About

  1. Home
  2. About

Vision

Our vision is to bring together parent-led groups from across the state of Florida and unite our voices to protect every student’s right to access information and ideas.

  

Mission

We want to support our public school districts with fulfilling their duty under the law to keep every decision student-centered, especially as they face the “Parents’ Rights” movement.

 

Story

The mission for Florida Freedom to Read Project became clear in the fall of 2021 when coordinated book challenges arrived in Florida.

In late 2021 the book banning effort came to Orange County with the hasty removal of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer followed by the shadow banning of George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, then challenges to Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. We wasted no time pushing back however we could: we spoke at every board meeting in defense of diverse shelves, we filed FOIA requests to get access to how the District was responding to these challenges, we reached out to national organizations and media to let them know what was going on in our progressive and inclusive county.

Our efforts taught us we weren’t alone and we wanted to start something that would provide other Floridian parents with the same comfort and support. January 2022 we started the Florida Freedom to Read Project. By May we were ready to officially become a 501(c)(4).

Liquid syntax error: Error in tag 'subpage' - No such page slug video

#freadom Campaign

One of our first allies on Twitter was a group of Librarians out of Texas seeing the same rise in challenges and hasty removals. You can find them @FReadomFighters on Twitter or keep up with the community using #FReadom. In an ode to their amazing work, we created buttons for our local student advocates to hand out. They are quite popular and we hope to keep it going.

Petition

Florida Parents have the right to screen what their own children read, but it stops there. No one parent or government entity should be able to prevent all students from accessing information at the library.