Florida Schools Ban 700 More Books

Photo for illustrative purposes only. Photo by Canva

The book bans continue, and continue to be discredited, across the state of Florida. According to an official report from the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), around 700 total books were removed from county schools between the 2023-2024 school year. 

The report breaks down the data by the books banned in each county and by the impacted grade levels. For instance, in Indian River, “Paper Towns” by John Green was banned for grades 6-12. 

The same books were also banned in multiple counties. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, for example, was banned in a total of five counties. Other counties did not discontinue or remove any books, like Miami-Dade, Pasco, and Sarasota.

Additional popular books that were removed in at least one county include Jay Asher’s “13 Reasons Why”, Kody Keplinger’s “The Duff”, Jennifer Niven’s “All the Bright Places”, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale”, Stephen King’s “Carrie”, and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”.
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Overall, this is a sizable increase in book bans from the previous school year, which only saw about 400 books removed. Comparing the two years, the 2022-2023 report shows that different counties banned books that year than in 2023-2024. Alachua is one of the counties did not ban any books the previous year but chose to remove 10 books for grades 9-12 this past year.

In addition, a court case that settled on September 11, 2024, challenged the book bans that had taken place in Nassau County, Florida. The issue started on November 9, 2023, when the Nassau County School Board announced that it had discontinued a total of 36 books.

The School Board had not given any sort of warning that a book removal was taking place, so several parents, some of the book authors, and New York law firm Selendy Gay took the School Board to court. In the settlement, 23 of the books were returned to the same status and condition as before the ban, and the other 13 were returned with grade level and age restrictions.

Despite the continued book removals and the court case, Governor Ron DeSantis and the FLDOE proceed to claim that the whole concept of a book ban is a hoax. On its website, the FLDOE cited a statement that DeSantis made on his official website on February 15, 2024, while  the court case involving the Nassau County School Board was ongoing.

Even though DeSantis has signed three school library book regulation bills into law since 2022, he says that the idea of Florida banning books is a “false narrative”. He believes that Florida is empowering “parents to object to obscene materials in the classroom” and other people have just made the choice to “abuse this process in an effort to score cheap political points”.
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Article by Ema Tibbetts