Race left out of Rosa Parks story in revised weekly lesson text for Florida schools highlights confusion with Florida law

CNN
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Studies Weekly, a publisher that provides educational periodicals for Florida’s K-6 grades, revised one of their lesson plans for the 2022-2023 school year to take out race as the reason Rosa Parks was told to change her bus seat and why she was subsequently arrested.

The initial text, which reportedly said Parks “was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin,” was edited because “individuals in our curriculum team severely overreacted in their interpretation of HB 7 and made unapproved revisions,” Studies Weekly tells CNN in a statement.

Florida’s House Bill 7 restricts what can be taught to students about certain topics, including race. It went into effect as law last July and requires schools to submit instructional material to the state’s Department of Education for textbook review.

Studies Weekly says the revisions were missed due to errors in the quality assurance process, and they have taken corrective action and implemented safeguards to ensure nothing like this happens again.

“We find the omission or altering of historical facts to be abhorrent and do not defend it,” the publisher says in its statement. “Those unapproved changes have already been removed from our curriculum.”

Studies Weekly says the “unapproved changes were never finalized nor delivered to schools for classroom use.”

However, Stephana Ferrell, a parent and activist with the Florida Freedom to Read Project, tells CNN she was able to easily access the Rosa Parks lesson plan with the omissions online along with several other Black history lessons as late as the end of January while serving as a guest reviewer for Florida’s Department of Education.

According to Ferrell, any parent could sign up to be a guest reviewer and see any lesson plan that had been submitted to the state for inclusion in the 2022-2023 curriculum.

The omission highlights some of the difficulties book publishers now face while trying to comply with HB 7.

Studies Weekly said in a statement to CNN that Florida’s Department of Education had not provided guidance on how the law applies to the publisher’s existing texts. “Studies Weekly, like every publisher, has had to decipher how to comply with their legislation,” the statement read.

“It is…