expanded “Don’t Say Gay” law.Charlotte County Schools Superintendent Mark Vianello and Michael McKinley, the attorney for the Charlotte County Schools, recently responded to questions from the district’s librarians at a July meeting asking whether the law required the removal of books with LGBTQ characters but contained no explicit sex scenes.“Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers,” Vianello and McKinley said in response, according to a district memo obtained under a public information request by the Florida Freedom to Read Project.The nonprofit group, which opposes the law’s provisions making it easier to challenge or remove books from schools, provided the memo to The Associated Press last week.After receiving negative press, the district backed off slightly from an across-the-board ban, clarifying that it primarily applied to elementary and middle schools.The district said that high school libraries could keep non-explicit books with LGBTQ characters and themes in their collections, but could not use any of those books in classroom instruction, according to the investigative journalism website Popular Information.The expansion of the “Parental Rights in Education” law — dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics — passed earlier this year after conservatives said the original 2022 law didn’t go far enough in stopping LGBTQ-themed materials from being accessed by minors.Under the new restrictions, the ban on LGBTQ content was applied to all grades — except in rare instances for some high school biology or health classes.The law also allows any county resident — regardless of whether they have children enrolled in school — to demand the removal of books
