed cartoonish drawings of kids’ bare bottoms. The Escambia County school district this fall pulled about 1,400 books from its libraries — including works by Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens — to review for compliance with the new law, according a list obtained by the Freedom to Read Project, which opposes school book bans.

Orange school board member Alicia Farrant, a member of the conservative Moms for Liberty group that has pushed for books to be yanked from schools, ran for office last year promising to get rid of books she called offensive.

She was on stage with DeSantis when he signed HB 1467 in 2022, which increased scrutiny of school and classroom libraries and prompted the new rules for media specialists.

During the board’s discussion last week, she mentioned the book “No, David!,” one of the picture books pulled from Hernando schools, and said districts need to find “that happy medium” when it comes to books.

“We can’t be living in a state of fear and removing every single book,” Farrant said. “I don’t like the book,” she said of “No, David!,” by David Shannon, “but a book like that shouldn’t be removed because a kid is running down the street with his butt showing.”

But Farrant also blamed Castor Dentel and others on the board before her 2022 election for allowing books she found inappropriate, including those with “graphic sexual content” and “major cussing,” onto campuses.

“If you’re so frustrated, with the state having its nose in your stuff, maybe you should have been doing your job and making sure these books were not in our libraries,” she told Castor Dentel.

To comply with this year’s new law, OCPS began reviewing school and classroom library books over the summer, with the early rejection list alarming some teachers even before the new school year started.

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” as well as popular, turned-into-movies books like “Into the Wild,” and “The Fault in Our Stars” were early entries on the list and remain rejected.

“Depicts or describes sexual conduct (not allowed per HB 1069-2023),” read the explanation on the early rejection list, referencing the law DeSantis signed in May.

The list of 673 rejected classroom books was first obtained by the freedom to read group, founded by two Orange County mothers, and then confirmed by OCPS.

Stephana Ferrell, one of the group’s founders, said books shouldn’t be taken from schools because Farrant or someone else doesn’t like them.

“That‘s what a free society does. We leave books on the shelf even if we personally don’t agree with them,” Ferrell said.

But Superintendent Maria Vazquez said media specialists had no option but to take the state’s warnings seriously.

“If there is a challenge, it’s the media specialist’s certificate that is in jeopardy,” she said.

The district’s guidance to media specialists as the book reviews began in the summer warned them about what was at stake. “You are tasked with protecting your colleagues, yourself, and OCPS to ensure content being made available to students is in compliance with Florida Statutes,” it read.

Vazquez said the district wants staff to review the rejected books as quickly as possible, so some novels might be returned to classrooms. But, she said, “There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books, and they also have another job they are doing at the same time.”

Board member Angie Gallo urged the district to make the list of rejected books available on its website so residents can see it, and, if it bothers them, talk to state lawmakers.

“I think they’d be shocked,” Gallo said. “I know I was shocked when I saw the list.”

Vazquez said staff would try to do that early in 2024 and also update the board on the status of the books on the rejected list.

Gallo also said she understood that media specialists and district staff faced a “huge burden” reviewing so many books. “They’re doing the best they can to try to adhere to a law that is out there, and I appreciate them so much,” she said.