Fact check: Ron DeSantis on Amanda Gorman poem being pulled from a Florida elementary school library

By Kate Grise, CNN

(CNN) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he “had nothing to do with” a poem recently being moved from an elementary school library to a middle school library.

“This is some book of poems. I never heard of it. I had nothing to do with any of this, but it was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library and the school, or the school district determined that was more appropriate to be in the middle school library. So, they moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library. Legacy media outlets are saying that [Miami-Dade County] is banning books, literally just moving it from one part of the school to the next is now considered a book ban,” the Republican governor said at the Florida Parent Educators Association Homeschool Convention in Orlando.

The poem in question – Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” which she wrote for Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration – was removed from the elementary school section of a Miami-Dade County K-8 public school to the middle school section of the school’s media center, CNN reported last week.

Facts First: DeSantis is correct that the school moved the book, but his claim that he “had nothing to do with any of this” ignores that he signed the law that allows any parent to complain about specific books in schools and mandates districts have a plan to address the complaints.

Among its provisions, HB 1467, which DeSantis signed in 2022, requires school districts to “establish a process by which the parent of a public school student or a resident of the county may contest the district school board’s adoption of a specific instructional material.”

A parent of a student at the Miami-Dade County school objected to “The Hill We Climb,” according to documents first obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project whose authenticity was confirmed by CNN.

It “is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,” the complaint said, adding that the poem would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.”

A materials-review panel at the school declined to remove the poem from the school entirely but did decide to move it to the library’s middle school section, which is for grades six through eight, according to minutes of an April meeting of the committee that were obtained by the nonprofit.

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CNN’s Kit Maher, Andy Rose and Eric Levenson contributed to this report.