TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Arguing that their First Amendment rights have been violated, three parents have gone to a federal appeals court after a district judge tossed out their challenge to a state school book review process.
The parents from St. Johns and Orange counties filed a notice of appeal last week after U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in January sided with the State Board of Education and dismissed their lawsuit.
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Watch Below: Previous coverage of book removals in St. Johns County
The case stems from a 2023 law that allows parents to use a state review process to seek removal of school books they contend are pornographic or depict “sexual conduct.” Parents can use the process when school boards have refused to remove or restrict the books.
But St. Johns County parents Nancy Tray and Anne Watts Tressler and Orange County parent Stephana Ferrell argued in the lawsuit that the 2023 law and related regulations violate their First Amendment rights because they are not able to use the process to challenge school board decisions to remove or restrict books.
They contend that the state allowing the process only to be used by people seeking to remove or restrict books — and not to prevent removal or restriction — is “viewpoint discrimination.”
The lawsuit, filed in June in federal court in Tallahassee, came amid disputes in various parts of Florida about removing or restricting access to books in schools.
The lawsuit said the 2023 law, approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature, “only benefits those parents who hold the state’s favored viewpoint: agreement with removing books and other material from schools, and disagreement with (and therefore seeking review of) decisions to retain books and other material.”
“Parents who seek to retain materials, a viewpoint disfavored by the state, are excluded from the state review process,” the three parents’ lawyers, who are from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Florida, the Democracy Forward Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote.
But in his Jan. 27 decision dismissing the case, Winsor concluded that differences in parents’ access to the review process are “based on status, not viewpoint.”
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“The state review process serves to ensure that the local districts comply with state law,” the judge wrote. “Accordingly, it serves only parents with a particular status: those whose formal objections at the local level were rejected. Access does not depend on the ideology of the individual seeking appointment of a special master. What matters is status alone. Everyone is excluded from the process except the parent who made an unsuccessful objection below (at the school board level) — regardless of that parent’s motivating ideology.”
As is common, the notice of appeal filed last week does not detail arguments the St. Johns County and Orange County parents will make at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuit named as defendants the State Board of Education and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr.
Under the 2023 law and the regulations, parents who want to remove or restrict access to books after being rejected by school boards can ask for appointment of special magistrates. The magistrates review the issues and make recommendations to the state board for decisions.
As an example of the issues in the case, Tray and Tressler objected to a decision last year by the St. Johns County School Board to restrict access to the Kurt Vonnegut book “Slaughterhouse Five” and other books. But because the state review process was limited to people who wanted to remove or restrict access to books — and not to people wanting to keep access to books — Tray and Tressler could not appeal the school board decisions, the lawsuit said.
“Parent Tressler has repeatedly been told by SJCSD (St. Johns County school district) that there is no process for her to object to board decisions to remove books from use in SJCSD,” the lawsuit said.