FLDOE Names Book Banners To Workgroup Designing Training For School Library Book Selections and No One is Surprised
“We are fighting pure evil! Most of these books are sexually explicit and it’s illegal to distribute to minors! Hopefully they all end up behind bars!” – Facebook post, 9/6.22, Jennifer Pippin, Moms for Liberty Indian River County
House Bill 1467, signed by Governor DeSantis on March 25, 2022, and effective July 1, 2022, required (among other things) the development of an online training program for all public school personnel involved in the selection and maintenance of library media collections. Beginning January 1, 2023, only personnel who have completed the FLDOE developed training will be allowed to select/approve school library materials. By July 1, 2023, and annually thereafter, the superintendent of schools in each district must certify to the Commissioner of Education that all school librarians and media specialists have completed this training. (Of course, HB1467 does NOT apply to Florida’s Charter Schools or voucher-funded private schools)
On August 12, 2022, Chancellor Jacob Oliva sent a memo to superintendents across the state, asking for nominations of “a parent or parent organization representative” to serve on a workgroup to develop the online training program.
Those parents have been chosen. Jennifer Pippin is one of them.
The workgroup consists of both Media Specialists and Parents. If Google and LinkedIn served me well, the Media Specialists are:
- Terri Adams, Marion County, Media Specialist
- Tasha Bates, Okaloosa County, Media Specialist
- Kristi Humburger, Elementary Media Specialist in Collier County School District
- Michelle Jarrett, Oseola County, President of the Florida Association for Media in Education (FAME) and President-Elect for the Florida Association of Supervisors of Media.
- Lori Pick, Manatee County, Media/Technology Specialist
- Kristine Smith, Volusia County, Media Specialist. Member of Volusia Association of Media Educator. Received the Amanda Award from the Florida Association of Media Educators
- Ruth Witter, Santa Rosa County, Media Specialist
- Amelia Zukoski, St. Johns County, Program Specialist for Instructional Media
The Parent members are:
- Julie Dashiell, St Johns County
- Michelle Beavers, Brevard County
- Jamie Merchant, Lee County
- Jennifer Pippin, Indian River County
I took a closer look at the parents who will be helping to develop the mandated online training program for personnel involved in the selection and maintenance of library media collections in all of Florida’s district-managed public schools. Spoiler Alert: the Florida PTA, the largest not-for-profit parent association in the state and country, is not represented.
Julie Dashiell, St Johns county Parent
Unlike the other parents on this list, Julie Dashiell does not appear (at least not that I can find online) to be a representative of a specific parent organization or to have been outspoken regarding removing books from school libraries. Per LinkedIn, she is a Stay at Home Mom, a former Legislative Assistant to Senator Bill Nelson (2005-2008) and a former Program Associate for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her Facebook page shows she supported Nancy Tray for St. Johns School Board District 1 in the August 23rd election. She is reported to love books, be level-headed and common sense oriented and support St. Johns’ Schools’ libraries and media specialists.
Michelle Beavers, Brevard county parent
Michelle Beavers is a Brevard County mom who has fought to remove dozens of titles from her district’s school libraries. She is a member of Mom’s for Liberty and serves as the head of the Brevard Moms for Liberty Library Committee, which has submitted a list challenging 41 books in the Brevard Public Schools, claiming they contained violent, pedophilic and pornography content. Per Florida Today, her group “is arguing that the sexually explicit scenes in the books constitute pornography and that school officials have committed a felony crime — distributing harmful material to minors — by allowing minors to access the books through school libraries.”
Jamie Merchant, Lee County Parent
Jamie Merchant is a parent in Lee County. She is “pro-parent” and conservative who, on Facebook, says she works at Republican HQ as a Community Leader for Governor DeSantis. She wrote an op-ed in July saying that she supported Governor DeSantis’ Education Agenda because “he gave parents their rights back to control their student’s education by stopping a “woke agenda” and passing the Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021 and the Parental Rights in Education Bill in 2022.” “The Parental Rights in Education Bill” or HB 1557 was known by its opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Merchant appears to be involved with “Mamas for DeSantis.” Ms. Merchant serves on the Advisory Council of the Florida Citizen’s Alliance (FLCA). The Florida Citizens Alliance is an organization that has been intimately involved with Florida’s “Book Banning bills” over the past several legislative sessions and in 2019 released a report entitled “Porn in Schools,” which listed books found in school libraries which they claimed violated Florida’s anti-pornography statutes. Keith Flaugh, the CEO and co-founder of the FLCA, personally recommended Ms. Merchant to the FLDOE to serve the HB 1467 Workgroup.
Jennifer Pippin, Indian River County. Parent
Jennifer Pippin is a mother of 2 and regularly participates in public comment at Indian River School Board meetings. She is the first Chairperson of the Indian River County chapter of Moms For Liberty (which was the first local chapter in the national organization) and was recently awarded the Mom’s for Liberty Summit 2022 Founders Award.
She is, also, the co-founder of We The People, Indian River County. We the People Indian River County is a non-profit which “Advocates, Educates, and Demonstrates (A.E.D.) for religious freedom, parental rights, the right to assemble, personal health, personal liberties, law enforcement, and our Constitution, to name a few.”
At IRC school board meetings, she regularly speaks out against the availability of books in school libraries which she deems pornographic or sexually explicit. Her Moms for Liberty group brought a list of books to the attention of the school district. You can read the list of books online (which includes Nobel Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Nobel Prize and U.S. Medal of Freedom winner John Steinbeck’s novella “Of Mice and Men” and Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning “A Color Purple”). “We found these books that have incest, pedophilia, sexually explicit pictures, sexually explicit text,” she insisted, “We’re not burning books. We’re following the state statutes that were written to protect children.”
Pippin said: “There’s no educational value to children reading about rape, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, sexually explicit content, or sexual acts…The statutes are in place to protect children from the authors, publishers, and the people who want to sexualize children.”
The FLCA CEO and co-founder, Keith Flaugh, also personally recommended Ms. Pippin to the FLDOE to serve on the HB 1467 Workgroup.
So… these are the parents who have been chosen to help experienced educators and media specialists develop Florida’s online training program for those selecting books for our school libraries – Two represent Moms for Liberty, none represent the Florida PTA. I suppose no one is surprised to see those fighting to keep books out of school libraries on that list. The only question is whether Florida’s experienced media specialists will be able to push back against well funded national efforts to censors certain books and ideas in our schools.
To be clear, Florida’s recent moves to challenge and remove books are not home grown, grassroots efforts, begun by parents upset by the books their children brought home in their backpacks. On 9/19/22, PEN America published an updated report, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” which offers a comprehensive look at book bans, across the country, throughout the 2021–22 school year. It is a MUST READ. Its Key Findings: “More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature.”
Not surprising, Florida figures prominently in the report.
- Florida (with reported 566 bans, 21 districts) is second only to Texas (801 bans, 22 districts) for number of Book Bans.
- Duval County, Florida‘s decision to not to distribute purchased sets of the Essential Voices Classroom Libraries, a collection of books designed to make classroom libraries more diverse and inclusive, is noted as an example of increasing calls to remove books with protagonists of color or featuring LGBTQ+ characters associated with generalized complaints about diversity and inclusion efforts.
- The attention of those demanding book removals has increasingly turned to challenging books depicting LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as books they claimed featured “sexual” content, including titles on sexual and reproductive health and sex education. Such efforts arose in concert with Florida’s passage of the Parental Rights in Education/Don’t Say Gay bill.
- Local chapters of Moms for Liberty are reported as driving efforts to remove books from Florida to North Carolina to Virginia
- FLDOE Workgroup participant and IRC Moms for Liberty Chair Jennifer Pippin’s filing of a complaint with the sheriff’s office accusing the school board and superintendent of distributing pornography, is used as an example of escalating nationwide tactics to restrict books by filing criminal charges against school officials and librarians.
- Florida’s passage of HB1557 (Parental Rights in Education), HB1467 (Instructional Materials) and HB7 (Stop WOKE) are described as combining to do “what was intended: it has created a chilling effect on teaching and learning. In anticipation of the law, books were removed in Palm Beach County in June 2022. Over the summer, more books were reported being removed from districts across the state, including a plan to “pause” classroom libraries entirely in Brevard, Florida.”
The report highlights the dangers our students and schools face as Florida continues to further restrict books and ideas:
“This movement to ban books is deeply undemocratic, in that it often seeks to impose restrictions on all students and families based on the preferences of those calling for the bans and notwithstanding polls that consistently show that Americans of all political persuasions oppose book bans. And it is having multifaceted, harmful impacts: on students who have a right to access a diverse range of stories and perspectives, and especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied of books that reflect and speak to them; on educators and librarians who are operating in some states in an increasingly punitive and surveillance-oriented environment with a chilling effect on teaching and learning; on the authors whose works are being targeted; and on parents who want to raise students in schools that remain open to curiosity, discovery, and the freedom to read.”
We need your help to combat the restrictions on books and ideas and support public schools.
- Please read the PEN America report.
- Research efforts to fight back (like The Florida Freedom to Read Project).
- Learn about book challenges in your district and speak up for a student’s freedom to read and learn about diverse perspectives and ideas.
- Don’t let a few individuals limit what other people’s children can read.
- And most importantly, Vote for pro-public education candidates in November.
This LA Times article from the 90s shows how Christian Nationalists have played the “long game”… You can hardly tell it isn’t about today’s movement.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-12-10-mn-255-story.html
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”
The name of the blog is “Accountabaloney”