DEEP READS
The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore
She loved books. And in a time of spreading book bans in public schools, that’s why this Florida librarian had to quit.
Tania Galiñanes as she closes in on her last day as librarian at Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee, Fla.
By Ruby Cramer
Photographs by Thomas Simonetti
Nov. 11 at 6:05 a.m.
Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.
Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School.
Last box, and then after this week, she would no longer be a librarian at all.
She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.
“What’s the name of this thing?” he said. “Freedom Week?”
She exhaled loudly. “Freedom Week.”
“Oh, good,” he said. “You know about this.”
Yes, Tania knew about it. It was one more thing the state had asked of them, a mandatory recitation of parts of the Declaration of Independence “to reaffirm the American ideals of individual liberty,” along with something else she had heard from the district. “They asked us to please not celebrate Banned Books Week,” Tania said.
She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.
Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”
That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.
And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.
A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.
Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave. Tania took the first book out of the box. It had been sent over by a teacher who, like teachers throughout the school, was concerned that the books inside her classroom might be in violation of the law. She looked at the title: “Music for Sight Singing.” She took out another. “30 Songs for Voice and Piano.” She took out another. “Star Wars: A Musical Journey, Easy Piano.”
There was no sexual content to review here. Barely any content at all. She was looking at sheet music.
It should have been absurd, kneeling over a box of music she couldn’t read, sent over by a music teacher who wasn’t sure what she was allowed to have in her classroom. But now the library was a place where things like this happened.
The books went back in the box. The box went on a cart. Tania asked one of her student assistants to return it to the teacher’s classroom, and then she walked to her desk and to the purple folder.
Inside, there were printouts of 79 pages of Florida law and statute that told her how to think about what students should and should not read. One law made it easier for people to challenge books they believed contained sexual conduct or age-inappropriate material. Another defined that term, “sexual conduct,” in layer upon layer of clinical specificity.
When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.
All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian.
It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.
Tania saw the headlines in other states, too: A new law in Iowa to prohibit library materials that include “depictions of a sex act.” A new plan in Houston to convert parts of some public school libraries into discipline centers for misbehaving students. Meanwhile, in Tania’s county, the public library had just eliminated late fees, as a means of attracting more readers. That was the whole idea, Tania had thought. But in schools, the whole idea was getting lost somewhere. Or at least that’s what she wanted to convey in January, when she wrote an email to the Florida Department of Education. She had just taken its mandatory library training. “Have we forgotten that students should be reading for pleasure?” she wrote.
