School district bans the dictionary to comply with Ron DeSantis’s book-ban law

A Florida school district has literally banned the dictionary in an effort to comply with Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s (R) book-banning law.

The Escambia County School District has reportedly removed over 2800 books from library shelves as they undergo a review process that will determine if they are inappropriate for students, according to Popular Information. Among the books currently relegated to storage are The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary.

Related:

Florida school removed Bible from shelves over “sexually explicit content”

The Bible contains passages about naked people, drunken incest, and one sex worker who compares her well-endowed male lovers to donkeys.

The district contends these texts could violate H.B. 1069, which DeSantis signed into law in May 2023.  

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The law is an expansion of the state’s infamous Don’t Say Gay law. In addition to expanding the anti-LGBTQ+ law’s ban on discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity to all grade school levels, H.B. 1069 broadened school board oversight of library collections and empowered Florida parents to challenge any books in school libraries. It requires contested titles to be pulled from shelves for review and specifies that content that “depicts or describes sexual conduct” can be challenged.

The dictionaries define words like “sex” that describe “sexual conduct,” and their removal shows the danger of the law’s broad language.

Of the 2800 books that have been shelved in the district, only 67 have reportedly completed review. In the meantime, students do not have access to the thousands of titles still awaiting a decision. Books on the list include LGBTQ+ titles like Being Jazz: My life as a (transgender) teen by Jazz Jennings, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, and Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli.

Escambia County is known for its strict response to H.B. 1069, as well as for the antics of a certain English teacher, Vicki Baggett. Baggett has become notorious for her crusade to ban over 100 books from Escambia school libraries and submitted almost every single one of the 150 book challenges being reviewed by the district in 2023. Many of the challenged books are by Black authors or deal with LGBTQ+ topics.

Baggett’s actions have been successful in banning many of the books she has challenged and have led to a federal lawsuit against Escambia County. In May, book publisher Penguin Random House sued, accusing the district of violating the Constitution. The publisher sued alongside the free-speech organization PEN America, as well as authors and parents negatively affected by the ban.

Baggett also made headlines in November for using a student to help orchestrate a harebrained scheme to ban a book in a nearby county.

Baggett’s list of complaints about the books she challenged took some language directly from Book Looks, a website that lists book content that the website’s owner finds objectionable. The website was founded by a member of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Moms for Liberty.

The Escambia County School District also advised the staff in charge of reviewing library books to use Book Looks as a resource.