'Zealots' are crippling Florida's schools with political crusades barely anybody supports: editorial

Book ban "zealots" were blasted by a Florida newspaper Monday for crippling the state's schools with crusades it said barely anybody supports.

The Tampa Bay Times editorial hit out after its own investigation showed just two people accounted for 600 of the 1,100 book removal requests made in the state since July 2022.

Those two have been “wasting untold hours of school employee time and the taxpayer dollars that pay for it," the editorial said.

It went on that the two “are part of a small group of Republican-backed scolds who are making Florida school officials afraid to do their job, which is to educate students, not placate zealots.”

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It adds that, “They are doing exactly what the Republican officials leading this state want them to do. It would be comical if it wasn’t so damaging.”

Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature, at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, last year enacted laws limiting the extent to which the subjects of racism, gender and sexual identity can be taught in the state’s public schools.

Under the new law school officials are required to remove content deemed inappropriate or potentially harmful to minors and urged parents to request the removal of such material, which according to the report often led to the material’s immediate removal.

Bruce Friedman, a 57-year-old New York transplant who now lives in Clay County, is one of the two people behind the complaints. Vicki Baggett, a high school teacher in Escambia, Florida, is the other.

“We have probably spent more resources on (Friedman) than anyone else in the history of the school district,’’ said Roger Dailey, who serves as Clay County’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, according to the report.

The editorial notes that the “saddest aspect of all this” is that Florida parents already have an opt-out mechanism that allows them to exclude content for their children without impacting other students.

“That’s a much better way to empower parents than allowing a few zealots to decide what every student should read,” the newspaper writes.

Read the full article here.