A Florida school has received backlash after it required parents to provide written consent allowing their children to engage with a Black author’s book. The permission form detailed an activity in which “students will participate and listen to a book written by an African American”.
Chuck Walter, a parent at Coral Way K-8 in Miami, posted a photo of the slip on X, writing: “I had to give permission for this or else my child would not participate???” He tagged the Miami-Dade county public schools superintendent, Jose L Dotres. (Dotres’s office did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.)
Walter’s post comes days after another Miami school, iPrep Academy, drew ire for asking for parents’ permission for students to participate in “class and school wide presentations showcasing the achievements and recognizing the rich and diverse traditions, histories, and innumerable contributions of the Black communities”.
The permission slips indicate how some Florida schools are trying to comply with the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, more commonly known as the “don’t say gay” law, and the “Stop Woke Act”, both signed by the governor, Ron DeSantis, in 2022. The former prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender in classrooms, while the latter regulates how race and race issues can be taught in schools. Critics have suggested that Florida lawmakers are aiming for erasure or to teach a false history to the state’s children.
The Florida commissioner of education, Manny Díaz, called the situation a “hoax”, posting on X: “Florida does not require a permission slip to teach African American history or to celebrate Black History Month. Any school that does this is completely in the wrong.”
But DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers in the state have created an environment in which teachers are severely limited in how they can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in all grades, and officials have not provided concrete guidance on how to comply. As a result, some teachers and districts have created policies, like the permission slip policy, to ensure they are acting in accord with the law.
For Miami-Dade county public schools, compliance has included requiring parental consent for all club meetings and events, guest speakers, college adviser visits and other enrichment activities, the Miami Herald reported. Teachers now face time- and resource-consuming hurdles to ensure their students are able to hear from Black historians and Holocaust survivors, for instance, which has been a normal practice in local schools in previous years.
In an interview with NBC, Walter said that his daughter, a first-grader, almost did not participate in the activity because she had not mentioned the form or the event to her father, thinking it would be boring.
“The idea that kids can have a say in what activities they participate in is really strange,” Walter said to NBC. “And then the idea that some kids would be taken out of class, that just seems bizarre.”
Until clear guidelines on compliance are enacted, though, schools in the state are forced to create their own, perhaps overzealous, methods of ensuring their teachers are operating within the law.
