Book removals land OCR complaints for Florida, Georgia districts
K-12 Dive | By Naaz Modan | May 14, 2024
The complaints allege hostile environments for LGBTQ+ and students of color were created by discriminatory board member behavior.
Dive Brief:
- Book removals in Georgia’s Cobb County School District and Florida’s Collier County School District created a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students and students of color, according to two complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday alleging Title IX and Title VI violations.
- The complaints brought by the National Women’s Law Center against two of the largest school districts in Georgia and Florida claim book removals targeting LGBTQ+ and racial issues or written by LGBTQ+ or non-White authors have “impacted the ability of LGBTQIA+ students and students of color to feel safe and represented in their educations.”
- The complaints also say the book censorship was predated by discriminatory comments from school board members, and that the firing of teachers who sought to foster diverse environments has created “a pall of fear over the educational environment for LGBTQIA+ students and students of color.”
Dive Insight:
The complaints say the school districts violated civil rights laws that protect students against discrimination based on sex and race.
In Georgia’s Cobb County School District, the complaint alleges White school board members displayed race-based hostility toward their Black colleagues, such as calling a Black school board member “boy” in a derogatory tone several times in 2021.
An open records request showed that the district removed over 600 books from school libraries in just a little over a month between Aug. 10, 2023, and Sept. 22, 2023.
In Florida’s Collier County School District, the complaint alleges that multiple school board members made discriminatory comments toward LGBTQ+ students, including saying, “We’ve got to save the children, that’s our job, get the LGBTQ letter people out.”
Florida’s Collier County district came under fire last year from PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, that singled out the district for having banned over 300 books by November 2023 under a law that went into effect some four months earlier.
″Once again we see a Florida school district erring on the side of extreme caution while navigating vague legislation,” said Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director at PEN America, in a November 2023 statement.
Florida is one of the leading states in efforts to ban books related to LGBTQ+ and race-related issues, responsible for over 40% of all book bans in 2022-23, according to PEN America.
As such, Florida has also been on the receiving end of complaints and lawsuits claiming discrimination in district policies implementing the state’s censorship laws. Last year, for example, PEN America and publishing giant Penguin Random House sued Escambia County School District.
That lawsuit challenged the district under the First and 14th amendments, a common approach for similar lawsuits filed nationwide against book censorship policies in conservative states.
In the 2022-23 school year, the number of public school book bans nationwide increased by 33% year over year, according to a 2023 PEN America report.
That momentum has continued into 2023-24. In the first half of the school year, schools saw 4,349 instances of books banned, compared to 1,841 in the first half of 2022-23, per a separate PEN America report.
