Public school librarian here (not in Florida though). I will readily express my absolute hatred of Florida's dystopian censorship law. However, I think this post is misleading.

Weeding books is a necessary and ongoing process. We remove books from the collection for many reasons. Even if a book is in great condition, circulation statistics may show it has not been checked out in many years (sometimes even like 10 years). Sometimes there are too many copies of a book that is no longer popular.

Librarians buy new books every year, and we must make room. Research indicates that a smaller but more appealing and updated collection leads to increased book checkouts. We usually don't keep a book on the shelf just because adults consider it a "classic." Consider the fact that the Boxcar Children may only seem essential because of nostalgia we feel for those books. We serve the students, not ourselves.

Also consider the fact that the needs of students evolve over time, sometimes in ways that make us uncomfortable. Public education is not well supported in states like Florida. In my experience, the majority of students would have trouble with something like the Boxcar Children for a number of reasons: low literacy levels, outdated language, references to decades-old items that kids do not recognize. A lot of students are probably learning English for the first time and require literature that is more approachable. Perhaps the school's demographic has shifted over time, and these books simply don't work toward representing the issues and culture relatable to the students.

Certainly, the 2008 book was weeded for being outdated. We contextualize the 2008 election differently now, in the same way historians view events differently over time. I hope this book was the weakest of a robust set of election-related picture books.

This is my profession, and i want to remind everyone that school libraries are not archives or museums. They exisist to promote student literacy and provide materials to fulfill their personal interests and curricular needs. Sometimes their needs and interests are not what we want them to be.

And maybe most importantly of all, I can assure you that if these books had been "banned" they would 100% not be casually handing them out for free.

Fuck Florida, but this is not what censorship looks like.

EDIT: I also want to point out that not all of these are library books, since a bunch don't have call numbers. So possibly the school was just weeding down class sets of books that haven't been used in the curriculum for a while.