Dozens of books removed from Duval Schools shelves include ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ Maya Angelou

The Duval County school district is formally reviewing two books that activists are challenging on the basis that they are inappropriate for school libraries. If the novels by bestselling author Jodi Picoult are removed, they’ll join dozens of titles that the district has already removed from shelves on its own in recent years.

In recent months, the publicly posted list of not-approved books has more than doubled. Now, books including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, and two volumes of E.E. Cummings’ poetry are no longer allowed on school shelves.

Internal review removes dozens of titles

So far, formal challenges are not the primary way books are getting removed from the district’s collection — mostly, that’s happening as the result of Duval Schools’ ongoing internal book review.

Duval Schools made national news three years ago for covering and emptying library shelves while it began reviewing its library materials for unlawful content to try to adhere to rapidly changing content guidance from the state Education Department. Duval’s model of not staffing middle and high schools with certified media specialists made the work of evaluating the entire catalog of books more difficult, because in 2023, state law required certified media specialists to conduct the reviews. 

District spokesperson Laureen Ricks tells Jacksonville Today that two district media specialists are still working on the internal review of the more than 1.6 million books in the district’s collection. About three years ago, the district said it had completed 10,000 books. Duval Schools didn’t provide the current number before this story’s publication.

Ricks says, “The process began with elementary school collections and has since moved into middle and high school library materials, which accounts for the increase in titles added to the non‑approved list over time.”

A list of 50 titles called “Books Under Review 25-26,” is “reflective of what has been reviewed thus far in secondary (schools),” the district’s chief academic officer, Paula Renfro said in an email received under a public records request by Jacksonville Today. Sixty percent of those — the 30 books recently added to the not-approved list — were not approved under Florida Statute 847.012. One book, Ready Player One, was weeded from the collection because of low circulation. Nineteen of the books reviewed were approved.

At the rate that the document suggests, the review will take millennia to complete.

The current book challenges

In addition to the books the district removed on its own, it will soon reconsider Picoult’s Vanishing Acts and The Pact in response to formal challenges.

They were two of three books that Jacksonville resident and political activist Blake Harper, 67, presented to the School Board this month. (The third book Harper targeted, Stephen King’s historic thriller 11/22/63, “is not currently held within our collections,” Duval Schools spokesperson Laureen Ricks says.)

“We are submitting tonight the first three book challenges,” Harper told the board. He’d circulated a flier soliciting others to mount book challenges with him, and two others with no children enrolled in the district obliged. “These books violate state law, period, end of story,” Harper said.

Both of the challenges to Picoult’s novels mention profanity and sex. Where the complaint form asked whether the complainant had read the whole book, they indicated they had not and wrote that state statutes don’t require challengers to do so.

The challenges are attracting the attention of Picoult herself, who posted April 6 on Facebook: “Duval County FL is at it again. They’re trying to ban Vanishing Acts and The Pact. If you live nearby and believe in the freedom to read, now is the time to raise your voice.”

Her spokesperson told Jacksonville Today the author was “unavailable to participate” in an interview for this story. 

Florida law requires residents to be able to challenge school books on the basis that they are “inappropriate” for the grade level or age group to which they are made available. Non-parent residents, like Harper, may challenge one book per month. Parents may make unlimited challenges. 

According to statistics released this week by the American Library Association, only 3% of the book challenges nationwide in 2025 came from individual parents. Most were brought by “pressure groups, government officials and decision makers.” 

At the board meeting, Harper alluded to a group effort, using the word “we” several times. He did not clarify who “we” referred to specifically, and added, “We are not going to respond in the media in any way, shape or form about the work we’re doing.”

Jacksonville Today reviewed what appeared to be a recruiting email he sent prior to the meeting, which read, in part, “We need parents who have children in either public schools or home schools (stet) so that we start to catch up for lost time.”

Duval’s history of book challenges

The district’s book reconsiderations list shows book challenges going back to 1980. Most of the 77 documented book challenges resulted in books remaining on shelves.  

The earliest decision to remove a book came in the 1991-92 school year, when the district removed Onions in the Stew, a midcentury memoir by Betty MacDonald, who also wrote the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series of children’s books. The reason given: “Alcohol.”

Parents can also limit their child’s access to books and media materials by submitting a form to their school. 

Last year, the district received its first formal book challenge since Florida expanded book challenge laws. It resulted in the School Board’s 6-1 vote to remove the young-adult novel Identical by New York Times-bestselling author Ellen Hopkins. A review committee had encouraged the board to retain the book. 

The board has since revised its policy regarding the makeup of the review committee that advises the board, so it now consists of one representative appointed by each of the seven school board members and two nonvoting district staffers.

Amanda Kordeliski, president of the American Association of School Librarians and a public school librarian in Oklahoma, tells Jacksonville Today that media specialists curate their collections in response to their schools’ needs and interests. 

She says reviewers should consider the types of content that typically land books on challenged lists — profane language, drug usage and sexual situations — in the context of the surrounding plot.

And Supreme Court precedent — specifically something called the Miller Test — requires reviewers to consider the whole book when determining whether it’s obscene, Kordeliski says. 

“When you take out and just read a three-sentence excerpt or the most outrageous thing that you can find without the context of what the plot is, you do a huge disservice — not only to the creative work that you’re evaluating, but also to your readers, because sometimes how they’re experiencing the world is through a book,” Kordeliski says. “They can experience things, or learn about stressful events in the pages of a book without having to personally live that trauma or that event for themselves.”

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The district’s newly appointed review committee will hold its first meeting next week to begin the work to review Vanishing Acts. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 29, at 5:30 p.m. at the Schultz Center, 4019 Boulevard Center Drive. It’s open to the public.