How Floridas book wars tore Escambia Countys school district apart

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A teacher unable to read books to her fourth-grade students without seeking permission. A pastor worried children will encounter graphic sexual material in the titles waiting on classroom shelves. A superintendent fired in part, he said, for refusing to yank books out of the schools.

The battle over what children should be allowed to read in school has riven Florida’s Escambia County School District. It’s part of a national battle, as school book objections surge to historic highs across the country.

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In Escambia County, the controversy kicked off in 2022, when a high school language arts teacher, Vicki Baggett, challenged more than 100 books for what she called inappropriate content. The challenges would spur the removal or restriction of scores of titles, contribute to the superintendent’s termination and draw an ongoing federal lawsuit that seeks to restore the books and alleges district officials have violated students’ and teachers’ constitutional rights.

Over the course of a year, The Washington Post interviewed people on all sides of the debate in Escambia County schools to understand how the spike in book challenges affected how they live, learn and read. (Baggett, the prolific challenger, denied several interview requests.) These are their stories — shared in their own words. Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.

Contacted about The Post’s reporting, the Escambia district sent a one-sentence statement: “Thanks for reaching out, but we are unable to comment on pending litigation.”

Susan Ingram: The librarian who left

I always loved reading. It takes you to places you’ve never been. To places that don’t exist, like the world of Harry Potter. It teaches you to walk in someone else’s shoes. You can feel what it was like for Rosa Parks to sit on that bus.

And I always loved kids. Reading and kids. That’s why I became a librarian two decades ago. And I loved being a librarian — until the challenges started coming in.

More than 100 of them, many against books by and about Black and LGBTQ people. Against books that I adored — like “Monday’s Not Coming,” about a girl whose best friend disappears over the summer. “New Kid,” which tells what it’s like to be the only Black kid at a mostly White school. “When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball,” a picture book about a wonderful basketball player who overcame polio and racism.

The challenger said these books were wrong. Race-baiting. Anti-White. Woke. None of this made sense to me. I don’t even know what “woke” means.

I had to pull the challenged books off the shelves. I had to put them in a restricted area behind the front desk. Students would come up to me and ask for the books. They’d say, “I can see it.” They’d point. “Can I check out the book?” A lot of African American students did this. They all wanted to read “The Hate U Give,” a novel about a 16-year-old Black girl who sees a police officer shoot and kill her best friend.

And I had to tell them no. I had to send those kids home with a permission slip for their parents to sign instead. Luckily, their parents signed. But what if they hadn’t?

Then another law went into effect, giving parents more power over book selection. And my job changed again. Now, I had to submit every book I wanted to buy for approval by a committee made up of two other teachers, a parent and someone who lived in the area. None of them were librarians.

It felt like all my time was going towards compiling lists of books for approval. Or taking books off of shelves for no reason I could understand.

Last year on Columbus Day, I turned to my husband. I told him I wasn’t happy anymore. I wasn’t trusted anymore. I didn’t want to censor books. I didn’t want to keep telling kids, “You can’t have that book because someone else thinks it’s not for you.”

I wasn’t being what I wanted to be: a librarian.

My husband told me to retire early, three years before I had planned. So I did.

Shortly before Christmas, I packed up my office. I stuffed 19 years of my life into two large bags. I looked around and told myself to take in one last little bit of everything. Because I wouldn’t be back. Then I turned out the light.

As I walked out, I passed by the books in the restricted section. That was the last thing I saw.

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Heather Van Sickle: The teacher who feels unable to teach

In January, I was told to clear out my classroom library. I was supposed to box up the nearly 500 books I’d spent 15 years collecting, take them away and look through every single one to figure out if it might be a problem. For some reason.

I’m a fourth-grade teacher. I teach English language arts. I know my subject, I know my books. There’s nothing bad in my books. There’s no spookiness or inappropriateness in my classroom library.

So I said no. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to rifle through 500 books to find the ones someone might have trouble with. These are all books that, as a trained educator, I have chosen. I’m not going to take time away from connecting with students and parents, or writing up my lesson plans, to box up books because of someone’s irrational fear of — what? I’m not sure.

Other teachers said the same thing. So the district went back to the drawing board.

Instead of taking away our books, they’re making media specialists catalogue every single book in every single teacher’s classroom library. Instead of working with children, our media specialists are inside classrooms looking at books for hours and hours and hours. And if they find a book that isn’t in our regular library, it has to go.

They’re also entering the books into an online database. So parents can search the books that are available and challenge them if they don’t like what they find. Actually, it doesn’t have to be a parent. It could be anyone. It could be my next-door neighbor.

And even though I got to keep my books in my classroom, I can’t teach them without permission anymore. I can’t teach any book that isn’t in the district curriculum without permission.

If a child approaches me with a book they would like to share with the class, I can’t read that book out loud. I have to get it approved by a media specialist first.

I never imagined being this restricted. I used to be trusted. Now I feel handcuffed.

Last year, I was teaching a social studies lesson, from a curriculum given by the state, and it included a small excerpt about Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man in Virginia who escaped by mailing himself to Philadelphia. And the kids were pretty shocked that someone shipped himself in a box to freedom.

So one of my kids went to the library to check out a book about Henry Box Brown. Because he was interested. And he came back excited. He said, “Look what I found. We just read about this. Could we read this out loud in class?”

And at first I said “Yes.” Then I remembered.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.” I told him I would need a permission slip first — that I’d need to get the book approved by another adult before we’re allowed to read it. I felt like a fool saying that. I felt embarrassed.

He didn’t understand.

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Gary Porter: The pastor determined to protect

People ask me why I go to the Escambia County Board of Education meetings. People ask, “Do you have any children in the school system?” “Do you have grandchildren in the school system?” The answer to both of those questions is no.

But I am a resident of the county. I own a home here. Half my property taxes go to the schools. I have a vested interest. And I’m a faith leader, a pastor. Parents come to me with their concerns. They say, “What can we do?” They’re scared to speak publicly, to stand up in a room of hundreds of people. They ask me, “Would you come to the school board meeting, Pastor?” “Would you say something?”

So I do. I feel an obligation to do that.

And that’s where I heard about the bad books. People were presenting about books meant for third-, fourth-, fifth-graders. But I heard the stuff in these books and I thought, Wait a minute. The sexual information in these books, I didn’t encounter until I was a teenager. A child doesn’t have the cognitive skill to process that. These books are answering questions that children aren’t even asking.

After that, I started researching. I went to websites where the books are listed and you can read the context, read some excerpts. It’s kind of like Cliffs Notes. I went through those, and you know what? It’s just not healthy. It’s just not good.

There’s “And Tango Makes Three,” about the first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies. First of all, scientifically, that’s an impossibility. Secondly, I don’t think it’s helpful to the child. This is not the time and the place to bring that subject up. Whether you agree with the LGBTQ community or you don’t, to bring this in at a young age, that is when we start indoctrinating. It’s not honest.

And look, if you’ve got a young person in the school system and they’ve got parents who are two men, or two women, they should not feel threatened by the removal of this book. Their life in that home, it still continues. It’s not a removal of them. It’s not a removal of anybody in the LGBTQ community. Here in America, people have the freedom to make whatever choices they make. That’s what makes America America.

But these books have no educational value. What happened to the classics? They’ve just been forgotten about. “Gone With the Wind.” “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” That book brought reformation to the meatpacking industry.

The whole purpose of the school system is education. That’s what the good, solid people in America want. But we’re not doing that. We’re not number one in education anymore. We’re not in the top 10. We’re not even in the top 20.

I find it very problematic that we have spent our school board time on these books. I went to this one meeting, in March, it lasted for seven hours. It was the longest school board meeting I’ve been in — and the most contentious. There were so many people. The problem is, once the emotions get involved, the thought processes go out the door.

Still, I’m glad this situation came to a boil. It awakened the community. Books are how things start — but they don’t stay there. They end up going someplace else.

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Tim Smith: The superintendent who said no

I knew some school board members weren’t my fans. That they might like to see someone else in charge.

But I was looking forward to this school year. It was a chance to finally move forward with some academic achievement. I wanted to have every student learning. I thought we really could.

There had been a number of difficult issues for us as a district — the pandemic, of course. There was a middle school we had to convert to a charter or close. And we had a review of our discipline policies, which caused a lot of angst.

Then there were the books.

A new law went into effect in July 2022. It said that if a resident challenged a book, brought a book to the district as a concern, we had to establish a system for that. And that became one of our trouble spots. We had to spend so many hours in public forum talking about how we handle books. It was drawing a lot of attention. A lot of time.

What we came up with was: A challenged book goes to a district committee. The committee makes a determination. If the challenger isn’t satisfied, they can appeal. Then it goes to the school board. They can vote to pull the book everywhere. Or pull it some places: out of middle schools but kept in high schools.

But some people wanted me to pull the books. So did a board member. But the legal advice we’d been given was, “Superintendent, don’t do that.” It would be against the law for me to do that.

Then, in May, my evaluation came before the board. It was not positive. The board motioned to approve the evaluation. Immediately after that, there was a motion to terminate my employment. Then there was a 3-to-2 vote.

I was fired.

I’d never been fired before. It was a bit of a surreal moment. I suddenly realized, “I’m done here.”

In this job, you come, you serve, you do the best you can. You don’t know how long your timeline is going to be. You just hope you make a positive difference.

I think my firing and the issues that came to my firing were deep. The books, those were a piece. But just a piece.

I think a divisiveness had permeated our board. It was toxic. If you have a divided board and superintendent, you are not moving your district forward.

I’m very concerned for our school district. My hope is that the person who follows me is better at building unity than I was. I hoped that would happen. But the bottom line was — it didn’t.

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Lindsay Durtschi: The parent who became a plaintiff

I have never worried, “What if my child picks up an adult book?” Maybe I parent a little more free range than some. But that’s nobody’s business — and how others parent is none of my business.

What is my business is what books my child can read at school. If you don’t want your child to read something you find inappropriate, there is an “opt out” form. Every school in Escambia County has that form. You can opt your child out of reading that book.

But you can’t tell other children what to read. Or — you shouldn’t be able to.

One person is responsible for the majority of book challenges in Escambia County. And I just ask myself: To what end? What are we trying to do here? Who do you think you’re saving? What do you think is out there that’s so awful?

Some of the books she challenged are hard reads. They talk about child molestation and things that are tough to hear. But they’re meant to be hard reads. That’s how we learn.

Some of the books just bring children joy.

I’m a doctor. In my office, I have the book “When Aidan Became a Brother,” which is about a transgender boy. I use it for children that are having learning-related visual problems. As we’re testing out lenses or different therapies, I’ll have them read that. It’s great for all ages. It has beautiful pictures. No one has gotten upset about it. Ever.

But the district is listening to the challenger. Our children, my children, are losing access to books.

I feel like we’re walking back in time. We’re putting kids back in the closet. All this progress we made in my lifetime, in my parents’ lifetime, we’re just rewinding all of it. We’re going back to this perceived great America. When the people in power were all White men. When it was normal to use the n-word in the living room.

I don’t want my kids to be like that.

So I decided to take some action. I’m suing my school district to get the books back.

I was given the opportunity to join a lawsuit with the authors of challenged or censored books and a free-speech advocacy group called PEN America. Eventually, other families joined the lawsuit, as well as the largest publisher in the country, Penguin Random House.

Because I’m a parent, and I have rights. And this is our country, too.

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Aleora Holman: The student who feels silenced

My friends and I like to hang out in the library before school. But this year, for a long time they wouldn’t let us into the library. They said it was closed: under construction. Then when it finally opened, we came back in and it wasn’t a library anymore.

All the shelves were covered in black paper. There were no books. There was nobody reading. There was nobody checking things out. It wasn’t a library. It was just a room.

Initially, I was confused. Then I got angry. I found out why the books were covered up. It’s because of all these new laws and school rules that happened because some people were really upset the library had books about LGBTQ people — books about people like me.

I was raised very religious. The kind of Christianity that says you go to hell if you’re gay. I was taught that women belong in the kitchen, wearing dresses. The man works. The man wears a suit.

But I grew out of that. I did my own reading online. I made friends who were gay. I realized gay people aren’t possessed by demons. They’re just people. I’m 17 now, and I’m pansexual, which means I like anybody. I’m also transgender and nonbinary, because I don’t identify with male or female. I’m just somewhere in the middle where it really doesn’t matter. You just kind of do you.

I’m never going to understand the argument that having gay couples in children’s books is not age appropriate. I mean, straight couples are literally everywhere.

It doesn’t make sense to say “And Tango Makes Three” is age inappropriate. It’s penguins. It’s wholesome. It’s a childish way of introducing, you know, that there’s not just women and men that like each other — sometimes there are boys that like each other.

Nobody thinks, when they walk into school, “I really hope I don’t read a book about a gay couple today.” If anything, every now and then I’ll have the worry, “What if today’s the day that somebody shoots up the school?” It’s pitiful that people are deciding to focus on something like books instead of a real problem like guns.

But it’s not just books. It’s more than that. They’re trying to make it seem inappropriate or unnatural just for gay people to exist. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me. Like I should be different.

It reminds me of the bullying that started in middle school. The name-calling on the bus. They would play a game called “hang the f-slur.” They took the seat belt and threw it around my neck and pulled it. Really hard.

If they keep restricting books about gay people and Black people, then there will only be straight White people everywhere. Anything else will be weird.

And I know what’s going to happen. More kids are going to get bullied. Kids like me.

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