Florida Protects School Children From Dictionaries And All The Naughty Words Inside Them

Who knows what kind of words they've got in there?

It is sure is a time to be a student in Florida.

Teachers can't tell you about LGBTQ people or racism, and also your teachers can be soldiers with no prior experience who don't even have a Bachelor's degree. That is if and when you even have teachers, given the state's massive teacher shortage. And if teachers can't teach you anything, don't think you're going to go and become an autodidact or anything, because the state is also cracking down on books .

In order to comply with yet another kooky school-related bill, at least one Florida school district halting all donations and purchases of books entirely. This bill, HG 1467, requires that all books be pre-approved by "state-certified media specialists" to ensure that they are "age-appropriate" (ie: they do not mention LGBTQ people). Currently, there are no "state-certified media specialists" in the state to inspect any new books.

According to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is out of his goddamn mind, the bill will "increase transparency" and prevent "indoctrination." It will also allow parents, and indeed, any county resident to petition that any book be removed from school libraries and reading lists. This, surely, will get interesting.

Sarasota County school district, which serves 45,000 students, has decided to bar all new books from coming into the district until January 1 of next year, which is when the DeSantis administration will first start training teachers to be able to approve the books.

This includes dictionaries. The Herald-Tribune reports:  

Hundreds of dictionaries earmarked for donation from a Venice Rotary Club sit collecting dust, precluded from being given to Sarasota County students. Even dictionaries aren't safe from the Sarasota Schools book freeze. [...]

After donating about 300 dictionaries per year and about 4,000 to date, the club for the first time has been denied.
"I would suspect somebody, anyone, could approve a dictionary in less than one minute," Reese said. "Why are we going through all this trouble?"

The club partners with an organization called the Dictionary Project , and Reese said he asked a representative from the group if there were any offensive or obscene words in the dictionaries the group donates. He said there were not.

 A Rotary Club? What mischief are they up to, trying to expose Florida school children to ... words? Words they could probably use to learn about things Ron DeSantis doesn't want them to learn about! It's best, probably, to keep the children as illiterate as possible, so that even as adults they do not run the risk of accidentally finding out about the existence of LGBTQ people or reading about the Civil War by people who don't even have the decency to call it The War of Northern Aggression.

This is not the fault of the Sarasota County school district. They're just doing what they have to do in order to not run afoul of a bizarre and extreme law put into place by their elected officials and governor — and given this extremity, one cannot use normal human judgment to determine what it is these people would potentially find "unsafe" or "offensive." Clearly, either all the books will have to go or the law will.

OPEN THREAD!

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