Duval School Board Votes to Remove '1984' Graphic Novel — a Book About Censorship — After State Memo

The short version: The Duval County School Board voted Oct. 6 to remove its sole copy of the graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 — a book about censorship — after Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack's Sept. 23 memo pushed districts to tighten book reviews. The board also pulled Stephen King's Misery and two Jodi Picoult titles the same night. The district's roughly 200 copies of Orwell's original text were not affected.

A school board voted to remove a book about the dangers of removing books. You can't write this stuff.

The target was 1984: The Graphic Novel, adapted and illustrated by Fido Nesti — the district's single copy. Superintendent Christopher Bernier had recommended keeping the adaptation for grades 10–12, with parental permission for ninth graders. Then Mack's Sept. 23 memo arrived, directing stricter review of library and classroom books, and the calculus changed.

The vote

Board member Tony Ricardo urged removal, arguing the adaptation did not pass what he called "the commissioner's litmus test for pornography." Mack's memo had warned districts that the department will "hold districts, and the superintendents who lead them, accountable for failing to protect students from inappropriate content," noting that Clay, Escambia, and Nassau counties had already removed substantial numbers of titles.

Members Darryl Willie and Cindy Pearson were the only votes against removal. Member Melody Bolduc, a longtime teacher, called it a "gray area" and said students would have benefited from the graphic format — the visual adaptation that makes a dense classic accessible to reluctant readers.

The same night, the board also approved removing single copies of Stephen King's Misery and Jodi Picoult's Handle with Care and The Tenth Circle.

The irony, which is not subtle

Orwell's 1984 is the foundational text about state control of information — the novel that gave us Big Brother, the memory hole, and Newspeak. Removing the graphic adaptation while keeping 200 copies of the original text is, from a certain angle, a distinction without a difference. From another angle, it's the difference that matters most: the adaptation exists precisely for the students least likely to pick up the 328-page original.

Thirteen books were challenged in Duval County Public Schools this past school year, with the 1984 graphic novel among eight titles pending official review as of June. One DCPS student, Mya Smith, made a documentary — Words on Trial — about the removals. The students are paying closer attention than the adults seem to think.

The statewide pattern

Duval is not an outlier; it's a data point. Florida's book-removal machinery has been accelerating since the state's 2023-era library laws, with commissioners' memos and district-level challenges creating a pipeline that runs from a single parent's complaint to a board vote in months. The Sept. 23 memo from Mack formalized the pressure: superintendents are now personally on notice.

The numbers tell the story of the pipeline. Thirteen books were challenged in Duval County Public Schools this past school year alone, with the 1984 graphic novel among eight titles pending official review as of June. Mack's memo cited Clay, Escambia, and Nassau counties as districts that had already removed substantial numbers of titles — presented as a model, not a warning. The message to every other superintendent in the state was legible: get ahead of this, or we'll get ahead of you.

What makes the Duval vote distinctive is the collision between the process and the particular book. Board member Ricardo's argument — that the adaptation fails "the commissioner's litmus test for pornography" — is the standard vocabulary of the current removal wave. Applied to Orwell, it produces the kind of sentence that writes its own commentary: a book about the state's power to dictate what people read, removed by the state, using a test the state wrote.

Who actually loses the book

The district kept roughly 200 copies of Orwell's original text. Nobody is arguing that 1984 has been erased from Duval County. But the graphic novel was the district's only copy of the adaptation — and adaptations exist for a reason. Nesti's version is the on-ramp: the edition for the tenth-grader who won't pick up the 328-page original, the visual learner, the reluctant reader who might discover Orwell through panels instead of paragraphs and then, maybe, go back for the real thing.

Melody Bolduc, the board member and longtime teacher who called the vote a "gray area," was making exactly this point: students would have benefited from the graphic format. Teachers know that the choice is rarely between the adaptation and the original. It's between the adaptation and nothing.

And the students are watching. Mya Smith, the DCPS student who made the documentary Words on Trial about the district's removals, represents the cohort these policies are supposedly protecting — teenagers documenting, in real time, the adults deciding what they're allowed to read. There's a throughline from Orwell's Winston Smith keeping a secret diary to a Jacksonville student pointing a camera at a school board. The book keeps finding its readers, with or without the library's copy.

The question the vote raises

The question the Duval vote raises — and the reason this story travels beyond Jacksonville — is where the line sits between curation and censorship. A district keeping 200 copies of the original while removing the one copy adapted for struggling readers is making a choice about who gets to read Orwell, not whether Orwell gets read. That's a thinner distinction than it looks.

Superintendent Bernier's original recommendation — keep the adaptation for grades 10–12, with parental permission for ninth graders — was the compromise position: access with guardrails, the kind of calibrated judgment school administrators are hired to make. The Sept. 23 memo overrode that judgment from Tallahassee, and the board followed the memo. Local control, in this instance, meant the state telling the district what local control looks like.

The irony will outlive the news cycle. Somewhere in a Duval County classroom, a teacher is about to explain to students why the graphic novel they heard about isn't in the library anymore — and the explanation will require describing the book's argument about censorship, which will require describing the book, which is, in the end, the book doing its job anyway.

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