Sarasota County Schools has 90 days to audit its library shelves and pull sexually explicit books or risk losing state money.

Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack sent a seven-page memorandum to every district superintendent and charter school leader Wednesday, ordering proactive removal of sexually explicit material from school libraries and classrooms. The directive applies statewide, including to Sarasota County Schools and Superintendent Terry Connor.

Districts that don't comply face losing state funds, grants, Florida Lottery money and other legislative appropriations under Florida Statute 1008.32. The State Board of Education could also bar noncompliant districts from competitive grants and require periodic reporting.

"A process that depends on a parent discovering explicit material, reading it in a public meeting, and then forcing a district response is not only severely flawed; it is administrative neglect masquerading as either ignorance or ineptitude," Mack wrote in the memo.

Nine-point plan requires audits, parent panels and certification

Mack's nine-point plan requires superintendents to issue written directives to principals, launch layered collection audits, appoint Library Materials Integrity Panels that include parents, and freeze unvetted book donations. Principals must personally certify compliance at midyear.

Districts must also cross-check the Florida Department of Education's published list of removed or discontinued books against their own collections. If another county already pulled a title, any district holding the same book must review it.

The memo also applies the department's "public meeting comfort" test: If a librarian would not be comfortable reading a passage aloud at a public meeting, the librarian should lean toward keeping that book off the shelf.

Current Florida law allows districts to review and remove books after a complaint, as the Sun reported. It does not explicitly require districts to preemptively remove titles or cross-check the statewide removal list. Mack's directive goes further, treating reactive-only review as insufficient under Florida Statute 1006.28.

Hillsborough board meeting prompted the statewide push

Mack pointed to a recent Hillsborough County school board meeting where parents read aloud from books on library shelves. Titles included "Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out" by Susan Kuklin, "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison and "A Court of Wings and Ruin" by Sarah J. Maas. He said those books should have been caught before a parent had to flag them.

More than 50 Florida districts had not removed any books from school libraries during the 2024-25 school year, according to Bay News 9. Mack issued the directive weeks after the state released its 2025-26 challenge and removal list.

Sarasota's new board majority faces the mandate

The directive lands as Sarasota County's school board is shifting. Voters elected a progressive-leaning majority in the August 2026 primary. Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry won their seats by more than 10 percentage points and will join incumbents Tom Edwards and Liz Barker. Tennimon and Mayberry campaigned on ending culture-war clashes over book removals, LGBTQ inclusion and immigration enforcement.

Connor and Sarasota board members had not publicly responded to Mack's directive as of Friday.

If the district does not meet the 90-day deadline, which falls around Dec. 22, the department warned it would open formal probable-cause investigations and could restrict the district from acquiring new library materials until it demonstrates compliance.