Florida Central High School students have been told they will not receive their yearbooks until they are censored
From the Associated Press
10 May 2022, 15:06
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LONGWOOD, Florida – Florida Central High School yearbooks will not be distributed until images of students holding rainbow flags and a “love is love” flag can be distributed while protesting against the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” state law covered.
District officials said they did not want anyone to think the school had supported dropouts.
Lyman High School principal Michael Hunter said in a statement Monday that “photos and descriptions” documenting student dropouts in March in response to Florida’s parental rights law in education should be “caught earlier in the review process.” “.
The bill, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in grades K through 3.
“Instead of reprinting the yearbook with significant costs and delays, we have chosen to cover this material, which is not in line with the board’s policy, so that the yearbooks can be distributed as soon as possible,” the director said in a statement.
In an email Tuesday, school district spokesman Michael Lawrence said the problem was not the protest, but how his yearbook portrayal could be interpreted as approved by the school, which would violate school board policies.
Lawrence noted that the yearbook dedicated a separate page to the Gay Straight Alliance Club and elsewhere showed students marching in pride and holding rainbow flags, and said the images were in line with policy.
“It’s not about the photos or the topic the students are protesting about,” said Lawrence, a communications officer at public schools in Seminol County. “If these items were captured earlier before printing, it’s probably possible that some simple editing / tuning happened to make this section consistent before printing.”
School officials decided that the cheapest solution would be to cover up this section so that the annual books could still be distributed to high school graduates before graduation and the rest of the students before summer vacation, he said.
The yearbook’s faculty adviser, Daniel Pomerantz, told Orlando Sentinel that she had been asked to check whether she was putting stickers on photos and captions depicting her departure. She said reprinting the 600th anniversary would cost $ 45,000.
“This really shouldn’t be happening, because all we did as journalists was document what was happening at our school on our campus,” Skye Tidemann, one of the yearbook’s editors-in-chief, told Sentinel. “It is not right to cover this up. … This is censorship. ”
Tidemann told WKMG that the students had to have a party on Monday to have anniversaries signed by their classmates, but this was canceled.
Students at a school in Longwood, near Orlando, have created the hashtag “#stopthestickers”, which is circulating on social media. They also planned a peaceful protest at a meeting of the Seminol County School Board on Tuesday night, WKMG reported.
MP Carlos G. Smith, a Democrat who is the first state-run LGBTQ Latin American legislator, said in a tweet that “censorship is a direct result of the law these students are protesting against. #WeWillNotBeErased in this so-called “free state”. “
DeSantis often cites the free state of Florida in his press conferences.
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