It was all fun and games until someone got fired.
Liberal public school teachers and faculty in Florida recently thought they were making a political statement by showing empty school library shelves on social media.
The point was a protest against a new state law, enacted by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, that required schools to train librarians on state standards for acquiring and distributing books — including a provision that declared handing out materials considered pornographic was considered a felony.
The videos were, in fact, misleading. The law did not ban every book, or anything close to that.
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As The Free Press reported last week, 59 of 67 school districts provided the Education Department the totals of the books they had removed, and a majority of those — 33 — acknowledged that they didn’t take out any books.
One person who wanted in on the fun of poking DeSantis and his supporters was Brian Covey, a substitute teacher at Mandarin Middle School in Duval County, who posted one such video on Jan. 27.
Covey’s video went viral, attracting 13 million views, according to First Coast News.
And now he’s unemployed.
Covey was fired for posting the video — which DeSantis last week had singled out for spreading a “fake narrative” about the policy and its intent.
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In a statement, the Duval County school district said, “In discussion between the district and ESS [the organization that hires subs on the district’s behalf] regarding this individual’s misrepresentation of the books available to students in the school’s library and the disruption this misrepresentation has caused, it was determined that he had violated social media and cell phone policies of his employer.’
“Therefore,” the district added, ‘ESS determined these policy violations made it necessary to part ways with this individual.”
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