In the name of “curricular transparency,” the Republican-controlled state of Florida has appointed several anti-gay and anti-mask conspiracy theorists to take charge of a new effort in public schools: ban books.
The hastily assembled Oversight Board — tasked with retraining public school librarians to adhere to the new restrictions — is the latest stunt in Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign to overturn the state’s education system.
But the board has also been operating under shady circumstances, with the state Department of Education ignoring its call for official candidates from local school districts and instead filling most vacancies with right-wing activists with a history of proposing book bans. One was even nominated by a religious activist with close ties to the DeSantis administration a week before the ministry publicly invited candidates, according to government emails, hinting at secret coordination between them.
It raises the question of the process that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to implement. “It raises important questions about transparency,” said Megan Ozil of the Forward Democrats, which obtained those government emails.
While the “Parents Working Group” is just getting started, a recent Orlando Department of Education meeting last week revealed how the state is spreading these controls from school libraries to teachers’ classrooms.
As the meeting ended, Clinton McCracken, president of the Orange County Teachers’ Union, made a comment to another parent: “I don’t know what to say to my teachers.”
The last episode started on August 12 note From the Head of the Education Department Jacob Oliva. The memo called on local school districts to nominate “parents of students in K-12 schools for representation on a working group” — someone tasked with creating a mandatory “training” that would guide state librarians on how to follow new library oversight rules signed into law by Governor DeSantis. earlier this year. School districts had a week to submit the names of eligible candidates.
Records show that the Department of Education has passed nearly 100 qualified applicants with relevant experience. In Brevard County alone, five submissions by the local bipartisan school board, including the nomination of a former elementary school principal, director of teaching centers at Eastern Florida State College, and director of the local scholarship fund, were ignored.
Instead, the oath went with a self-nominated woman: Michelle Bevers.
While other candidates have teaching experience, the beavers’ good intentions consist of right-wing activism. She leads the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a MAGA band that has antagonized her school board for years over mask mandates — and allied with DeSantis in his latest attempt to ban critical race theory in schools.
Since then, Beavers has actively sought to ban books. In March, I emailed the Brevard County assistant superintendent about what was then the nineteenth title on my growing target list: a comic book about coming of age. this summer , Which Mentionsed Lesbians Teens are shown participating The typical raw joke.
Beavers thanked the moderator’s assistant for her “effort to obtain this material for verification and hopefully get it out of the hands of minors.” In other emails, Beavers identifies herself as the “chair of the library’s book committee,” explaining that she has created a “comprehensive report” that reviews all of the “offending elements” in some of the books. She warned against “porn books” and opposed the parental opt-out program in a deceptive and sweeping statement riddled with grammatical errors.
“These books are violating the law, it is a felony. So why are you trying and still defending there [sic] Exist by allowing parents to withdraw? ” I wrote.
Beavers and the three other appointed parents are now in a working group that is finalizing a presentation that will be used to train school librarians statewide.
March orders come from the top. In March, Governor DeSantis . said Parental rights It must be on top of the child’s education.
We will not allow politicians to deprive parents of their right to know what is taught in our schools. “I am proud to sign this legislation that ensures curriculum transparency,” the governor said in a statement at the time.
Florida added, “While teachers, principals, and school board members have a tremendous amount of power over what and how our children are taught at school, at the end of the day, parents — not schools — have a responsibility to raise children.” Republican Senate leader Wilton Simpson.
“The state has created a situation that harms students.“
– Clinton McCracken, President of the Orange County Teachers Union
The Education Department’s meeting last week was the latest example of the restrictions being overstepped, when it voted unanimously to implement rules guaranteeing so-called “parental rights”. The department has determined that parents should be notified if their child uses a school restroom or locker room that is not related to the child’s gender specified at birth.
Meanwhile, oversight measures that initially targeted school libraries have been expanded to include individual classroom groups for teachers, which must now be “reviewed by a district employee with a valid instructional media specialist certification,” according to Florida’s Country website. The council also decided that educators may lose their educational certificates if they do not comply with state certificates Parents’ rights in education Law.
At Wednesday’s meeting, state Board of Education member Grazie Pozzo Christi, a senior fellow at the Catholic League, noted the need to “hold teachers accountable” for what she called “some rotten apples.”
Teachers are already struggling with poor working conditions, low wages, and understaffing — being subject to state review of classroom books adds more to their plates, McCracken, president of the Orange County Teachers’ Union, said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“The board voted…to demand that all these books be cataloged now. It is, of course, a daunting task for teachers who may have hundreds of these books. So, in fact, for many of these teachers, this means that these classroom libraries will not be available to students anymore so we can figure out how to manage that,” he said. “Laws like this were made to demonize public education.”
McCracken criticized how the meeting was scheduled in conflict with teachers’ schedules and low salaries: 9 a.m. on a school day in a hotel with exorbitant cost of paid parking.
Despite the emotional testimonies from the teachers involved, the board didn’t budge.
Teachers who took years to build their own classroom book collections — available to students who can’t always make individual trips to the library — will now be charged with the task of cataloging their own shelves for so-called content restrictions, McCracken said.
“The classroom library has been a great tool for teachers to be able to inspire children to read,” McCracken said.
“So what would these kids do if the libraries didn’t exist?” Asked. They will have less access to important material that will inspire them to read and learn. The state has created a situation that harms the students.”
The little-known and quickly assembled “working group” developing this book-blocking exercise is a central part of this effort—making it curious that the Department of Education would engage in what critics describe as a ill-intentioned effort to hire it.
Two parents who applied to join the Florida Department of Education’s media working group told The Daily Beast that they raised their hands because they were interested in books being challenged in schools.
said Hilary Earl, who applied to join the media group after seeing an ad on the NextDoor neighborhood app.
Despite her academic years and mediation degrees, as well as endorsement from a school board member, Earl didn’t know she wasn’t selected for the media working group until her interview with The Daily Beast.
“This is the first time I’ve heard of it,” she said. “I didn’t get anything: a phone call, an interview, anything.”
By contrast, Scott Rock gained the endorsement of a Brevard County School Board member after expressing his previous interest in reading materials for children. But he only discovered that he was not chosen by a blog, balloon account. He immediately recognized the names of two Moms for Liberty members who made it happen: Michelle Beavers and Jennifer Pippen.
The parent membership seemed to be slanted from the start when I saw these two names.”
The woman who replaced him, Pippin, was not officially recommended by a school district. Instead, the emails show that her name was introduced by Keith Flo, a childless conservative activist who for years has advised DeSantis’s “Florida Citizen Coalition” closely on public school reform to combat “cultural Marxism” and “LGBTQ values.” In favor of “Judeo-Christian Family Values”.
When discussing proposed training for librarians and media center staff at a recent working group meeting, PepinAnd the who drove and sat in her car for the duration of the meeting, coincided to remind everyone, “I am not a media center specialist,” noting that she did not even understand some of the abbreviations used in the mandatory articles she intends to manufacture.
A third mom from MAGA now in the writers’ group banning work is Jamie Merchant, a member of “Mamas for DeSantis” whose summer reading book included educators’ crimes A call to demolish American public schools was written by two well-known conspiracy theorists – one running a website that warns of “Cancer deaths from COVID punches. “
Controversial consensus
By all accounts, the committee tasked with developing the upcoming mandatory librarian training for the Board of Education is a slow-moving train wreck. When the group reviewed the PowerPoint slides at their last meeting last week, the department’s director of educational materials, Amber Baumbach, presented what is clearly the most contentious and controversial material.
Faced with questions about the controversies, the director of the group revealed that the Department of Education may soon have two versions of the presentation — while critics like Stefana Ferrell of the Florida Project Freedom to Read expect it to be a sane version and one that caters to the insane. The DeSantis administration – which has already expended a great deal of energy attacking the “wake-up” culture – will decide what choice to make.
“If we can’t come to a consensus… it is possible that we could direct two different versions of the training,” said Baumbach, “One of the options we have is to offer two different perspectives.”
The working group is set to meet again publicly next Tuesday, where it will present slides addressing what these conservatives consider offensive material — and is expected to spark more protests from parent groups already fighting such book bans, such as the Florida Freedom to Read project.
The goal is to have the more conservative counties limit what the rest of the state can access. “It is to allow a conservative ideology to take a place above us,” said the project’s co-founder, Stefana Ferrell. “That’s what this is all about. Attacking teachers, banning books – they need parents not to trust public education, so they get bored and take taxpayer money into the for-profit education sector.”
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