Re: Complaint Against Collier County Public School District and Collier County School Board Pursuant to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Specifically, this complaint alleges that the County has created a sex- and race-based hostile environment for LGBTQIA+ students and students of color by targeting and removing numerous classroom and library materials that feature people of color and LGBTQIA+ characters and authors, that discuss racial identity and race-based discrimination, and that discuss LGBTQIA+ identity and LGBTQIA+ discrimi. [...] Discrimination is ongoing and involves the County’s course of conduct against LGBTQIA+ students and students of color in the form of a hostile educational beginning in 2022 and continuing through the present. [...] The State has made clear the potential punishment for non-compliance is a third degree felony (FL Statute 847.12).” On the CCPS media services’ website, the County included a spreadsheet listing the titles and authors of the banned books, the date that each book was reviewed, and “specific examples of explicit sexual content from the book reviewed.”27 Some, but not all, of the removed books were t. [...] In August 2023, an individual emailed the members of the Board to “report” a poster in a CCPS classroom.72 The poster read “Rise up for LGBTQ+ Youth” and had a logo for GLSEN in the lower right corner.73 The individual followed up the next week to demand that a “general direction [go] out to the principals of all other Collier Schools to instruct them to remove all GLSEN, Rainbow and related poste. [...] Parents, students, and community members have repeatedly voiced their concerns about the censorship of inclusive media and books and the hostile comments by Board members to the County through the Board, the Superintendent, and a multitude of CCPS teachers and staff.