Mike Andoscia. PROVIDED

Florida legislation that has led to battles statewide over what books are acceptable in the classroom, claimed a Lee County high school teacher who had been recognized multiple times by the School District of Lee County as one of its best teachers.

Mike Andoscia, a North Fort Myers High School teacher who had earned commendations as a Golden Apple Teacher of Distinction in the district, resigned from his job in January after he said he refused to cover up more than 600 of the books in his classroom library while they were undergoing district review, a new state requirement.

At the time of his resignation, Andoscia was also under an administrative investigation for what he believes was the way he addressed another controversial state law governing the use of preferred pronouns for students in the classroom.

In January, on the day after Martin Luther King Day, Andoscia arrived at his classroom in the morning to find that all of the books in his classroom had been removed. They had been taken to the filing room, and he was told by the school’s principal to take them home.

“At first it was confusion. I don’t think outrage is specific enough,” Andoscia said about his feelings when he saw his books were gone from the classroom. “I was just outraged.” He took a video of the room and posted it on YouTube.

He met with North Fort Myers High School Principal Debbie Diggs who asked him why he didn’t keep his books covered, Andoscia said.

“I said ‘this is absurd, and it’s fascism,'” Andoscia said. Two days later, he submitted his letter of resignation effective Jan. 19.

According to Andoscia, the book ban saga began after the end of the previous school year when he began to catalog all of the books in his classroom to comply with the state’s Curriculum Transparency Act. The law requires all books in the classroom to be made publicly available and allows for a complaint process to review the books. Last year, the state passed an additional law governing books in the classroom, known as House Bill 1069, which requires the removal of books after they are challenged until a complaint is resolved.

Since that time, Andoscia said fewer than 50 of the books in his classroom were reviewed and a handful were challenged — including William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” The Faulkner novel, based on the trials and tribulations of a family in rural Mississippi, has frequently been named one of the greatest American novels of the 20th Century. Faulkner is widely considered as one of the preeminent authors of the Deep South.

Andoscia said he appealed the challenges, with one of the challenges being overruled but listed as pending in the system. While he was awaiting the review, he was told to cover up his books. Other teachers took their books and put them in closets or took them home.

Andoscia initially covered them with project paper after being told by the school principal to have them covered before open house. He wrote over the project paper the words “These books have not yet been vetted by the state and may contain dangerous knowledge.”

After open house, Andoscia, took off the project paper as he said he didn’t want to send a message to students that it was acceptable for the books to be covered. “That’s not what I wanted my kids to learn. That the state is going to watch what we read or the state should have anything to do with what we read. That’s not a free society,” he said.

School District of Lee County spokesperson Rob Spicker said that Superintendent Dr. Chris Bernier and the district would not be commenting on the allegations of Andoscia.

“Since the teacher is no longer an employee of the School District it is inappropriate for us to comment,” Spicker said.

As part of the new state law, the district is required to employ media specialists to review all of the district’s books. A Sunshine Law records request sent to the district for a copy of its contract for media specialists and how many media specialists were employed, had not been responded to as of press time.

The district employs approximately 6,000 teachers creating quite the burden for reviewing books. Andoscia said he doesn’t believe the district hired enough media specialists to review the books.

It’s not quite clear how the books are reviewed, though, according to sources a database of how other districts have ruled on books is checked on. Otherwise, the media specialists must review books individually which can be time consuming.

Most of Andoscia’s books had not been reviewed.

After a book is challenged, the School District of Lee County uses an ad-hoc committee of district administrators and staff to review the challenge. The committee includes a director of curriculum, English Language Arts Coordinator, media specialist, curriculum advisory representative, equity and diversity representative and district advisory representative.

The district keeps a list of books that have been challenged on its website at leeschools.net/calendars/public_meetings/challenge_to_instructional_media_committee.

According to the district’s database for challenged books, five books by the author Ellen Hopkins were removed due to their graphic material. A sixth book, a novel by E. Lockhart titled “Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything,” was removed after objections sent in an email from a name that was redacted citing a review by the Florida Citizens Alliance.

Other books reviewed by the committee were allowed to continue being used in classrooms. The anti-war novel “Slaughterhouse Five” was challenged but ruled to be allowable in classrooms but restricted to grades 9-12.

Andoscia taught history, honors economics, sociology and philosophy classes.

A North Fort Myers High teacher for the last eight years, he previously taught at Lehigh Acres where he first grew his classroom library after being encouraged by former principal Dr. Jeffrey Spiro.

“He had a focus on reading-rich classrooms as diverse as possible to appeal to student interests,” Andoscia said.

When the Lehigh Acres high school library began being converted to a media center like other libraries throughout the state and the number of books were thinned out, Andoscia grabbed as many as he could for his classroom library. Throughout the years, he has taken pride in the diverse set of books in his library. They range from world history books to guides on reptiles and amphibians to field guides on fishing. “I had these books in my class for a long time,” he said.

“If you go to any school now and ask for a school library, you get pointed to a media center,” Andoscia said. Instead of rows of books, the media centers are now occupied by computers and often used for tests, Andoscia said.

Andoscia said he used to have 20 to 30 students a year checking out books from his library. In recent years that number dropped to about 10. In the last year, following the controversy over the state’s new laws to regulate books in the classroom, Andoscia said only one book was checked out: “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.

“I can’t help but think this is watering down to (students),” Andoscia said. “The kids may have been intimidated.”

Before teaching at Lee County, Andoscia had a background in working with students deemed at risk. At North Fort Myers, he was the sponsor of the school’s Gay Straight Alliance Club.

Around the same time that Andoscia wasn’t following directives to cover up his books that were being reviewed, Andoscia ran into a problem with another controversial state law involving Florida schools.

In one of his classes, Andoscia told students that while he couldn’t address any of them by their preferred pronouns any more due to a new state law, he would be willing to discuss alternatives. That talk apparently led to an investigation by the school district that Andoscia said he found out about after former students told him they were being pulled out of class to answer questions about what he had said around the same time that books were removed from his classroom.

Andoscia said he wouldn’t find out formally about the investigation until after he submitted a letter of resignation. His principal, Diggs, asked him to reconsider, he said. As part of the district’s investigation into his conduct, the matter will be referred to the state and Andoscia could potentially lose his teaching license in the state for five years.

House Bill 1069 prevents schools from compelling teachers to address students by their pronouns and also limits how teachers can use pronouns in the classroom in murky language. The law is the subject of a lawsuit brought by three Florida teachers and the Florida Poverty Law Center. The teachers include an unidentified Lee County public school teacher.

The law also extends the state’s prohibition on classroom instruction regarding sexual orientation and gender identity through the eighth grade. Previously, such discussion was limited through the third grade.

The law states that an employee of a public school “may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.”

Previous to the new law, Andoscia said students who preferred to be called by a pronoun informed the district with permission from their parents and each teacher was made aware. Andoscia said teachers were made aware of the pronoun preferences again this school year, but weren’t allowed to use them even with a permission slip from parents.

Shortly before his resignation, Andoscia said his classroom was observed though he was never confronted over allegations of how he spoke to students regarding the law governing the use of pronouns in the classroom.

At a press conference last month at a time when the so-called “book ban” laws were getting national attention, Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to temper the flames surrounding the law at a time when published reports have documented the removal of hundreds of books from some classrooms.

During the conference in Orlando, DeSantis and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said they weren’t “banning” books but they only wanted to ensure that inappropriate books weren’t making their way into the classrooms of schools.

DeSantis professed that the law wasn’t meant to be a book ban and that it wasn’t intended to restrict the classics from schools. DeSantis questioned whether some districts were overreacting to the law and wondered aloud whether those without students in the school should have an equal input on which books were allowed as parents of students in the school.

“We have to empower parents, at the same time, to just have random people who don’t even have kids in the school system and just start objecting thing to just gum up the works, that is not something we should be incentivizing,” DeSantis said.

“He knows what he is doing,” Andoscia said. “There is a lot of fear and anxiety over this.”

A message seeking comment from DeSantis was not returned.

“It’s scary to me, the idea that this was normalized,” Andoscia said. “It’s terrifying to me.”