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      Florida school superintendent who criticized DeSantis could lose job

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      Florida officials are threatening to revoke the teaching license of a school superintendent who criticized the governor, Ron DeSantis.The educator is accused of violating several statutes and DeSantis directives and allowing his “personal political views” to guide his leadership.A revocation by the state education department could allow DeSantis to remove the Leon county superintendent, Rocky Hanna, from his elected office.The Republican governor did that last year to an elected Democratic prosecutor in the Tampa Bay area who disagreed with his positions limiting abortion and care for transgender teens and indicated he might not enforce new laws in those areas.Disney sued DeSantis this week, saying he targeted its Orlando theme parks for retribution after it criticized the governor’s so-called “don’t say gay” law that banned the discussion of sexuality and gender in early grades and has now been expanded.Hanna has publicly opposed that law, once defied the governor’s order that barred any mandate students wear masks during the Covid pandemic, and criticized a DeSantis-backed bill that will pay for students to attend private school.The Leon county district, with about 30,000 students, covers Tallahassee, the state capital, and its suburbs.“It’s a sad day for democracy in Florida, and the first amendment right to freedom of speech, when a state agency with unlimited power and resources, can target a local elected official in such a biased fashion,” Hanna said.A Democrat then running as an independent, Hanna was elected to a second four-year term in 2020 with 60% of the vote. He plans to run for re-election next year and does not need a teacher’s license to hold the job.“This investigation has nothing to do with these spurious allegations, but rather everything to do with attempting to silence myself and anyone else who speaks up for teachers and our public schools in a way that does not fit the political narrative of those in power,” Hanna said.He said the investigation was spurred by a single complaint from a leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a conservative education group.“We are fighting tirelessly with our local school board to no avail,” Brandi Andrews wrote to DeSantis, citing Hanna’s mask mandate, opposition to new education laws and directives and public criticism of the governor.Andrews noted she had appeared in a DeSantis re-election TV commercial. Her letter was stamped “Let’s Go Brandon”, a code used by some conservatives to replace a vulgar chant against Joe Biden. Andrews said her complaint against Hanna was one of many.An education department spokesman, Alex Lanfranconi, said that while officials would not discuss the Hanna investigation in detail, “nothing about this case is special”.“Any teacher with an extensive history of repeated violations of Florida law would be subject to consequences up to and including losing their educator certificate,” he said.The threatened revocation was first reported by the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper.Hanna can have a hearing before an administrative judge, attempt to negotiate a settlement or surrender his license. He said he had not decided what to do.Hanna received a letter from the education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr, earlier this month saying an investigation found probable cause he violated a 2021 directive barring districts from mandating that students wear masks.Hanna required students to wear masks after a Leon third-grader died of Covid. The fight went on for several months until Leon and other districts had their legal challenge rejected.Diaz also cited a memo Hanna issued before this school year telling teachers, “You do You!” and to teach as they always had, allegedly giving approval to ignore laws enacted by DeSantis.His letter also cites the district’s failure for a month in 2020 to have an armed guard or police officer at every school as required after the 2018 Parkland high school shooting. Hanna said there were not enough available officers to meet that requirement. The education department cleared him of wrongdoing.Diaz also complains parents were told children could get an excused absence if they chose to attend a February protest at the state capitol opposing DeSantis’s education policies.Offering students a “free day off of school” to attend the rally “is another example of [Hanna] failing to distinguish his political views from the standards taught in Florida schools”, Diaz wrote. More

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      Rightwing extremists defeated by Democrats in US school board elections

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      Scores of rightwing extremists were defeated in school board elections in April, in a victory for the left in the US and what Democrats hope could prove to be a playbook for running against Republicans in the year ahead.In Illinois, Democrats said more than 70% of the school board candidates it had endorsed won their races, often defeating the kind of anti-LGBTQ+ culture warrior candidates who have taken control of school boards across the country.Republican-backed candidates in Wisconsin also fared poorly. Moms for Liberty, a rightwing group linked to wealthy Republican donors which has been behind book-banning campaigns in the US, said only eight of its endorsed candidates won election to school boards, and other conservative groups also reported disappointing performances.The results come as education and free speech organizations have warned of a new surge in book bans in public schools in America. Over the past two years conservatives in states around the US have removed hundreds of books from school classrooms and libraries. The targeted books have largely been texts which address race and LGBTQ+ issues, or are written by people of color or LGBTQ+ authors.“Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board – across the [Chicago] suburbs especially,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, said after the results came in.“Really, the extremists got trounced yesterday.”Pritzker added: “I’m glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.”The Democratic party of Illinois spent $300,000 on races in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported, endorsing dozens of candidates. The party said 84 of 117 candidates it had recommended won their races.Teachers unions, including the Illinois Education Association, endorsed candidates in school board elections around the state. The IEA backed candidates in about 100 races, and around 90% of those candidates won, said Kathi Griffin, the organization’s president.“I would hope that the tide is turning, to make sure that people who want to have those [school board] positions because they want to do good for our kids, continue [to get elected],” Griffin said.“I think that oftentimes these fringe candidates are funded with dark money. That dark money comes from outside our state.”The results were disappointing for conservative groups, who had pumped money into races.The 1776 Project, a political action committee which received funding from Richard Uihlein, a billionaire GOP donor, said only a third of the 63 candidates it had backed in Illinois and Wisconsin had won their races. Politico first reported on the lackluster performances.Union-endorsed candidates won two-thirds of their school board races in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, although Republican-supported candidates performed better in rural areas.Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic party of Illinois, said “values were on the line in these races”.“We knew this work wouldn’t be easy, especially given the organized movement from the far right to disguise their true agenda, but we’re grateful that voters saw through the falsehoods and turned out to support credible community advocates,” he said.“I’m proud that Illinoisans once again voted for fairness, equity and inclusion in our state.”With other states holding school board elections later this year – and a critical presidential election in 2024 – the successes offered some hope for Democrats.At the local level, at least, Griffin said the results “showed the value of having relationships within the community”.“When you have teachers who are part of the community, who have relationships with parents, with other community members who engage in community activities and support that community, there’s a level of trust that is built and that has happened across our state,” she said. More

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      Book bans in US public schools increase by 28% in six months, Pen report finds

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      Book bans in US public schools increased by 28% in the first half of the 2022-23 academic year, the writers’ organisation Pen America said on Thursday, describing a “relentless” conservative “crusade to constrict children’s freedom to read”.Releasing a new report, Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools, Pen said the increase was over figures for the previous six months.“Censorious legislation in states across the country has been a driving force behind new restrictions on access to books in public schools,” it said.“Since Pen America started tracking public school book bans in July 2021, [it] has recorded more than 4,000 instances of banned books … this includes 1,477 individual book bans affecting 874 unique titles during the first half of the 2022-23 school year.”Book bans are more common in Republican-run states. According to Pen, “seven districts in Texas were responsible for 438 instances of individual book bans, and 13 districts in Florida were responsible for 357 bans”.It added: “Of the 1,477 books banned this school year, 30% are about race, racism or include characters of colour, while 26% have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”Pen also highlighted “the misapplication of labels such as ‘pornographic’ or ‘indecent’ by activists and politicians to justify the removal of books that do not remotely fit the well-established legal and colloquial definitions of pornography.“Alarmist rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ has been a significant factor behind such mischaracterisations, which routinely conflate books that contain any sexual content or include LGBTQ+ characters with ‘pornography’.”According to Pen, the most frequently banned books in the 2022-23 US school year were Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Flamer by Mike Curato, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins and The Handmaid’s Tale: a Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Renée Nault.Atwood last year supported Pen by auctioning an “un-burnable” edition of her dystopian feminist novel, which was published in 1985 and became the inspiration for a hit TV series. It raised $130,000.Atwood said then: “Free speech issues are being hotly debated, and Pen is a sane voice [amid] all the shouting.”Book bans have not been without political blowback.In Florida on Wednesday, so-called “don’t say gay” laws regarding the teaching of gender and LGBTQ+ issues were expanded from public elementary schools to the whole state system. But the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, last week saw a major donor pause support for his nascent presidential run, citing book bans as one policy of concern.Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy told the Financial Times: “I have put myself on hold. Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.”The Pen chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, said: “The heavy-handed tactics of state legislators are mandating book bans, plain and simple.“Some politicians like Ron DeSantis have tried to dismiss the rise in book bans as a ‘hoax’. But their constituents and supporters are not fooled. The numbers don’t lie, and reveal a relentless crusade to constrict children’s freedom to read.” More

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      Florida board approves expansion of ‘don’t say gay’ ban to all school grades

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      Florida’s board of education has approved the expansion of the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill, which now prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity at school across all grade levels.Wednesday’s approval came at the request of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who in the past two years has waged what critics call a “culture war” across the state through his bans on gender-affirming care, Covid-19 precautionary measures and abortion rights, among other facets.According to an education department spokesperson, the proposal will take effect after a procedural notice period that lasts about a month, the Associated Press reports.The rule states that Florida educators “shall not intentionally provide classroom instruction to students in grades four through 12 on sexual orientation or gender identity unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards … or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend.”Previously, the Parental Rights in Education law focused on banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity only from kindergarten through third grade.Parents are allowed to sue school districts over violations and educators who violate the ban risk having their licenses revoked.The expansion is a part of a series of anti-LGBTQ+ being proposed in Florida, including a ban on gender affirming care that would allow the state to take “emergency” custody of a child whose parents allow them access to such care.Other bans include curtailing drag performances, banning pride flags from public buildings, as well as removing college majors and minors on gender studies and critical race theory, among other similar disciplines.In a statement to the Associated Press, Florida’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr, said: “We’re not removing anything here. All we are doing is we are setting the expectations so our teachers are clear: that they are to teach to the standards.”As a result of DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” bill and his culture war against “wokeness”, the governor, who is widely expected to launch his 2024 presidential run, has found himself going head to head with Disney, one of the state’s largest private employers.Last month, Disney pushed back against DeSantis’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights by announcing its plans to host a major LGBTQ+ conference at Walt Disney World in Orlando. The announcement was widely regarded as a defiant response to DeSantis who assumed new powers in February that allow him to appoint members of the development board that supervises the theme park and its self-governing district. More

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      The Guardian view on US book bans: time to fight back | Editorial

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      “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” warns a character in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of an America where books are considered so dangerous they must be incinerated. The novel appeared 70 years ago, in the aftermath of Nazi book burnings and amid McCarthyism and Soviet ideological repression. But the urge to ban books has resurged with a vengeance, with the American Library Association (ALA) recording a doubling of censorship attempts in 2022, to 1,269 across 32 states: the highest rate for decades. Pen America, which champions freedom of expression, tallied more than 2,500 cases in the last school year.These attempts are not merely more numerous but are also broadening and deepening. The decisions of school boards and districts take place in the context of politicians grasping electoral advantage and punitive yet often vaguely worded state laws on education – such as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis’s, Stop-Woke Act. At least 10 states have passed legislation increasing parental power over library stock, or limiting students’ access. In place of spontaneous challenges to single titles come challenges to multiple titles, organised by campaign groups such as Moms for Liberty. The ALA says that 40% of attempts last year targeted 100 books or more.Not only schools but now community libraries too are under scrutiny. The efforts are also increasingly punitive. Missouri Republicans this week voted to defund all of the state’s public libraries after librarians challenged a bill that has removed more than 300 books and that threatens educators “providing sexually explicit material” with imprisonment or a fine of up to $2,000. A library in Michigan was defunded last year; another in Texas is under threat this week.These challenges are overwhelmingly from the right. And while liberal parents have sought to remove titles such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from mandatory reading lists over their approach to race, this time the demand from parents is not merely that their child should not have to read particular titles – but that no one’s child should be able to unless they buy it privately.Pen America notes: “It is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history.” They include works by celebrated children’s writers such as Judy Blume, literary greats including Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood – and even the comic picture book I Need a New Butt. Librarians are attacked as “paedophiles” over sex education titles or those depicting same-sex relationships. In part, this is a backlash against efforts to diversify reading matter in schools and libraries. The pandemic also gave parents greater insight into what their children are studying and fostered a “parental rights” movement rooted in opposition to mask mandates.The primary cost is to children denied appropriately selected books that could be life-affirming and life-changing – even, perhaps, life-saving. The chilling effect of challenges makes librarians and teachers second-guess their choices and cut book purchases. In two Florida counties, officials this year ordered teachers to cover up or remove classroom libraries entirely, pending a review of the texts – reportedly leaving weeping children begging: “Please don’t take my books.” But parents, librarians and communities are waking up to the threat, and are organising and educating to counter it. Books are the building blocks of civilisation. They must be defended.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trans people, students and teachers are besieged by DeSantis’s crusade. But he’s not done yet

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      No public school teacher or college professor in Florida has been more outspoken in his criticism of Governor Ron DeSantis than Don Falls. In the spring of 2022, the 62-year-old social studies high school teacher became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the governor to block enforcement of the recently approved Stop Woke (Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees) Act.The DeSantis-backed legislation banned the supposed teaching of critical race theory – a scholarly examination of how social conceptions of race influence laws, political movements and history – in the Sunshine state’s public schools and universities. When Falls heard that a Jacksonville law firm was drafting litigation to stop the new law from taking effect, the grandfather of five decided to raise his head above the proverbial parapet.“One thing I’ve taught my students is that there are certain fundamental values associated with a democracy, and if they’re going to work, you’ve got to stand up for them,” recalled Falls, who has taught for 38 years. “I couldn’t have taught that to my students and then, when the ball was in my court, pass it on to somebody else.”In his first year as Florida’s chief executive, DeSantis raised public school teachers’ salaries and paid tribute to the mostly gay, lesbian and transgender victims of one of the country’s most deadly mass shootings in recent times. But as he built his national profile, attracting attention for his controversial views on masks and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, he took a sharp swing to the right and stepped up his courtship of the party’s Trump-loving base.Now, with rumors he is close to launching his presidential bid, DeSantis is highlighting his crusade to “reform” public education in Florida and restrict the rights and freedoms of the state’s transgender population as centerpieces of a nationwide agenda for what he calls “America’s revival”.Last year, DeSantis and his Republican allies went further and rammed house bill 1467 through the state legislature, requiring all reading material used in public schools to be reviewed by a “trained media specialist” to ensure that the material be “free of pornography” and “appropriate for the age level and group”. Critics say it empowers conservative groups to ban books whose contents they disagree with, even if they are age appropriate.Falls continued to resist. Confronted with a choice of either removing the estimated 250 to 300 books in his classroom or submitting them to the vetting process, he and other colleagues at the school opted to conceal their covers by enveloping them in plain brown paper, thereby shielding themselves from possible criminal prosecution or civil liability.He posted a wryly written sign inside his classroom that read: “closed by order of the governor”.Book bans, pronoun bansOn 23 February hundreds of college students walked out of their classrooms at six public universities to protest against DeSantis’s decision to abolish diversity, education and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies that had been mandated in 2020 in all of Florida’s dozen institutions of higher education by other political appointees, including the former governor Rick Scott.Demonstrations were also held in early March to denounce HB 999, legislation that would eliminate college majors and minors in “critical race theory, gender studies or intersectionality”, render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, and require colleges to offer general education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents”. It would also formally outlaw spending on DEI programs, which seek to promote the participation and fair treatment of people from all walks of life.“We’re seeing more and more students who, emboldened by some faculty members, shout people down and shut down viewpoints they don’t agree with,” the chief sponsor of the legislation, state representative Alex Andrade, told the Guardian. “People are forgetting that public universities are a component of a state government’s executive branch, and when we’re trying to encourage and enforce discrimination in the name of diversity and equity, we’re getting it wrong.”The sweeping scope of that legislation, coupled with three other education bills that would, among other things, forbid school staff and students from using “pronouns that do not correspond with a person’s sex”, has left educators in Florida feeling incensed and dumbfounded.“There aren’t actually any majors in critical race theory or intersectionality,” noted Andrew Gothard, an English instructor at Florida Atlantic University and president of United Faculty of Florida, the union that represents more than 25,000 faculty members in the Sunshine state’s dozen public universities and 16 state and community colleges. “The goal is to eliminate all thought that diverges from the governor’s political platform, and it’s absolutely terrifying.“Any time you’re telling people they can only teach history in a way that praises the motherland, you’re straying into Hitler Youth territory.”Multiple requests from the Guardian for an interview with Governor DeSantis went unanswered. But in a recent statement, DeSantis defended HB 999 because it seeks to push back “against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination”.DeSantis called a press conference on 8 March to debunk what he termed “the ‘book ban’ hoax” in relation to the Stop Woke Act, asserting that books containing pornographic content and other kinds of violent or age-inappropriate content had been discovered in libraries and classrooms in 23 school districts statewide. These included Maia Kobabe’s widely acclaimed Gender Queer: A Memoir, one of 10 books that received an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 for having “special appeal for young adults ages 12 through 18”.“Our mantra in Florida has been education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis wrote in his recent memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. He hailed Florida as one of the first states to enact a parents’ bill of rights, which in his telling guarantees mothers and fathers “the right to inspect the materials being used in their kids’ schools”.Yet DeSantis also omits any reference to the state’s grossly underpaid public school teachers, who rank 48th nationwide in average salaries according to the National Education Association.‘Slate of hate’Another target of the 44-year-old governor is the state’s LGBTQ+ community and, in particular, the transgender population. A new bill, house bill 1421, titled “Gender Clinical Interventions”, would prohibit transgender individuals from amending their own birth certificates and eliminate transition-related care such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors.The chief sponsor of the bill, state representative Randy Fine, tweeted in March that the legislation would outlaw the “butchering of children” and free Florida taxpayers from having to subsidize “the sexual mutilation of adults”. In reality gender-confirming surgical procedures are seen as lifesaving, and are mostly offered to teenagers who are at least 15 years of age or older. Even among this group such operations are “exceedingly rare”, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.Not to be outdone, state senator Clay Yarborough introduced senate bill 254 that would allow the state to take temporary custody of children who may be receiving gender-affirming care now or in the future. (Yarborough declined the Guardian’s request for an interview.)The barrage of bills focusing on transgender people is part of a broader onslaught by far-right thinktanks and consultants on democracy, abortion rights and racial progress, according to Nadine Smith, a co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ community rights organization.“It’s not surprising to see this slate of hate introduced,” said Smith. “This rightwing shift has everything to do with usurping Trump on the right in the forthcoming Republican presidential primary elections. DeSantis is not driven by convictions or a core set of values, he is driven only by ambition and his desperation to become president.”The civil rights advocate remembers a different Ron DeSantis four years ago. Elected governor for the first time in 2018 by a razor-thin margin of about 32,000 votes, the former congressman and co-founder of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus gravitated towards the center-right during his early time in office.DeSantis issued a proclamation on the third anniversary of the 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub that paid tribute to the 49 people who died but failed to mention the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community as a possible motive of the killer.The governor came under fire for that omission and reissued the proclamation with amended wording. He even met with a survivor of the shooting and other members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community as a sign of solidarity.“The DeSantis we are seeing now doesn’t sound like the DeSantis who ran for governor the first time,” said Smith. “He went from being someone who went to the Pulse nightclub and responded to the criticism to someone who routinely calls LGBTQ+ people groomers and incites violence towards us.”The number of anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Florida has soared in recent months. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project documented 17 such episodes during 2022, up sharply from the six that the organization chronicled in 2021 and the five that were recorded in 2020. Some degenerated into riots. Nationwide, Florida ranked third in these incidents, surpassed only by California and Texas.Members of the state’s transgender population say they are feeling the intensifying heat.Morganti (not his real name) moved to the Gulf coast city of Bradenton from Louisiana in 2016. The 35-year-old New College of Florida student still identified as a woman at the time, and struck up a relationship with a local woman. “She and I could hold hands walking through a shopping mall, and when I first came down here it wasn’t a big deal,” said the third-year marine biology major.But the bearded trans man has noticed a palpable change in the political climate during the intervening six years. No violent confrontation has occurred to date, but he has dealt with comments about his voice and body.The hostile takeover of New College by six of DeSantis’s rightwing allies on its board of trustees earlier this year has not helped matters, and Morganti says he will move abroad to obtain his master’s degree once he has finished his undergraduate studies in January 2025.“If Ron DeSantis doesn’t make it to the White House, he will still be our governor – and that means Florida isn’t going to be a safe place to live in,” he said.If the 2022 and 2023 sessions of the Florida legislature are anything to go by, DeSantis is betting that legislation targeting the state’s transgender population and consolidating Tallahassee’s control over the curricula of the state’s public schools and universities will also strike a chord among voters in the Sunshine state and beyond.Whether or not DeSantis does mount a presidential bid in 2024 remains to be seen, as would the eventual success of such a campaign.In the meantime, university professors, schoolteachers and members of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community will continue to feel besieged for the foreseeable future. Some educators predict the departure of many colleagues in the coming months and years.“We have a governor and a legislature who are going rogue to harm the state,” said the union president, Andrew Gothard. “These laws are going to cause a major exodus of faculty and students from Florida’s system of higher education.” More

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      Florida teacher fired for asking students to pen obituaries for active shooter drill

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      A Florida teacher who was fired from his school after asking his students to write their own obituaries in advance of an on-campus active shooter drill says he has no regrets about the assignment that cost him his job.“It wasn’t to scare them or make them feel like they were going to die, but just to help them understand what’s important in their lives and how they want to move forward with their lives and how they want to pursue things in their journey,” the dismissed psychology teacher, Jeffrey Keene, told NBC News.Keene’s dismissal once again has cast a spotlight on the persistently bizarre decisions within the public education system of Florida, which has banned discussions of gender and sexual identity in classrooms but whose Republican extremist governor, Ron DeSantis, staunchly supports keeping the guns which help fuel school shootings across the country as accessible as possible.According to NBC, Keene learned that his 11th- and 12th-grade students at Dr Phillips high school in the Orlando area would be rehearsing how to respond to a shooting attack at their campus during their first period on 4 April. That prompted him to ask his students to write their own biographical obituaries as classwork, reasoning that the assignment would cause them to reflect on their lives as they prepared to undergo the active shooter drill.“This isn’t a way to upset you or anything like that,” Keene recalled telling his class of 35 students. He added: “If you can’t talk real to them, then what’s happening in this environment?”Just one week earlier, an intruder shot and killed three nine-year-old students as well as three staffers at Covenant elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. Police shot and killed the intruder. The attack was one of more than 100 shootings at kindergarten through 12th-grade schools or during school-related activities in the US this year as of Saturday, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database resource.The murders at Covenant also occurred during what as of Saturday was one of more than 140 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four victims are wounded or killed.It later became apparent that someone was upset by Keene’s assignment. By second period that day, Keene said some of his students revealed to him that they had been interviewed by school officials about the obituaries. And in the middle of seventh period, he was told that he’d been fired from his job, which he had started in January.The public school district which oversees Dr Phillips high has largely declined to discuss the case. A spokesperson for the district only told NBC in a statement that an employee responsible for “an inappropriate assignment about school violence” had been fired.Keene said to NBC that he was too new of a hire to qualify for membership to the local teachers’ union, so he had no administrative method available to seek reinstatement to his job. The school district’s statement also noted that Keene was still completing his post-hiring probation, implying that his dismissal could be implemented more swiftly than for a teacher who had finished the trial period.Keene hopes to find another job in teaching and believes his assignment was appropriate, according to NBC.“I don’t think I did anything incorrectly,” Keene told the network. “I honestly didn’t think a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old would be offended or upset by talking about something we’re already talking about.”The steady presence of mass shootings and violence at schools in US news headlines has moved many to call for more meaningful gun control, but Congress has been unable to pass anything substantial, even as schools acknowledge their vulnerability by making students practice what to do if heavily armed intruders barge onto their campuses and try to shoot them to death.A bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden last year expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and funded some mental health and violence intervention programs. But the president is among many who say much stronger measures are needed, including an assault weapons ban that Congress has been unable to pass.Three days after the Nashville school murders and five days before Keene lost his job, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature voted to allow gun owners to carry around their firearms without a state permit.They did so at the behest of DeSantis, who has also successfully advocated for a legislative ban against classroom discussions of systemic racism, saying the concept joined learning about sexual and gender identity as one of the biggest threats to Florida’s schoolchildren.Florida’s 22 million or so residents make it the country’s third-most populous state. More

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      Democrats bid to use censorship law against DeSantis and ban his book

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      Democrats in Florida are attempting to use a state law that censors books in public schools against the governor who signed it, Ron DeSantis, by asking schools to review or ban the Republican governor’s own book, The Courage to be Free.“The very trap he set for others is the one that he set for himself,” Fentrice Driskell, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida state house, told the Daily Beast.DeSantis published The Courage to be Free in February, in what was widely seen as an opening shot in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He has said he wrote the book himself.Seeking to compete with Donald Trump – who enjoys convincing leads in polling – DeSantis has established himself as a ruthless culture warrior, willing to use government power against opposing interests and viewpoints.He signed the law regarding books in schools last year. It includes guidelines for content deemed inappropriate on grounds of race, sexuality, gender and depictions of violence.But the law has run into problems over interpretations of its language, not least when a children’s book about Roberto Clemente, a baseball legend who faced racial discrimination, landed at the centre of national controversy.Seeking to take advantage of such uncertainties, Florida Democrats are highlighting instances of language in DeSantis’s book which they contend could violate his own guidelines.As reported by the Beast, in The Courage to be Free, DeSantis “use[s] the terms ‘woke’ and ‘gender ideology’ 46 times and 10 times respectively, both of which could constitute ‘divisive concepts’ the governor has argued should stay out of curricula up to the college level”.DeSantis also claims students have been forced to “chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice” and, as well as describing violence at Black Lives Matter protests, cites a video showing “dead black children, dramatically warning … about ‘racist police and state-sanctioned violence’”.DeSantis also describes the 2017 mass shooting at congressional baseball practice in which Steve Scalise, a senior Republican, was seriously wounded.Such passages, Democrats contend (in what the Florida publisher Peter Schorsch called a “clever bit of trolling”), could fall foul of the governor’s own rules.According to the Beast, only one school district initially responded to Democrats’ complaints. Marion county, near Orlando, said no public school there possessed the governor’s book.Driskell told the Beast: “We’re leaning into one of [DeSantis’s] weaknesses.“… If America doesn’t want Florida’s present reality to become America’s future reality, people need to know what it’s like here. This is our way of fighting back, but also highlighting how ridiculous some of this becomes, right?” More