Duval School Board removes district’s first challenged book, ‘Identical’
With a 6-1 vote on Tuesday, the Duval County School Board voted to permanently remove the young-adult novel Identical by New York Times-bestselling author Ellen Hopkins from school libraries.
A committee tasked with reviewing the book had recommended to the board that it retain Identical in its high school libraries and add it to high school guidance offices also. The committee’s reasoning was not shared.
More than two dozen people spoke about the book during Tuesday’s meeting. Most favored removing it, but some agreed with the review committee’s recommendation. The two factions snapped at each other throughout the hour-long public comment session, drawing warnings from Board Chair Charlotte Joyce and culminating in one speaker nearly getting herself removed from the room for disrupting the meeting while shouting at another person.
The book, which includes a story of a father sexually abusing his daughter and depicts self-harm by a teenager, has faced criticism from groups like Moms for Liberty and Citizens Defending Freedom. A handful of Duval high schools had copies of Identical on their shelves until it was pulled for review in 2023. The book’s Amazon listing says it’s geared toward ninth- through 12th-graders.
District 5 School Board member Reginald Blount called Identical “straight up pornography” and drew a comparison between keeping the book in high school libraries and putting a Hustler magazine in a first-grade classroom.
“If we don’t make the right decisions, that’s where it’s going,” Blount said.
Getting here from there
Duval’s challenge of Identical began two years ago amidst a statewide rush to bring school libraries into compliance with new state guidance on implementing legislation like the HB 7 Individual Freedom Act — first known as the Stop WOKE Act — and House Bill 1069.
In November 2023, several people used their allotted time during public comment at a Duval school board meeting to read passages from the book aloud. The excerpts they selected were deemed by then-Board Chair Kelly Coker to be inappropriate for a public forum, and the meeting became contentious as one person’s microphone was turned off and he was escorted out of the room by a police officer.
On Tuesday, Joyce began the public comment portion with a disclaimer that echoed the earlier scene; she warned the audience that commenters may once again read excerpts.
“I just want to warn you that may happen, so if you have small children…use discretion,” Joyce said. “These passages potentially could be read, and they may be sexually explicit.”
Many of the same people who read from the book 16 months ago again spoke and read from the book or talked about it in more general terms — including Joey Marmo, the man who had been escorted from the room. He held his phone up to the mic, playing a video of his removal.