The year was 1991. Four of the Lake County School Board’s five members were dumbfounded.
Their newest colleague, Pat Hart, wanted to talk about sneezing witches, quacking fathers and why some books should be banned from school libraries. “We should not be making a witch appear nice to a child. There is no such thing as a nice witch,” Hart said about the book “When Itchy Witchy Sneezes.” Joy Cowley, the author of Itchy Witchy, also wrote “Quack Quack Quack” about a dad making funny noises while taking his kids to school, which Hart thought was disrespectful to fathers.
Hart’s rant came completely out of left (actually, right) field for the other School Board members, some of whom reacted with outrage. Banning books had not been a major flashpoint of controversy for public schools for decades. But Hart kept pursuing the issue with other books and instructional material, commandeering long stretches of meeting time while her fellow board members rolled their eyes or snickered.
The laughter stopped in November 1992, when voters elected two board members who gave Hart control of the board. Suddenly, Lake County was making national news as its board members assailed yoga and sex education, talked about requiring schools to teach creationism, pushed hard to shut down access to controversial books and restrict teachers’ freedom to choose their own classroom materials, and adopted a requirement to teach students that “American culture is superior to any other foreign or historic cultures.” Does any of this sound familiar?
And here we are
The dirty practice of using public education as a stage for culture wars had begun. And it never really died down. Over the past four years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken things to a full rolling boil, with restrictions on discussion of race and sexuality along with strictly enforced guidelines that allow anyone to challenge books on grounds that are both wide and vague.
How ironic, then, that the Lake County school system has exposed the lie at the center of it all — by crafting a solution that, while imperfect, creates an easy technological bypass around blanket book bans.
The big lie behind the culture-war nonsense is that it’s about parental control. But as controversy after controversy ignited, it became clear that the real goal was to rally far-right voters around DeSantis and his supporters. (The governor even went so far as to anoint his preferred candidates in 30 School Board races around the state.)
Books have always been easy targets. But Florida has escalated things to new levels. In some districts, math books are being rejected because they are too “woke” — DeSantis’ blanket term for anything expressing concern over racism or support for LGBTQ+ Floridians. Recently, one candidate for the Orange County School Board held a press conference just to announce her opposition to a human-development guide and a popular novel by writer John Green, “Looking for Alaska.” School districts across the state are now required to post portals that allow anyone in the community to review lists of textbooks and library books, and challenge anything — even if they have no children in local schools.
But there are alternatives. And Lake County has found one. The district custom-built an add on to its library software (a commonly used suite called Destiny Discovery from Follett School Solutions) that allows parents to set controls for their own children. Lake County parents now have options: They can authorize their child to check out any book, require their approval of any book, or set certain titles that their child can’t have access to.
It sounds a lot like a module that Follett introduced itself, earlier this year — and hastily withdrew after a firestorm of controversy from school librarians who blasted it as censorship. And we definitely feel their outrage. This policy will undercut intellectual freedom for some students; we’re thinking, in particular, of teens struggling with the knowledge that their parents don’t support their sexual orientation.
But what looks terrible from liberal states like California or New York looks entirely different from Florida’s perspective. If DeSantis and groups like Moms for Liberty, which are challenging books by the dozens across the state, were seriously interested in parental control, they’d be pushing other counties to adopt Lake County’s system or a less-restrictive (but still parent-empowering) tool that lets Osceola County parents choose between unlimited access to educational material, limited access or no access.
We can’t find a single county where any of these true parental-control options have been brought forward by groups like Moms For Liberty. And we want to be clear: These technological workarounds don’t sit well with any sincere proponent of intellectual freedom. But they are better than the current atmosphere of fear, where districts are frantically pulling books from shelves (and posters from walls). If these software solutions give school board members more faith in the judgment of professional educators to choose library books and classroom curriculum that is appropriate and thought-provoking, they should be considered.
The goal revealed
This isn’t about parents. It’s not about kids. They are pawns. And it sure as heck is not about liberty or choice. Instead, it takes away options from parents who encourage their children to be intellectually curious and challenged by conflicting ideas.
No, the real battle is for the votes and pocketbooks of people who might be persuaded, through their prejudice and prudery, to support far-right candidates financially and at the polls. And it’s time for Florida voters to say “enough” — as they did in Lake County, where voters jettisoned Hart and her allies at the first possible opportunity.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Contact us at insight@orlandosentinel.com
