During the 2023-24 academic year, 4231 unique titles (books) or more than 10,000 total were banned in public schools across the country (PENN America). The most banned book was Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. It is a novel involving a mass shooting in a high school. It is the story of a seventeen-year-old student who shoots his fellow students. The chapters in the novel alternate between past and present to give readers an insight into how bullying in school can lead to the mass shooting.
Most of the bans in the country took place in Florida. In Florida one parent or a resident can complain about a book in a public school and the book is removed from circulation until a committee or the school board decides to make the ban permanent or not. That process can often take more than a year. Students do not have access to this book during this period. The parent or resident who complains about the book does not have to have read the book. The committee can choose to ban the book permanently or put it back on the shelf.
Since July 2021, Florida has banned more than 4500 books from its public schools (PENN America). During the 2023-24 academic year, 33 of 70 school districts in Florida banned or “removed or discontinued” more than 700 books (Florida Department of Education). The banned books included classics that I read in high school such as For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood as well as dozens of books by Stephen King and more than 20 titles by Jodi Picoult including The Storyteller which is about the holocaust have also been banned.
It should be noted that 44% of those banned were written by African American authors or had African Americans as the primary characters in the books. 39% of those banned were written by LGBQT+ authors or had LGBQT+ individuals as the primary characters in the books.
Finally, at least two counties have been successfully sued by either the author of the book or the publishers of the book. Those books had to be placed back on the library shelves.
What has happened to common sense? In my day if parents didn’t want their child to read a particular book they talked to the librarian and told them not to allow their child to check out the book and the librarian would always comply. Or the parent would call the teacher and ask if he/she could find a substitute for a book that the parent did not want their child to read. All teachers would work to find a substitute. The current system in Florida allows one parent to override the wishes of all the other parents who are OK with the book.
It's time to call Governor DeSantis and the Republicans out on this…this is unacceptable and undemocratic.
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