Book challenges were so urgent that the topic required a special meeting of the Escambia County school board this week to consider removing a trio of titles from the district’s libraries and classrooms. Before board member Kevin Adams and his board colleagues voted to remove a book about a transgender boy who becomes a big brotherhe noted that students in the Florida district would still be able to check the title out from the library.
“Go get books if you want to, but it’s something that should not be in the school district,” Adams said. “We should be concentrating on the education of our students, and if I can’t connect those dots I won’t approve the book.” But dissenting board member Patricia Hightower rejected claims that such books could indoctrinate children or steer them toward an LGBTQ+ lifestyle. “Reading books opens your mind but it doesn’t change who are you or what you are,” Hightower said. “It makes you a more compassionate, caring person.”
Book challenges building momentum
Ultimately, the Escambia County school board also removed the LGBTQ+-themed All Boys Aren’t Blue and And Tango Makes Three.
Those titles joined a growing list of that have been challenged, many of which had been targeted for removal by an Escambia high school teacher, the Pensacola News Journal reported. A review of all of the district’s librarieswhich contain about 100,000 different titlesis also underway, theNews Journal noted.
This activity in Escambia County reflects the rising tide of book bans and book challenges that has hit almost every corner of the nation in just 2023 alone. The push has even led to the removal of hundreds of picture books and biographies of Black baseball heroes Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente.
The list of books being reviewed by the Central Bucks School District outside of Philadelphia has in just the last few weeks, WHYY reported, adding that all of the titles appear on a website called , which pushes schools to ban books that contain objectionable and sexual content. The site was created by a member of Moms for Liberty, a national far-right organization aligned with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that has led multiple book-banning campaigns and accused school administrators of indoctrinating students with instruction on LGBTQ issues.
The books on Central Bucks’ review list include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, All Boys Arent Blue by George M. Johnson, TTYL by Lauren Myracle and Shout by Laurie Halse Andersons book, WHYY said. The school district said , enacted in July 2022, “was written to ensure that books are appropriate for the subject area and for the age, intellectual development, and ability level of the students for whom the material is selected and that salacious, graphic, explicit sexual content that is age-inappropriate is not on library shelves.”
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In January, from the library at the single high school in Madison County, Virginia. The school board charged that the booksincluding Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale, and Stephen King’s鴛岳are sexually explicit and thus inappropriate for high school children,堰顎韓韓永看壊岳油reported.
Not one single parent has ever reached out to me about concerns about titles, or to request that their child be limited to certain books at checkout, Charlotte Wood, a Madison County High School librarian told the district’s school board earlier this month, according to堰顎韓韓永看壊岳.油
Book bans becoming law?
The ACLU of Missouri, the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association against a law passed last year that now puts schools at risk of criminal charges and fines over books deemed inappropriate for students. Extreme politicians … are using the government-knows-best model for legislationin this case telling parents what their children can and cant read at school and, in some cases, at home, while imposing criminal penalties on those who might disagree, said Gillian Wilcox, deputy director for litigation at the ACLU of Missouri.
Lawmakers in Indiana have that would allow a parent or guardian to challenge books and have them removed from school libraries. The proposal would also put librarians and educators at risk of criminal prosecution for providing a book deemed inappropriate for children.
