Florida Teachers, Parents, Kids Just Want Schools To Have Books. That's All.
OK, and there's this one preacher dude who's simply delighted by censorship.
Here, have a gift link to one of the best stories the Washington Post has run lately on school censorship in Florida. Go read this brief collection of interviews, with videos as well, of folks in Florida’s Escambia County, the school district where one self-appointed jerk on a mission took it upon herself to file challenges to over 100 books, prompting the district to remove them while it reviewed them to see if they were too porny for kids. (ZERO of the books were “porn,” but that didn’t stop the district from permanently removing several of them from libraries and classrooms.)
We’ve covered much of this national eruption of book-banning madness already, as has the Post, but this article is especially poignant because it’s so immediate, sharing first-person accounts of five people struggling to deal with the damage being done to Florida schools by a well funded minority of rightwing fundamentalist vandals. That damage is aided by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed a suite of awful laws that ought to be found unconstitutional, eventually, assuming we can hold on to democracy.
There’s also an appearance by one of those vandals, a preacher who doesn’t have any children or grandchildren in the district, but is delighted the schools are cleansing library shelves of dangerous Gay Penguins. Yes really.
The Post also notes that it tried several times to interview Vicki Baggett, the English teacher who challenged so many books, but no luck there. Possibly because she knows she can’t possibly make herself look good, particularly not since her former students have spoken out about racist and homophobic comments she shared with her classes.
This was totally going to be one of those pieces where I keep urging you to go read the whole thing and then I jump out, the end, but damn it, I had to go and write up a a few highlights:
Susan Ingram, a former librarian in the district, loved sharing books and the love of reading with students, but that changed once all the challenges meant she was spending more time dealing with those than she did actually serving students who had the book bug.
I had to pull the challenged books off the shelves. I had to put them in a restricted area behind the front desk. Students would come up to me and ask for the books. They’d say, “I can see it.” They’d point. “Can I check out the book?” A lot of African American students did this. They all wanted to read “The Hate U Give,” a novel about a 16-year-old Black girl who sees a police officer shoot and kill her best friend.
And I had to tell them no. I had to send those kids home with a permission slip for their parents to sign instead. Luckily, their parents signed. But what if they hadn’t?
She got so sick of it that she retired three years earlier than planned.
Fourth-grade language arts teacher Heather Van Sickle recalls being told she had to clear out her classroom library in January, and to check all 500+ books for anything that might upset an angry rightwing parent.
These are all books that, as a trained educator, I have chosen. I’m not going to take time away from connecting with students and parents, or writing up my lesson plans, to box up books because of someone’s irrational fear of — what? I’m not sure.
Other teachers refused, too, so the district assigned “media specialists” to review every teacher’s classroom library and cull anything not in the school library.
Now, Van Sickle says, any new book has to be treated as potentially toxic before it’s formally cleared for classroom use, even if it’s about something the class already covered.
One student was thrilled by a lesson about Henry Box Brown, the enslaved man who in 1849 freed himself by shipping himself in a crate from Virginia to abolitionists in Philadelphia. What a story! The kid checked out a book on Brown from the school library and asked,
“Look what I found. We just read about this. Could we read this out loud in class?”
And at first I said “Yes.” Then I remembered.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.” I told him I would need a permission slip first — that I’d need to get the book approved by another adult before we’re allowed to read it. I felt like a fool saying that. I felt embarrassed.
He didn’t understand.
And then there’s Gary Porter, the preacher who may not have any kids in the schools, but knows that the kids who are there must be protected from gay penguins. He pays his taxes, and his parishioners are worried about all the grooming they hear about on Fox News and Facebook, so he is so entitled to tell families in the district what their kids can read.
Yeah, he’s one of those people who thinks two daddy penguins raising an adopted chick is “sexual information” that children lack the “cognitive skill” to make sense of, although they seem able to process a mommy and a daddy in other books.
There’s “And Tango Makes Three,” about the first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies. First of all, scientifically, that’s an impossibility. Secondly, I don’t think it’s helpful to the child. This is not the time and the place to bring that subject up. Whether you agree with the LGBTQ community or you don’t, to bring this in at a young age, that is when we start indoctrinating. It’s not honest.
Grr. OK, we said we would just point you at the gift link and send you to read, so here you go! You’ll also hear from an awesome mom who’s one of the plaintiffs in that federal lawsuit against the school district, a former superintendent who was fired by the school board for not being draconian enough, and an absolute joy of a self-described pansexual nonbinary kid, Aleora Holman, who has had it with all this bullshit, and who offers the pull-quote of the day by observing,
Nobody thinks, when they walk into school, “I really hope I don’t read a book about a gay couple today.” If anything, every now and then I’ll have the worry, “What if today’s the day that somebody shoots up the school?”
You want hope for the future? Aleora and their classmates are it.
Now go! Read the whole thing!
[WaPo (gift link)]
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"Gay kids read thousands of books about straight characters, yet they still grow up gay.
But y'all are worried if your son Billy reads just one book where a penguin has two dads, he's gonna wake up the next day and ask Greg to the prom."
[Fourth-grade language arts teacher Heather Van Sickle recalls being told she had to clear out her classroom library in January, and to check all 500+ books for anything that might upset an angry rightwing parent.]
You see, the problem here is that we're catering to these entitled assholes instead of telling them plainly to "go fuck yourself because you're an entitled asshole."
And I get that school administrators don't want to deal with angry parents, but giving in to entitled little assholes just means getting shit on constantly and having shit all over your school.