More Books Are Being Banned Than You Are Being Told

In Clay County, for example, one person is responsible for over 1,000 objections or appeals to the district since July 2022.

How many books were banned in Florida this year? Is the number going up? Is it coming down? Have the new laws slowed the number of bans, or are they still accelerating in spite of recent legislation, ushered in by shadowy, opaque systems out of public view?

It feels like these are questions we should have answers to. Yet, increasingly, they are not.

Public reporting is at odds with the truth of the matter when it comes to books being restricted from schools and school libraries around the state of Florida. Where one group says the number has come down, another shows a significant increase. So who are you supposed to believe? Where do you go for a source of truth? 

An excellent question. And it is a real problem that there isn’t an easy answer to that question.

Here’s what’s going on as we near election season. The recent passage of HB 1285 was meant to stem the obscene tide of book bannings. It took a more ‘common sense’ approach to literature being restricted (as if there was such a thing as common sense in this issue) with some changes to the law that only allowed one objection per non-parent citizen per month, while still allowing parents tied to a public school within the district as many opportunities to object as they like.

Did that help? 

Not really. 

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Because of course it did not. This law left certain loopholes open. In Clay County, for example, one person is responsible for over 1,000 objections/appeals to the district since July of 2022. As a citizen objector, HB 1285 initially slowed him to one objection per month starting in July, but that changed this month after he found a parent willing to put their name on multiple forms.  Doesn’t exactly seem like the intention of the law. 

In fact, Clay County alone removed 126 titles between January 1, 2024, and August 31, 2024. Which seems like a pretty big number, especially considering one national report apparently put the total number of titles removed in Florida at around eighty for the same time period. 

Did you know that EIGHT districts in the state of Florida had more than twenty titles removed according to their own reporting to the state? Clay led the way, but Hernando, Indian River, Manatee and Volusia all put prohibitions on  FORTY or more titles! Keep in mind this reporting, in many cases, is a gross undercount of the actual total number of titles with prohibitions since most districts failed to report any removals or restrictions made after an informal or internal review because they weren’t asked to do so. The state only requires that they report what each district considers an objection to material, and many of those objections were still “pending” a final decision by the end of the 23/24 school year.

The state is required under HB 1467 to compile this data annually and release it to the public after the close of each school year. The 23/24 report is yet to be shared with the public. This report would reveal to the public that over 1100 objections were recorded across the state from July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024. The number of removals recorded more than doubled since the previous year, thanks to the broadened language in HB 1069.

Why would the state withhold this report?

Maybe releasing this report ahead of an important and contentious election, with dozens of important and celebrated works on this list of removed titles, could move voters to prioritize education when they decide whether or not to allow the Florida GOP to keep their supermajority in the state. Just speculation. 

So where did this “eighty” number come from in some reporting? Again, it’s difficult to say, but that might be by design. Some national accounting relies solely on what their membership reports or what makes it into the press. Our organization uses the public records process to track as much as we can, but we know we miss the removals and restrictions that don’t leave a paper trail. 

If only the journalists who reported this undercount came to us before publishing, we may have been able to prevent this misleading narrative of a decline in book bans from spreading.

We’ve continued to advocate here for transparency in the process to remove books from schools and libraries, and that is what continues to be missing. Transparency. Something HB 1467 ironically promised when it passed in 2022 and paved an easy road to censorship. A view for the public. The ability for parents to see into what decisions are being made, and more importantly, have a say in how they are being made. 

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You see, even in districts that have some sort of established process for challenging and removing books, there’s no real guarantee that process is actually followed in an open, public manner. With 570 titles that faced objections or appeals in Clay County during the 23/24 school year, only two of them had public committee meetings to decide their fate. 

And even when committees are convened, radical school boards might override their decisions. There was a recent case where the book Beloved was examined in its entirety and debated by a committee, made up of parents, educators, and community members. That committee voted 4-1 to keep the book in schools. 

What did the board do? Overrode them. 

They overrode their own committee! By a vote of 3-2, the school board still decided to remove Beloved from the high schools where it was previously available. 

Who is actually being represented here? 

So many of these decisions are made in secret. And so many of these lists are incomplete. Because oftentimes these lists only include books that have gone through a formal review and removal process. But you know what that doesn’t include?

Books that are removed from shelves while they are being reviewed (call it a ‘temporary’ ban that can last years in some districts here). It doesn’t include books that are removed outside of public processes. These lists don’t include books that schools take off the shelves because they’ve seen other schools restrict them. 

All of these lists are incomplete - even our own!

And in all of these cases, particularly in the six districts with the highest number of books that were removed, all of the challenges and bans are being driven by radical groups with extreme ideologies that are out of step with actual popular sentiment. We’ll put it another way.

You are not being represented. 

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Very small groups wield undue influence over school boards and educational administrators. Decisions are being made outside the public review process, and without the input of the actual parents being impacted. All the systems that were put in place to slow down the book bans have not, and because these systems remain opaque and exclude parental input, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine just how bad the book bans across Florida have gotten.

It's election season. It’s time to vote. It’s time to send a message. 

Don’t just vote for the president. Vote local. Your local school, city, and county leadership, your state representative, your state senator, anyone and everyone that could possibly have any impact at all on your student’s education and your RIGHTS as a parent. 

Vote. 

Until reasonable minded parents not controlled by radical special interest groups take back control of school boards and libraries, this problem might only get worse. 

Because the new laws sure haven’t slowed things down. 

Only you can.

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