ORLANDO, Fla. — A short educational cartoon on civil rights upset a Seminole County mother, who complained it was “racially divisive” and its drawing of a gay pride flag wrongly introduced sex education to her son.
District administrators determined the video, used in a fifth-grade class, met Florida’s academic standards and did not violate any state rules. Nevertheless, students can now only view it with parent permission.
In Osceola County, the school district canceled a workshop for social studies teachers, worried — incorrectly, according to the history professor scheduled to present the workshop — it would offer lessons on “critical race theory,” which the state banned in June.
In Orange County, the school district has been reviewing books after one mother, upset by profanity and sex scenes, urged it to pull several from school libraries.
Educators say events like these reflect growing uncertainty about what teachers are allowed to discuss with their students and what materials —particularly those that deal with race and the LGBTQ community — the state may no longer consider appropriate. And Florida is poised to adopt new laws that could make such controversies even more common.
The Republican-backed measures would limit discussions about race, sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, allow more public scrutiny of books in school libraries and allow parents to more-easily question school materials and lessons.
“We just want to make sure that teachers promote that discussion at the right age level and we want to make sure parents are kept in the loop,” said Rep. Joe Harding, R-Williston, a sponsor of one of the bills, in a video about legislation released earlier this month.
He and other GOP lawmakers passed two of the bills through the Florida House on Thursday as members of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ group backing the legislation and active in book and curriculum challenges across Florida, held a rally in the Capitol to show their support.
All the bills are about “fanning the culture war flames,” said Karen Castor Dentel, a former teacher and Democratic state lawmaker and current member of the Orange County School Board.
She and other critics fear a “chilling effect” in public schools as a result. They view the bills as an effort to whitewash American history and erase any discussions about LGBTQ people, even routine conversations about family from a child with gay parents.
“I think many of our teachers will be able to navigate the new laws and still be able to discuss appropriately the issues that come up,” Castor Dentel said. “For others, I think it will have a chilling effect. They’ll be so cautious, overly cautious.”
The measure dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill (HB 1557/SB 1834) by its opponents prevents discussions on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade — and in any other class in which it is not “age appropriate.” Another set of bills (HB 7/SB 148) continues Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push to ban “critical race theory” from Florida’s classrooms. A third (HB 1467/SB 1300) allows more public scrutiny of school library collections.
The bills are part of a national conservative movement, with similar legislation introduced in other states, too.
Critical race theory says racism is embedded in the country’s institutions. Historically, it has been a law or graduate school subject and not one taught in public schools. But conservatives rallying against it say its tenets have seeped into K-12 classrooms with the aim to make white children feel guilty and to teach children to hate the United States.
“If you look what the CRT and woke is doing, it’s pitting people against each other,” DeSantis said at a recent press conference in Alachua County. “It’s also denigrating our country.”
The stated aim of the bill, which DeSantis called an “anti-woke” measure, is to make sure someone, by virtue of their race or sex, isn’t made to feel responsible for past wrongdoings by someone of the same race or sex.
Jonathan Cox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, said the bills represent a “complete mischaracterization of critical race theory,” a topic he studies and teaches to graduate students. The theory is a tool researchers use but has been misinterpreted to mean “anything that relates to race.”
Florida lawmakers, he added, should focus on making sure students get a “full picture of history” but instead are focused on whether white students feel uncomfortable during some lessons.
Slavery, segregation and the Ocoee Massacre should be taught as routinely as how Florida became a state or the U.S. Constitution was approved, Cox said, but the bills likely will make teachers feel nervous about covering those and other race-related topics.
“It has this really limiting and chilling effect,” he said.
That fear was on display at a recent town hall education meeting in Jacksonville when a teacher asked if it was still OK to teach about Jackie Robinson, the first Black player on a Major League Baseball team, said Chris Guerrieri, a longtime Duval County teacher who called all three bills “horrible.”
Guerrieri said the teacher was told lessons on Robinson were fine. But he expects more self-censoring by some instructors.
“A lot of teachers are hesitant about what to teach,” Guerrieri said. “How do we know if the superintendent is going to have our back?”
Backers of the bills said they do not want to prevent lessons on historical events.
“Nothing in this bill, absolutely nothing in this bill, bans the teaching of historical facts about slavery, sexism, racial oppression, racial segregation and racial discrimination,” said Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, the bill’s House sponsor.
In Osceola, however, school district administrators last month canceled a workshop for social studies teachers because they feared the Flagler College history professor’s talk on the civil rights movement dealt with critical race theory.
Michael Butler, the history professor, said his planned lecture was fact-based and its cancellation revealed the political motives of DeSantis and other GOP leaders: “This is to prevent a serious examination of how African Americans have experienced this history,” he said.
Melissa Roy, who left a 26-year teaching career this month, said she views the bills as an effort to muzzle gay teachers who want to be role models for LGBTQ students and to limit conversations that could help those youngsters.
“It it sends a message to my queer kids that who you are is not ok,” said Roy, who taught reading at Lake Brantley High School. “That it’s taboo, that we can’t talk about.”
If the bills passed, Roy said she would feel that even mentioning her wife in an off-handed way, the way teachers often reference their families, could lead to parental complaints, even at an “amazing” school like Lake Brantley where she felt “embraced.”
Books with LGBTQ or Black characters are among those that have been targeted across the state, including in Orange.
Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member, urged the Orange school board to remove several such books from Boone High School’s library because of their sexual content. “Stop sexualizing our children,” she said at a January school board meeting.
Other parents, librarians and students have pushed back, arguing books with LBGTQ and minority characters are important to students who want to read of experiences like their own.
“They are just stories on the shelves waiting for someone who needs them,” said Kiley Mack, 18, a senior at Boone High who spoke against book banning at last week’s board meeting.
In April, Belinda Ewen, an Oviedo mother, objected to a video by BrainPop, a widely used educational media company, that her son watched at Stenstrom Elementary School.
Though most of the video was “valuable,” she wrote on a complaint form, Ewen objected to two frames that depicted people carrying more modern protest signs, such as “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop Police Violence,” “White Silence is Violence” and “Full Rights for Immigrants.”
The signs were “misleading” and “politically divisive,” wrote Ewen.
“It’s unjust to make children feel shame for their racial identity,” she told the Seminole County School Board in a meeting this month about her complaint.
She also disliked one that showed someone holding a gay pride flag with a transgender symbol on it, arguing that was tantamount to sex education without parental permission.
Because of Ewen’s complaint, more than a dozen educators reviewed the video. “All determined that the video was age appropriate and was not biased or indoctrinating,” nor did the showing of a gay pride flag amount to a sex education lesson, the district’s attorney wrote.
But because BrainPop labeled the video as “sensitive,” the district decided that it and any others with that designation would no longer be freely available to students.
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