The Duval County School Board has voted to remove its sole copy of a graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, a classic on government control of thought and expression often mentioned in debates about censorship.
The school district’s roughly 200 copies of the original text are not affected by the board’s October 6 vote.
In urging the board to remove the graphic version by adapter/illustrator Fido Nesti, board member Tony Ricardo cited a September 23 memo from Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack telling school districts to set stricter rules for reviewing library and classroom books.
“I believe it does not pass the commissioner’s litmus test for pornography,” Ricardo told the board.
Ricardo said after the meeting that he has no objections
to the Orwell original, which has occasionally been challenged in other school districts.
“It’s important. It’s a piece of what we would call classic literature,” he said. “... But the graphic version departs from it,” Ricardo said, by supplying images that the text-only book requires readers to conjure from their minds.
The graphic novel had been considered by school district reviewers and Superintendent Christopher Bernier recommended that the adaptation be available in a high school library to students in grades 10 through 12. Ninth-grade students would have needed parental permission.
Members didn’t object to that recommendation during a September 15 review of the agenda for the October meeting, but Ricardo said Mack’s memo came after that and put the choice in a different light.
The board also approved separate recommendations from Bernier and district staff to remove single copies of three more modern fiction titles, Misery by Stephen King and Jodi Picoult's Handle with Care and The Tenth Circle. Books by both authors are among the most frequently removed titles in Florida school systems.
Mack warned districts in his memo that “the [Education] Department will hold districts, and the superintendents who lead them, accountable for failing to protect students from inappropriate content and material.”
Mack wanted school districts to cross-check the state’s official list of removed books with their own lists of material to be reviewed.
“Several districts, including Clay, Escambia, and Nassau, have already removed or discontinued substantial numbers of titles following review. Delaying until a district becomes the subject of the next public controversy is not an acceptable approach,” Mack wrote.
Member Darryl Willie noted that school boards are each responsible for adhering to state law but said the law hasn’t been changed by another school district’s decision.
Willie and member Cindy Pearson cast the only votes against removing Nesti’s adaptation which included an illustration portraying an intimate moment between a couple.
Member Melody Bolduc, a longtime teacher, said she has had students who would have benefitted by being able to access the story through a graphic novel.
“When I looked at it, it didn’t evoke anything from me,” she said. “Black and white pencil drawings of the figure of woman. ... It wasn’t shocking.” But she said other people told her they found it disturbing or objectionable, so she cast the choice as a “gray area” where there might be difference of opinion.
In 2023, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union published a staff list of favorite banned books that included Nesti’s volume “just for the exquisite irony of it.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Duval School Board bars '1984' adaptation from library after state memo
