Last week, a permanent substitute math teacher was fired for posting a video of empty bookshelves at the Mandarin Middle School in Duval County, Florida. The video had gone viral on social media after a new statewide policy forced school faculty to remove books from classrooms and libraries until they could be fully reviewed.
Brian Covey learned about his dismissal approximately 24 hours after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters during a press conference that the video Covey took and posted online was a “fake narrative” and “not true.”
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Covey’s story starts on January 26, the day before he took the video, when he was taking his young kids to a literacy week-themed event at their elementary school, and his son told him the school took away all the books.
“I’m like, what do you mean, all the books,” Covey told Motherboard. “And he’s like, they took away all the classes and they either removed or put construction paper over all of the classroom books.”
The removals were part of the state’s new media specialist guidelines that went into effect earlier this year, which instruct teachers and librarians to cover or remove books from their respective libraries until it’s determined that they are free of what the state considers “pornography.” The state guidelines were authored with the input of right-wing groups like Moms 4 Liberty, and threaten teachers with felony charges if they provide students with unapproved books that are considered “prurient” and “offensive.” The definitions of these terms appear to be left intentionally vague, and many of the books that have been previously banned from schools in Florida and other states contain LGBTQ characters and themes.
Covey said his son also told him that librarians—which the state calls “media specialists”—weren’t offering classes, or at least much less frequently, until all the books that had been taken off Duval County Public School shelves were cross-referenced with a state-approved list.
“In order for the media center to be able to run, media specialists have to take time from reviewing books, which means it slows down the process of actually reviewing books, which means there’s less books available,” Covey added. “The media specialists I’ve talked to don’t even see an end of the tunnel. They just know this isn’t sustainable, but they’re trying to do it for the kids.”
While his kids were participating in the literacy event activities, Covey noticed behind book fair decorations what he thought were books taped off, like they were off limits. He later posted to Twitter what his son had told him and was stunned by the range of replies he received, many of which expressed disbelief.
“Somebody had mentioned something along the lines of ‘things that didn’t happen for $500,’” he recalled. “So I walked in to check in for my job and was just venting to the principal’s assistant that, you know, I can’t believe they removed all the books, like people outside of Duval County don’t believe it’s a real thing.”
According to Covey, the principal’s assistant told him to check out Mandarin Middle School’s own media center.
“So when I went upstairs, I took that video, it was just a little 17-second video,” he recalled. “I just decided to post a visualization because people were doubting my kids’ reality.”
The video went viral while Covey was teaching. But Covey didn’t hear anything—until February 15. That day, Covey went to work, as usual. He followed his lesson plans for converting metric units while English speaking students acted as translators for non-English speaking students with questions. Then, at the end of the day, he got a phone call from his employer, ESS, the education staffing agency that placed him at a Duval County Public School in October.
“I got a 45-second call from the staffing agency that my services were no longer needed for violating their cell phone and social media policy,” Covey told Motherboard.
He was also contacted by the reporter who confronted DeSantis at the press conference.
“As soon as I heard that [DeSantis] had called [the video] a fake narrative, I walked across the hall and took the same exact video, but only on those blank shelves, and at the end of it is the approved book lists for the entire middle school of 1,200 students,” he added.
On Friday, Duval County Public Schools announced the district had finished reviewing 6,000 books and posted a video that’s supposed to discredit Covey’s videos. But a quick scraping of the metadata clocks their video as being created that day, February 17, at 2:18 PM—five minutes before the account manager published the video with the following text: “The viral video you are sharing shows less than half the story. Yes, those shelves were empty. But they were in a room full of books. See the video below for the full story.”
According to Covey, the district never reached out to him with a reason why he was being let go, just ESS. But on Friday, a representative from Duval County Schools told a local TV news channel that Covey was fired because of his “misrepresentation of the books available to students in the school’s library and the disruption this misrepresentation has caused.”
In a joint statement emailed to Motherboard, Duval County Schools and ESS wrote that “it was determined that [Covey] had violated social media and cell phone policies of his employer. Therefore, ESS determined these policy violations made it necessary to part ways with this individual.”
A spokesperson for Duval County Schools also claimed that on the week Covey recorded the viral video, the library media center was in the same state it had been a month prior. “The only exception was that some of the fiction titles had been returned to the fiction shelves which were empty in the earlier, viral video,” the spokesperson wrote in an email sent to Motherboard. “All the non-fiction, biographies, reference materials, and fiction resources used in the curriculum have remained available to students without disruption.”
Even so, the state-mandated review process that initially called for the removal of books is not even close to being finished. Since Covey is really good at math, he was able to deduce that in 16 days, the district only made it through 0.375 percent of their titles.
“They are averaging 54 minutes per review with 52 certified media specialists… At this rate, it will take 13.4 years to complete,” he added.
Covey calls the consequences of the new media specialist guidelines an “unfunded project” because the Florida Department of Education did not assign additional staffing to help review the books.
“So they’ve taken out the media resource, or the media guidance resource or reading comprehension resource out of the students curriculum for an undetermined amount of time—at the current rate it’s over a decade—and it’s just surreal to me that this is the reality that I have to pay for my kids.”
