Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new law on Tuesday that will limit a person’s ability to object to books in a school district if they don’t have students attending a school in said district.
Under the new education bill, HB 1285, a person who doesn’t have a child in the school district will only be able to raise an objection to a book once per month.
At the same time, parents who have a child who can access the district’s books will be able to file unlimited objections. This also applies to those who have home-schooled children.
DeSantis shared a statement on the bill, claiming that his state is the top in the “country for education.”
“By focusing on core academic subjects and rejecting indoctrination in the classroom, we have become a standard-bearer for educational excellence,” DeSantis said in the statement. “The legislation I signed today continues to build on Florida’s previous accomplishments.”
HB 1285 comes two years after DeSantis signed a different law that gave individuals new power to raise objections to books available to students in schools’ K-12 libraries. That law also required reading materials to be age-appropriate for students in the state.
Critics of that law say that it led to an uptick in banned books in Florida, a large portion of which contained race-related content or focused on LGBTQ matters.
Still, book bans are happening across the country, not just in Florida.
A new report from the advocacy group PEN America found that in the first half of this school year, there have been more than 4,349 instances of book bans, more than the entirety of the 2022-23 academic year when the then-record of almost 1,500 books were banned.
The report also noted that bans were found to have occurred in 23 states and at 52 school districts from July to December. Going back to July 2021 through December 2023, PEN America says it has recorded more than 10,000 instances of book bans.
Among the leaders in book bans was Florida, which the report said has had more than 3,000 instances of restricting literature, the report shared.
DeSantis’s office seemed to acknowledge this, as the 2022 law created logistical challenges. In his statement, he said the new law “protects schools from activists trying to politicize and disrupt a district’s book review process.”