A fight against book challenges and removals in public schools has taken several blows recently.
The U.S. Education Department on Jan. 24 dismissed 11 complaints against school districts for removing books from their libraries, calling the concept of "bans" a "hoax." The agency's Office for Civil Rightsalso said it would no longer have a book ban coordinator to investigate local school districts and parents.
Meantime, a Florida judge dismissed a lawsuit that would have allowed parents to challenge a district’s decision to remove a book.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is celebrating the Trump administration's move to dismiss the complaints, which had been filed under the Biden administration. DeSantis has used the term “hoax” to describe such complaints for years.
“We’ve already exposed this idea of a book ban in Florida, that somehow they don’t want books in the library - that’s a hoax," he said. "And that’s really a nasty hoax because it’s a hoax in service of trying to pollute and sexualize our children.”
In 2025, DeSantis’s terminology has gone national. In a press release from the U.S. Department of Education, officials school districts are following policies to remove age-inappropriate materials.
However, PEN America, a free speech organization that works in the literary world, cites more than 10,000 instances of book bans in the 2023-24 school year. More than 4,000 were books challenged or removed in Florida.
“We saw language from Florida under Gov. DeSantis about book bans being a hoax since book bans started in 2021,” said Kasey Meehan, the director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. “We watched press conferences where Gov. DeSantis put images up that took images out of the full context of a book. And he used those images to generate panic around what was available to students in public schools across the state of Florida. We’ve now seen that language jump to the federal level.”
Florida has a process that allows challenges to books used by a school district. It’s complicated and time-consuming.
The law also allows parents and citizens to petition for removal classroom books and instructional materials that include “pornography” or describe sexual conduct. Parents and guardians can make unlimited challenges, but others one per month. Individual districts are responsible for creating processes to provide resolutions.
Betty Castor, the state’s former education secretary and a retired president of the University of South Florida, says the problem with using parental choice as a yardstick is all the parents who don’t get to choose.
“There’s a real irony here," Castor said, "because if I’m a parent and I want my child reading a variety of books, they now do not have access to the books because another parent complained.”
Sally Bradshaw agrees. The owner of Tallahassee’s Midtown Reader describes her son as a strong reader. She wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading books that were too mature for him, so she read the same books and kept tabs with the school librarian.
“I might have decided a book was too mature for my child at that time, but I would never impose that on another parent," said Bradshaw. "I really think it’s a parent’s decision -- working with the librarian, working with the teacher to find out what is age-appropriate for their child. But that’s not their decision for other families, for other children.”
Bradshaw, chief of staff to then-Gov. Jeb Bush, disagrees strongly with the argument that removed and challenged books are still available to students in bookstores. She says students may not have the money or transportation. But in an attempt to help, she keeps a section for those books at Midtown Reader and offers a 20 percent discount.
“We really believe storytelling teaches empathy and brings people closer together," she said. "So, the concept of book banning was such a foreign concept when I started this process. It was something that happened, you know, in the 1940s in Nazi Germany. It was not something that we expected to be happening in Florida in 2023 and ‘24 and ‘25. It has been eye-opening to us.”
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