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Escambia School Board Votes To Remove 18 Books. Here’s The List.
June 19, 2025
The Escambia County Board has voted to remove 15 books as recommended by the superintendent.
At this week’s school board meeting, Superintendent Keith Leonard recommended the removal of the books from all media centers and classroom libraries. The board also approved removing three books that have been identified as pornographic by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.
He cited the following reasons: “These are all classified as adult novels. They contain graphic descriptions and depictions of sexual conduct which are not appropriate for minors in Escambia County Public Schools. Additionally, no school district employee holding a media specialist certification has selected these titles for inclusion in their library collections; accordingly, they cannot be made available to students through a school district media center.”
Most of the books have already been removed by at least one other county in Florida, while one — “Lexicon” by Max Barry — has never been checked out by a student in Escambia County since it was first acquired in 2014.
The 15 books being removed on the recommendation of the superintendent are:
Lexicon” by Max Berry
“Milk and Honey” by Rupi Kaur
“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy
“Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood
“Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood” by Sarah Maas
“Triangles” by Ellen Hopkins
“The Sun and Her Flowers” by Rupi Kaur
“Home After Dark: A Novel” by David Small
“Home Body” by Rupi Kaur
“My Dark Vanessa” by Kate Russell
“White Knight” by Sean Murphy
“Zahra’s Paradise” by Amir & Khalil
“Collateral” by Ellen Hopkins
“Maestros” by Steve Skroce
“Woodcuts of Women” by Dagoberto Gilb
The three books removed to follow the attorney general’s recommendation are:
What Girls are Made of” by Elana Arnold
“Beautiful” by Amy Reed
“Breathless” by Jennifer Niven
Comments
13 Responses to “Escambia School Board Votes To Remove 18 Books. Here’s The List.”
I searched for Lexicon. The author got his own book banned to increase sales. Milk and Honey contains different themes, but one is how to deal with sexual assault. The God of Small Things has some graphic sexual language. This list is a mixed bag. Books that could be important to students should be kept separate perhaps, instead of banning them. In the time of the internet, banning a book seems pointless.
These books aren’t banned… They were removed…
You can’t still buy these from Amazon…
YOU want YOUR kids to have them… Buy them for them…
The schools job is to educate them…
Not raise them… That’s the parents job…
Book bans are wrong. It’s a library, treat as such. As to what a child or teen reads, how about the parents step up and do their responsibility to the level required and not take choices from others.
I approve of the books being removed. However, kids are looking at the same stuff on their phones everyday .
If you can’t read excerpts out loud during board meetings or PTA meetings because it’s too graphic then it doesn’t belong in our kid’s schools, period! Parental freedom is buying the paperback book on Amazon for $10 if you want your kid reading the book. It’s not the community or tax payers responsibility to make sure your kid has access to pornography at school.
I think that if you provide a wide variety of age appropriate books, students can enjoy all genres. If their parents allow them to read books that are not provided by the public school system, they can take them to the public library and they can get them there. The school library should provide only books necessary for school related projects.
we need every book that was ever written in every library in the United States if not then I would call it book banning
Well, the scenes depicted in some of the books are really bad.
What about this one “Two young ladies got their father drunk, raped him while he was unconscious and got pregnant by him”.
Wouldn’t you ban a book with stories like that from schools ???
We need to get ALL books out of the libraries!!
We dare not let people have the freedom to decide for themselves.
(And then change the name because libraries are supposed to have books.)
I wonder why the concept of governmentally enforced ignorance brings out the sarcasm in me.
Why aren’t those screaming for Parental freedom in education policies for book bans? It shouldn’t be the government deciding what books my kids read. That’s for me to decide. If you don’t want your kids reading those books, don’t let them. That’s parental freedom.
Who purchased the books to begin with? Maybe that’s where the problem is. Likely tech savvy children will now do a search online and find a downloadable .PDF file, now that the reading list is considered taboo. LOL. Will we be considering all “Far Right” books be legal to read too? What’s next: (Ref. List_of_destroyed_libraries Wikipedia)
Some look at this as what the Nazi’s did – banning books. But this is a very different set of circumstances. Every parent should monitor what their children watch on TV, read, which religious services they go to, and whatever is going into their children’s minds. You wouldn’t want your 14 year old reading material that is written for adults, you wouldn’t want your 8 year old reading graphic horror stories, you wouldn’t want your 11 year old reading communist propaganda, so our educators need to be selective in choosing appropriate reading material for the children in our county! Stand firm, school officials!
About time.
They should be teaching at least the basics. The adult stuff they can choose, if they wish, when they are adults.