Surrounded by the full-to-the-brim bookshelves that line his Florida classroom walls, Don Falls struggled to make sense of the memo: Cover up your books, or remove them at once.

The directive sent to Manatee County School District teachers on Jan. 20 came in response to a new state law, which requires that all books go through a formal approval process with a certified school librarian or media specialist before being made available to Florida public school students. Any books already on the school’s approved list were permitted to remain in classrooms, but Falls, a history teacher at Manatee High School, had too many books to feasibly check them all. So, he covered his shelves, taping up large sheets of paper to conceal the contents.

“I have hundreds and hundreds of books,” Falls told BuzzFeed News. “I just really had no other choice other than to cover them up or remove them all, so I just covered them up.”

Though the law, HB 1467, went into effect in July 2022, it wasn’t until January that the Florida Department of Education published training on the new law, leaving many schools in limbo for months, uncertain how to proceed. HB 1467 allows parents, or even any resident of the county, to lodge objections to course material, and right-wing organizations are already taking advantage: One group, Moms For Liberty, has lobbied for more than 150 books to be removed from Florida school libraries, including The Color Purple, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many others that deal with race and LGBTQ issues. So far, most of those efforts have not been successful, but many schools are erring on the side of extreme caution when faced with angry parents.

Over the past two years, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has promoted a variety of staunchly conservative education laws. In June 2021, when “critical race theory” was becoming the right-wing panic du jour, he successfully spearheaded an effort to ban it from curricula, saying teachers were “teaching kids to hate their country.” Less than a year later, he rubber-stamped the so-called Don't Say Gay bill, which prohibits LGBTQ topics from being discussed in classrooms from kindergarten through third grade. Now, HB 1467 is the latest piece of the puzzle as conservatives work to reframe school policy in the state, with all the individual pieces of legislation coming together to create an environment of uncertainty.

“All three are very vague, and all three are interconnected,” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, told BuzzFeed News. “They're implementing them exactly how the governor wanted — he wanted chaos, he wanted confusion, he wanted books pulled out of schools.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for Gov. DeSantis cited what the governor's office called inappropriate material in schools. "Our office has recently amplified several examples of inappropriate content found in Florida’s K-12 classrooms, which well exemplify the gender politics and sexualization agendas that ideologues are attempting to push via the public education system," Deputy Press Secretary Jeremy T. Redfern said. "The governor won’t let these agendas pervade Florida’s education system unanswered." The four books cited by Redfern were found in high school libraries, according to the Orlando Sentinel, and had already been removed from most of the schools before the DeSantis administration complained.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Florida Department of Education communications director Alex Lanfranconi said, "If educators are confused about what can and cannot be taught in Florida schools, the blame lies solely on media activists and union clowns who purposefully sow confusion and mislead the public."

But many of the educators interviewed by BuzzFeed News said their confusion stems from the legislation itself, with the murkiness of HB 1467’s finer points only serving to exacerbate that. Though the law does not directly address penalties for unvetted books, the text cites Florida statute 847.012, which makes it a felony to distribute sexually obscene material to minors. “What they've essentially done here is say that books now are part of that, and that if you give books [to students] that someone deems is pornography, then you can be charged under that statute,” Spar said. Many books with LGBTQ themes have been targeted for removal, whether or not they actually include sexual content.