The Manatee and Sarasota county school districts have 90 days to overhaul how they vet library books or risk losing state funding.

Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack sent a seven-page memo to superintendents and charter school leaders Wednesday directing every district to continuously audit library and classroom materials and pull anything sexually explicit. The mandate applies even when no parent or resident has filed a complaint, as first reported by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Mack wrote that "reactive review" is insufficient.

What local districts stand to lose

For districts serving Lakewood Ranch High School and other area schools, the stakes are financial. Those that fail to comply could face corrective action and lose state funds, grants, Florida Lottery money and any other dollars appropriated by the Legislature, the Herald-Tribune reported.

Going further than current state law

Under current Florida law, a district can remove a book after someone files a complaint calling it pornographic, obscene or not age-appropriate. Mack's order goes further. It requires districts to cross-check the Florida Department of Education's official list of books removed in other counties against their own collections. If a title was taken off shelves elsewhere, the local district must review it. Appearing on the list does not automatically ban a book statewide, Fox 13 reported.

Mack laid out a nine-point plan for that window, according to the Miami Herald. He cited Clay, Escambia and Nassau counties as districts that have already discontinued substantial numbers of titles, writing that "delaying until a district becomes the subject of the next public controversy is not an acceptable approach."

Mack also pointed to a recent Hillsborough County School Board meeting where parents read aloud passages from books still in circulation, including "Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out" by Susan Kuklin, "A Court of Wings and Ruin" by Sarah J. Maas and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison.

PEN America and Florida Freedom to Read warned that the approach could give individual book objections much broader reach and unnecessarily restrict students' access to books, the station reported.

Manatee and Sarasota leaders stay quiet

Neither Manatee County Superintendent Laurie Breslin nor Sarasota County Superintendent Terry Connor has responded publicly to the memo. Manatee County School Board Chair Cindy Spray, who faces Sharon Jefferson in a Nov. 3 runoff, told WUSF in July that a book the state doesn't permit won't be in the school. "That's just the way it's going to be," Spray said. "I'm not going to, you know, risk our district being fined."

The department said in a social media post that districts will be held accountable for failing to protect children from such content.

The clock started Sept. 23, putting the deadline near Dec. 22. No Manatee or Sarasota school board meeting has been scheduled to address the mandate.