Three Florida parents have filed a federal lawsuit that challenges a state review process allowing school parents to appeal local school board decisions that decline to ban books and other instructional materials.
The parents, who are from St. John’s and Orange counties, filed the lawsuit on June 6 in the Northern District of Florida. The legal complaint names the state Board of Education, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. and others as defendants and challenges a provision of House Bill 1069, which was enacted last year.
“The state’s chancellor of K-12 education has declared that parents must be in the ‘drivers’ seat’ to ensure that concerns about their children’s education are addressed,” the lawsuit states. “Yet when those concerns relate to the availability of books and other material in public schools, Florida’s leaders only welcome input from those parents advocating for removing books from schools.”
The plaintiffs include Nancy Tray, a St. Johns County parent who disagreed with her county board’s recent decision to limit the availability of books like Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. Under current procedures, Tray cannot initiate a state review of the decision, according to the complaint.
“HB 1069 and its implementing regulations provide parents with a formal process, the State Review Process, to challenge before the Florida State Board of Education decisions by school boards to retain books and other materials, but not to challenge decisions by school boards to remove those materials,” the lawsuit states.
Because the new law offers avenues for appealing local decisions regarding books and instructional materials only to parents seeking to restrict access to the materials, the result is a discriminatory system in violation of the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment, according to the plaintiffs’ arguments.
The state Board of Education did not respond to a request for comment, but the Florida Educational Association is critical of politicians who the FEA says have put measures in place that foster book bans in local districts.
“Every parent has the right to decide what type of content they want their children to see, but ‘erring on the side of caution’ is not the way, and we echo our statewide partners in urging the state to err on the side of education,” Andrew Spar, the FEA president, said in an email to the Florida Record.
Spar stressed that Florida students need access to an array of resources in order to succeed in school.
“Florida leads the nation in book bans because anti-public education politicians like Gov. (Ron) DeSantis co-signed fringe, right-wing groups and allowed them to overwhelm our districts with book bans that often included books authored by minorities or centered on marginalized communities,” he said. “The state has since provided limited and insufficient guidance to media specialists, all while sidestepping responsibility and placing blame on the very educators and staff who only want to do their jobs.”
The new law allows anyone in a school district to challenge any materials in a classroom or school library that mention sexual conduct, even if they are not pornographic, according to the ACLU of Florida.
“Florida HB 1069 is an attempt to steal important decisions away from parents and allow those with the most extreme positions to decide what information your kids have access to,” the ACLU of Florida said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.