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Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

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Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classroom libraries are a big deal. Every step taken that makes a teacher's job riskier, less pleasant, or less like what they want to be doing (teaching kids, without having to worry about whether some plainly-positive action is legal), drives good teachers out of the profession.

What's the difference between a classroom library and the school library? I'm German, I've never heard of classroom libraries or anything similar in Germany. We have school libraries that provide the standard text books and most of the novels etc, but they're generally not walk-ins where you pick something to read.

"Classroom library" makes it sound a lot more formal than it is. Picture like a bookshelf in the corner that students can pick a book from of during a designated reading time if they didn't bring their own.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were some books that some segment of voters didn't approve of that certain school libraries were providing. This seems like a backdoor way to stop that while bypassing having to go through controversial school board meetings and/or 1A constitutionality issues to block those books. Not to say this isn't insane, just explaining how I think it happened.

[flagged]

equally dystopian agenda? One side is removing all books that aren't on a whitelist.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#73

If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.

It didn't used to be a law, so clearly something has happened that made this idea popular enough to be passed into law.

I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classroom libraries are a big deal. Every step taken that makes a teacher's job riskier, less pleasant, or less like what they want to be doing (teaching kids, without having to worry about whether some plainly-positive action is legal), drives good teachers out of the profession.

It also drives families with kids out of Florida to more sane educational operating environments. Florida already has the worst teacher shortage in the nation: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/01/22/our-child...

It looks like Florida public school enrollment is increasing[1] by quite a lot. It's up to 3,032,800 for Fall 2023 from 2,903,500 in 2020[2], only beat by Arizona, Alaska, and Utah.

[1]https://www.fldoe.org/finance/fl-edu-finance-program-fefp/ft...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.20.a...

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#75
post #37

If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.

There's actually a very simple argument: The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. Keeping the books out of the library is the best practical method of stopping this, because directly controlling the contents of the curriculum is hard to enforce. That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible…

> Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries.

What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#77
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Conflating Spain with events in another European country, as if the EU (of which Ukraine isn't even part of) were comparable to the United States, is ridiculous. You clearly have no grasp of history or geography, let alone modern politics.

[flagged]

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#78
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Conflating Spain with events in another European country, as if the EU (of which Ukraine isn't even part of) were comparable to the United States, is ridiculous. You clearly have no grasp of history or geography, let alone modern politics.

Came here to say pretty much this. Conflating two states in a nation with two different nations in the EU isn’t exactly the best way to say “everything is ok here”.
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