At first glance, it looks compelling. A viral TikTok video made by a Broward County Public Schools employee who is not a teacher and is not a media specialist purports to show hundreds of books being banned by the state.
The school district says she got it completely wrong, but there have been actual book removals in Broward Schools, and as the Miami Herald first reported, in Miami-Dade County Public Schools as well.
“This is a quick video — I’m at my school right now, I just want to show you something because the state just came last week and decided what books were appropriate or inappropriate,” the employee says as the TikTok video starts.
It was made at McNicol Middle School in Hollywood, and according to school district director of communications John Sullivan, it shows a process that has nothing to do with book banning.
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“So they’re old books, so this is a process of 'weeding' we call it, which is really updating and refreshing the books to make sure they’re current, up to state statute, so it’s just a process that particular school was going through and that’s why there was all those books in bins,” Sullivan said, explaining that the books seen in the video are from the 1990s. “So those books will be replaced in the library.”
In another section of the video, the employee pulls individual books from the bins.
“These are just a few of the books that have been deemed inappropriate, 'Lewis and Clark,' they removed these books from our library,” she says.
“So the state did not come down last week and ban any books in Broward County Schools," Sullivan said. "The video depicted that the state was down here to ban those books in those bins, that did not occur."
Complaints from the public did lead the district to remove four books earlier this school year. Each deals with gender and sexuality issues.
Recently at Bob Graham Educational Center, a K-8 in Miami Lakes, one parent, Daily Salinas, objected to four books in the school library and even the poem read by Amanda Gorman at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“I found a few books with inappropriate content inside, talking about gender ideology, CRT, and communism,” Salinas said.
The school decided to allow only the middle school-age kids to have access to the materials to which she objected.
“So at this point what we’re doing is just moving books to areas in which they’re appropriate for students, we’re never removing any books unless it has content which is really not appropriate for any of our kids in the school system,” said Miami-Dade School Board member Robert Alonso, whose district includes the school.
Gorman tweeted Tuesday that she was "gutted" her poem was "banned."
But Miami-Dade Public Schools released a statement clarifying that the book was never banned.
Under the Parental Rights in Education Law, anyone from the public, regardless of whether they have education expertise, can file a complaint about any book in a public school and it must be removed until it can be reviewed by a committee. It gives one parent, for example, the power to impact everyone else’s children.
According to the free-speech organization PEN America, 175 books have been removed so far in Florida’s public schools since the law took effect.
