Duval School Board member Tony Ricardo is one of the six who voted to remove the book Identical. | Megan Mallicoat, Jacksonville Today
Published on April 2, 2025 at 4:02 pm
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With a 6-1 vote on Tuesday, the Duval County School Board voted to permanently remove the young-adult novel Identical by New York Times-bestselling author Ellen Hopkins from school libraries.
A committee tasked with reviewing the book had recommended to the board that it retain Identical in its high school libraries and add it to high school guidance offices also. The committee’s reasoning was not shared.
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More than two dozen people spoke about the book during Tuesday’s meeting. Most favored removing it, but some agreed with the review committee’s recommendation. The two factions snapped at each other throughout the hour-long public comment session, drawing warnings from Board Chair Charlotte Joyce and culminating in one speaker nearly getting herself removed from the room for disrupting the meeting while shouting at another person.
The book, which includes a story of a father sexually abusing his daughter and depicts self-harm by a teenager, has faced criticism from groups like Moms for Liberty and Citizens Defending Freedom. A handful of Duval high schools had copies of Identical on their shelves until it was pulled for review in 2023. The book’s Amazon listing says it’s geared toward ninth- through 12th-graders.
District 5 School Board member Reginald Blount called Identical “straight up pornography” and drew a comparison between keeping the book in high school libraries and putting a Hustler magazine in a first-grade classroom.
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“If we don’t make the right decisions, that’s where it’s going,” Blount said.
Getting here from there
Duval’s challenge of Identical began two years ago amidst a statewide rush to bring school libraries into compliance with new state guidance on implementing legislation like the HB 7 Individual Freedom Act — first known as the Stop WOKE Act — and House Bill 1069.
In November 2023, several people used their allotted time during public comment at a Duval school board meeting to read passages from the book aloud. The excerpts they selected were deemed by then-Board Chair Kelly Coker to be inappropriate for a public forum, and the meeting became contentious as one person’s microphone was turned off and he was escorted out of the room by a police officer.
On Tuesday, Joyce began the public comment portion with a disclaimer that echoed the earlier scene; she warned the audience that commenters may once again read excerpts.
“I just want to warn you that may happen, so if you have small children…use discretion,” Joyce said. “These passages potentially could be read, and they may be sexually explicit.”
Many of the same people who read from the book 16 months ago again spoke and read from the book or talked about it in more general terms — including Joey Marmo, the man who had been escorted from the room. He held his phone up to the mic, playing a video of his removal.
Many districts have dealt with book challenges faster than Duval, though Jacksonville made national news when photos of empty library shelves went viral in 2023 amid the district’s internal book review process.
As part of its response to the new laws, the district formed a review committee — which the district says is made up of four randomly selected volunteers — to advise the school board on book complaints. The Identical review was the committee’s first.
Identical had also been challenged in a number of other Florida school districts. Locally, Clay and St. Johns already removed the book from their collections, and Nassau’s review is pending. Statewide, most districts that had a challenge against the book decided to remove it or restrict access. Hillsborough opted last year to keep the book on shelves.
The first vote
As the board discussed the committee’s recommendation to keep the book, members Darryl Willie and Cindy Pearson separately suggested ways of limiting students’ access to the book while still keeping it available with parental permission.
The remaining five members — Duval’s conservative contingent — did not support any effort to retain the book.
“I want to remind everybody that this book is available in our public libraries. And so, if a parent wants their child to read this book, they can go to the Jacksonville Public Library and they can check it out or they can read it online or they can order it from Amazon,” April Carney said. “I do not believe that this material should be funded with taxpayer dollars.”
The Jacksonville Public Library’s online catalog shows it does not have any physical copies of the book in its collection, but does have it as an eBook and an audiobook.
“Amen to all of the people who came up here and said this is filthy, pornographic trash,” Charlotte Joyce said. “Enough. If you want your child to consume this filth, that is your right. But not with my vote with taxpayer money.”
Four board members said they’d read the book in preparation for Tuesday’s vote: Melody Bolduc, Carney, Pearson and Willie.
Willie said the book was “heavy” and not something he would recommend or want his own children to read, but students experiencing difficult situations at home might feel differently.
“We’re not talking about first graders — that’s not what we’re talking about,” Willie said. “We’re talking about age appropriate…and then figuring out how we create guides and guardrails for folks.”
Pearson said that before reading the book, she was leaning toward keeping it available with parental permission — but reading the book changed her mind.
“There were scenes, language, details in the book that pushed me over to the point of feeling like this particular book — and I will not say that I will feel this way about every book…but for this particular book, I do not believe that it belongs in a K-12 space,” Pearson said.
The board voted to permanently remove Identical from its libraries, with Willie the only member to vote against permanently removing the book.
Willie said this first vote was important in setting expectations for future book reviews.
“I think book-banning is outdated because students have unlimited access to everything digitally. I also believe that we’re a board who always has been thinking about parental rights, as well,” Willie said. “And I also believe that sometimes when we do things, it creates a precedent that’s a little scary sometimes.”
On the other hand, Blount said he couldn’t vote to keep the book available.
“My biggest concern is that if this is the norm — or this is the track that we’re going to stay on with these types of books — then what’s next? Where do we go from here? And what if the next author wants to push something even more graphic — maybe pictures?” Blount said. “I mean, we’re getting in a very dark area.”
