Florida's Top Education Official Cites Hillsborough in New Statewide Push to Pull Library Books

Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack sent a seven-page memo to every school district superintendent and charter leader on Sept. 24 telling them to stop waiting for parents to file complaints and start hunting through their own library shelves for "inappropriate" material. Hillsborough County is the example he built the case on.

The memo lands directly on Hillsborough's school libraries and classroom collections, and on any family whose kids check out books from them. Mack wants districts to adopt a 90-day, nine-step audit plan that includes inventorying classroom libraries, scrutinizing book fair donations, and setting a 30-day clock for reviewing any book once it's flagged.

What triggered it

The memo followed a Sept. 15 Hillsborough County School Board meeting where two speakers, parental rights advocate Julie Gebhards and Pastor John K. Amanchukwu Sr., read sexually explicit passages aloud from books they said were sitting on district shelves. Gebhards told the board the district had "so many books that are like this" and pushed members to act before parents have to keep finding titles themselves. Amanchukwu asked board members what educational benefit the passages served.

Mack's memo treats that meeting as proof the current system doesn't work. "A process that depends on a parent discovering explicit material, reading it in a public meeting, and then forcing a district response is not only severely flawed," he wrote, adding that state law makes district school boards responsible for what ends up in classrooms, libraries and reading lists. He noted hundreds of titles had already been pulled for review in Hillsborough before parents returned this month with objections to more.

The district responded fast. Nine books were named in connection with the complaints, and Hillsborough immediately removed the seven that hadn't already come down. Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" was among them, along with "1Q84," "Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out," "A Court of Wings and Ruin," and the "Kingdom of the Wicked" series, including "Kingdom of the Feared" and "Kingdom of the Cursed."

How the state wants districts to check their shelves

Mack's plan tells districts to compare their own collections against a list the Florida Department of Education keeps of books removed or discontinued elsewhere in the state after objections. State law already requires DOE to compile that list and circulate it to districts. But Mack draws a line he says matters: a title showing up on that list doesn't ban it everywhere.

"Inclusion on the list does not, by itself, establish a statewide prohibition," he wrote. Instead, he wants districts that hold the same book to review it locally and decide for themselves whether it fits Florida law and the age of the students who can reach it.

Critics see a statewide ripple effect

PEN America and Florida Freedom to Read are warning that even with Mack's disclaimer, the practical effect could look like a de facto ban. William Johnson, director of PEN America's Florida office, argued in a Sept. 10 statement that a book's removal in one county shouldn't become a license to pull it from the other 66. Florida Freedom to Read has made a similar case, saying each district should weigh a book's content and context on its own rather than treating another county's decision as a shortcut.

The tension is straightforward. Mack's memo explicitly avoids ordering a statewide ban, but it also tells every district to check its shelves against a list built almost entirely from other districts' objections, starting with Hillsborough's. Whether that produces 67 independent reviews or one county's judgment repeated 66 times is the fight now playing out.

Hillsborough's school board has not set a date for a broader vote on adopting Mack's 90-day audit framework. Families with questions about which titles have been pulled from a specific school can check with that school's media specialist directly, since removals so far have been handled title by title rather than through a single public list.

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