| “If I weren’t living through it, I wouldn’t believe it’s happening,” one parent, who has worked as a substitute teacher, said.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Photograph by Rebecca Blackwell / AP Brian Covey, a father in Duval County, in northern Florida, was recently greeted by his children with some alarming news. “Did you hear what happened at school today?” his daughter asked him. “They took all the books out of the classrooms.” When he went to investigate, he saw bookshelves covered with paper to hide their contents, and later visited another school, where he found bookshelves emptied altogether. As Charles Bethea reports in a new dispatch, schools in several Florida counties have taken steps to limit access to books while awaiting staff retraining in response to new state legislation, which requires that reading materials “be free of pornography and suited to ‘student needs,’ as determined by a librarian or school media specialist.” Additionally, districts have been told to “err on the side of caution,” as to what books are appropriate for students, and there has even been talk of felony charges for teachers who violate the new law. “I can only imagine how heartbreaking it is for career educators to have to take kids’ books away,” Covey says, “and what kinds of threats would have to be passed down to them so they’d feel they had no choice.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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