Amended SB 1692 - Myths and Facts

SB 1692 (HB 1539): What You Need to Know About the Amended Bill

On March 18, 2025, SB 1692 made its first committee stop on the path to becoming law. The bill is a further effort to provide the government full control on the ideas made available in the school library. Before the bill was debated, its sponsor, Senator McClain, submitted a delete-all and replace amendment that limits the impacts of the bill to only public schools. During the discussion of the bill and its amendment in the Criminal Justice Committee yesterday, a number of misleading statements were made by the bill sponsor and its supporters. We did our best to address them here.

Myth: This bill closes a loophole that has allowed districts to retain access to materials that are “harmful to minors” by pointing to literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Facts: 

• It’s not a “loophole.” It’s the LEGAL definition of “harmful to minors” based on an age-relevant version of the Miller Test. If there is literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors, it does not qualify as “harmful to minors” by Florida’s legal definition. This court precedent for determining whether or not speech is protected under the first amendment has been used federally since the 1970s, and this definition of “harmful to minors” has been in Florida criminal law for at least 30 years. 
• Creating a new legal definition of “harmful to minors” that is specific to public schools allows for strict government limits on protected speech in some, but not all, taxpayer-funded education options, yet students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” - Tinker v. Des Moines
  • This definition would not apply to students using state-funded vouchers to support private education options. 
    • Private and homeschooling students of the same age and capabilities would have the academic benefit of library curation that considers materials as a whole for literary, artistic, political, and scientific value to make an informed decision on whether or not to allow access to advanced works with complex and potentially controversial themes and ideas.
  • This new definition inserted into statute 1006.28 uses the terms “nudity, sexual conduct, or sexual excitement” without further defining these terms or referencing their legal definitions in 847.001 (where the original language for this “harmful to minors” definition resides).
    • These terms (specifically “sexual conduct”), absent their 847.001 definitions, could be used by objectors that erroneously conflate sexual orientation with sexual conduct to attack books with mere representation of families with two moms or two dads.
• Materials MUST be age appropriate. Well before these recent attacks on our libraries started, school library selection standards outlined in statute 1006.40 included the following:
  • Any materials purchased pursuant to this section must be:
    • Free of pornography and material prohibited under s. 847.012.
    • Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.
    • Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used or made available.
  • No book has been retained in the last four years where a committee believed the book to be age inappropriate for the group they retained it for - value or not. Their real issue is that they don’t agree with the current community standard of what is age appropriate and they are trying to legally force it to mean something much more restrictive on topics currently deemed “controversial” (health, identity, social justice, climate, orientation, etc). As we'll get to in the next section, this bill would pave the way for a state rating system that will allow the Florida Department of Education to "monitor" districts for compliance. That rating system will define when certain content is age appropriate by government standards - not professional standards and not local standards.
• The bill sponsors and supporters are simply upset with outcomes of parent-involved committee reviews that decide, despite complex topics and sections of the material that are objectionable to some, to uphold the first amendment rights of students, where it is age appropriate to allow access. 
  • Hernando County 23/24 committee review outcomes detail a number of times where the school board voted to remove a book despite committee recommendations to retain it. This includes books like The Hate U Give, Beloved, The Lovely Bones, The Black Friend, The Kite Runner, Forever, Nineteen Minutes and so many others. 
  • Senator McClain represents Marion County where books have been in "quarantine" since the start of the 22/23 SY, ignoring two different committee reviews (one before and one after HB 1069) that resulted in recommendations for retention. These titles include  I Am Jazz, Melissa, The Hate U Give, Beloved, Monday's Not Coming, and many more.
• In a police report from one of three failed attempts to charge educators with a (third degree felony) violation of 847.012, the detective compared the overall number of pages to the number of pages the complainant submitted containing objectionable content and found that the books did not “predominantly depict content of a prurient, shameful or morbid interest.” (bottom of page 5 to page 6)
  • The reality is, all three prongs of the Miller Test actually require some type of review of the material in its entirety. You cannot make an informed decision on whether or not a creative work is age appropriate based on community standards or if it “predominantly appeals to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest” without considering the totality of the work. 
  • The bill sponsors’ efforts to prohibit discussion of the overall value of the work are just forced limits on what should be a completely open and informed debate among local citizens - especially professional educators and parents - about when and what speech is accessible to our children in the school library. If their focus was to strictly target sexual and violent content for removal while preserving access to content that has literary, artistic, political, and scientific value, they would have filed a different amendment. But that's not all they are after. They want the ability to define for all what speech is and is not of value. 
• The bill amends the portion of 1006.28 specific to the criteria for objection, but the criteria for selection remains the same as it has been for years. 
  • This variation in criteria between objection and selection prompted the Florida Department of Education to send out misleading guidance in October of 2023 on HB 1069 that said any material with depictions or descriptions of “sexual conduct” (as defined in 847.001) were prohibited in school libraries and classrooms unless otherwise preserved by state statute or standard per the new law. 
    • This was factually inaccurate. HB 1069 updated the criteria for objection so that a parent or resident of the county could specifically object to materials that contained depictions or descriptions of “sexual conduct” (provided they were not required by state statute or standard) and while facing objection, the materials would have to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable for the duration of the review.
    • This bill adds limits on how materials challenged specifically on the basis of “harmful to minors” are considered, but makes it unclear if this same standard (prohibiting the review of the material in its entirety) would apply if an objection is filed on the basis the material is “age inappropriate” or “not suited to the students needs and abilities to comprehend.”
      • If it only applies to an objection on the basis of “harmful to minors” without any need to qualify that basis, then it's likely objectors will continue the trend of selecting this as the basis for their objection whether or not there is any evidence that the book comes close to meeting this new definition. By doing this, they unjustly deny students access to the book while under review and ensure it’s only reviewed based on its objectionable parts.

Myth: The “classics” will be preserved by the Florida Department of Education.

Facts:

• The sponsors and supporters say this, but they cannot guarantee that all classics will be preserved and "classics" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.
  • The current Florida Department of Education’s ELA B.E.S.T. Standards include just over 300 titles. In February 2022, Hillsborough County School District provided their board with a content analysis of this list to inform their vote on a multi-million dollar investment in classroom sets of each grade-specific book. Here’s what they found:
    • Nearly 80% are written by white authors. (55% of all authors are white males)
    • 20% are written by a combination of either Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, or Asian authors. 
    • The only religious texts present on the list derive from the Old Testament. 
    • A majority of the titles on the list are in the public domain (either it has been 95 years since original publication or 70 years since the death of the author).
      • Books in the public domain are cheaper to purchase, so there is an incentive to avoid preserving modern classics in our standards.
      • Due to their age, books in the public domain are often not as relevant to today’s youth, lack our modern vernacular, and fail to portray the current culture. 
• How will the Florida Department of Education monitor and charge districts with noncompliance when they have so far argued in court that it is up to districts to decide whether or not a book with sexual content is appropriate in their schools?
  • Under the language in this bill, the appointed leaders of the Florida Department of Education would have the authority to consider material in its entirety for literary, artistic, political, and scientific value while local leaders, elected by the communities they serve, professional educators, and even parent-led committees would not have this same privilege. 
  • This bill would make the state’s “libraries are government speech and can be viewpoint limited as we see fit” court argument official Florida law for our public school libraries (even though a judge has yet to affirm that defense).
  • It seems likely that the state will be obliged to create a rating system that districts will be required to comply with in order to fulfill the state monitoring and funding penalty outlined in this bill.
    • A rating system will reduce a book to its most potentially objectionable parts and assign an age or grade "appropriate" restriction or removal.
    • Committee reviews that involve parents could become irrelevant because it’s no longer the community or professionals that get to make an informed decision about what is and is not age appropriate, the state-created algorithm decides that.
    • The Florida Department of Education will be able to threaten state funding for districts that fail to comply with this rating system without ever having to name a specific book as the issue causing the noncompliance, allowing the state to keep a safe distance from final decisions to deny student access to specific materials.

Myth: This puts more power in the hands of parents.

Facts:

• Fewer than 100 parents statewide have filed library objections since 2021 and less than 5% of public school students have parental restrictions on their library access (based on data from 41 Florida schools districts, representing more than one million students, requested in the first quarter of the 24/25 school year).
  • Most parents are not interested in setting limits on student library access, yet millions of their allocated education dollars have gone to efforts that have removed or restricted access to classroom and school libraries.
    • Escambia County has spent more than $400,000 defending its removal of books (against committee recommendation) that contain ideas it found “inappropriate” like And Tango Makes Three.
    • Orange and Volusia counties are named as plaintiffs alongside the Florida Department of Education in a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the current language in statute 1006.28 (HB 1069, 2023) 
      • The state department filed a motion to dismiss, arguing they should be removed from the lawsuit because it’s up to the districts to ultimately decide whether or not a material is appropriate for their schools. 
      • The school districts argued that the law requires the districts to immediately remove books.
      • The judge rejected the state’s motion and the litigation is ongoing.
  • This bill would deny parent-involved committees the opportunity to consider the challenged materials in their entirety for literary, artistic, political, and scientific value. It would essentially force uninformed decisions to limit or remove access to materials that might still be available to their children (with support of public funds), if they were in a private school environment or homeschooled. 
• The current language in statute 1006.28, and in the Florida Department of Education’s rule 6A-1.094126, does not provide parents with the ability to appeal within the district or to the state to evaluate if a removal or restriction is overreaching. 
  • When Florida parents sued the state over this viewpoint discrimination, the Florida Department of Education argued that it has no obligation under the law to make the Special Magistrate process available to parents that object to the removal or restriction of a material, only to those that object to the use of a material. A judge in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida sided with the state, but the case has been appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.  
  • Nothing in this bill fixes this oversight, so government bodies can choose to remove whatever ideas it likes by claiming they would be “inappropriate” to offer to students in the school environment, and parents have no mechanism preserved in this statute to appeal.

Note: During the meeting's public comment period on this bill, Brenda Fam, a Broward County School Board Member, made the statement that her district is out of compliance with state law because she, as a resident and (not a current) parent of a Broward County student, was denied the ability to read from a material subject to objection during a public meeting.

Statute 1006.28 specifically states:

Parents shall have the right to read passages from any material that is subject to an objection. If the school board denies a parent the right to read passages due to content that meets the requirements under sub-sub-subparagraph b.(I), the school district shall discontinue the use of the material in the school district.

Did you notice that statute doesn't actually preserve the right to read passages at a "public meeting?" But, Member Fam wants to assert that "parents" here means past and present parents of the county. As we discussed above, in the Special Magistrate section of this statute, "parents" means ONLY parents that have objected to the use of a book according to the Florida Department of Education. So, it's possible, and more likely, that the only parents that have this ability to read passages from materials subject to objection are those that have already physically filed a formal objection.

The reality is, Broward's objection policy does allow residents the are not parents of current students to file one objection per month to the school district where they reside - per statutory requirements. Broward is in compliance with the law. What Member Fam takes issue with is her inability to force the immediate removal of a book during a public meeting, an effort book objectors rely on to remove books because it denies the parent community at-large the opportunity to participate and comment on a full and fair review process.