The Florida education system has undergone more than two years of belligerent and reactionary upheaval at the hands of Ron DeSantis. The state’s Republican governor, straining to build a popular movement around his conspicuously unpopular presidential campaign, waged this war on educators under the guise of rooting out the “woke” excesses supposedly plaguing public classrooms. But the consequences of DeSantis’s policies are proving as absurd as they are inconvenient for an already beleaguered education force.
Of particular note: A school district in the Florida panhandle recently took dictionaries off the shelves of its school libraries to adhere to a DeSantis law designed to police descriptions of “sexual conduct,” according to the news site Popular Information. Observing the same law, a school district in central Florida has removed 673 books from its classrooms, including Paradise Lost, East of Eden, and other standard fixtures of high school literature classes, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
These inane developments are the outgrowth of a fantastical and bigoted worldview: DeSantis and his ideological allies insist that hordes of teachers and administrators are secretly conspiring to scramble the minds of students, turning them gay, transgender, or nonbinary. To combat this supposed plot, DeSantis has signed a number of laws and regulations demanding schools receive parental consent for a multitude of things. The vague wording used in the laws—along with career-threatening penalties for those who violate them—has led to educators to seek permission from parents before administering even the most basic services, like vision and hearing tests, according to a new report from The New York Times. But often, parents are not readily available. “Nurses are spending most of their time trying to obtain permission,” Florida Association of School Nurses director Lisa Kern told the Times, noting that the upshot of these new bureaucratic hurdles is a decline in the well-being of students.
Nicknames have been another casualty of the anti-trans panic spearheaded by DeSantis. Apparently fearing that the identities of transgender students would be accepted by school authorities, Florida instituted a rule last year restricting how educators can refer to students. Now, even in the cases of standard nicknames, some school districts are requiring teachers to exclusively call students by their legal name unless they submit a signed parental form stating otherwise.
As for the discarded dictionaries, Popular Information reported Wednesday that Escambia County School District has relegated to storage the American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. They are among the more than 2,800 library books that have been removed in Escambia County under HB 1069. The bill, signed into law in May of last year, allows residents to have books removed from school libraries within their district if they contain depictions or descriptions of sexual conduct. As it so happens, dictionaries—those stubbornly descriptive texts—naturally fall under this criteria.
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