He asked that his name and the name of his high school not be identified for fear of facing discipline. The teacher is compiling and updating a list of rejected OCPS books and starting this past weekend others shared his list on Facebook, Reddit and TikTok. “The last thing I would have expected to be rejected is Milton,” said one English teacher, noting that John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” published in 1667, is considered a “cornerstone of Western literature.” Still, some OCPS teachers said they were shocked to see what books are being flagged as potentially objectionable. Those laws and rules are guiding OCPS’ review. Rules adopted by the state in January told them to “err on the side of caution” when selecting books for school libraries or approving them for classroom collections. Other books have been approved but only for certain grades.īut critics say the effort has wrongly labeled many books pornographic, when state law says, in part, that books with sexual content or nudity are considered pornography only if they are “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”Ī law passed last year requires media specialists - teachers with training to be school librarians - to review books. Some books rejected earlier this summer, among them “The Scarlet Letter” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” have since been approved, according to the lists shared with the Orlando Sentinel by a district teacher and by an advocacy group that obtained a rejection list through a public records request. The lists of books rejected and approved for OCPS classrooms are not finalized yet as district media specialists continue their summer work of reviewing all books in classroom libraries, said several people familiar with the process. Novels that in past years were frequently taught in OCPS high school classes, such as “The Color Purple,” “Catch-22,” “Brave New World,” and “The Kite Runner” have been put on the rejected lists, too, as have novels by Toni Morrison and Ayn Rand and popular, turned-into-movies books like “Into the Wild,” and “The Fault in Our Stars.” The classic novels “A Room With a View” and “Madame Bovary” and the epic poem “Paradise Lost” - published in England more than 350 years ago - have been at least temporarily rejected by Orange County Public Schools for sexual content that educators fear runs afoul of a new Florida law.
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