Lawmakers go all in on LGBTQ discrimination at voucher schools
Lawmakers sometimes are savvy enough to stop juuuust short of telling an outright lie.
Not Rep. Jennifer Sullivan, who during a House debate Monday on expanding a private-school voucher program, told this whopper about an Orlando Sentinel investigation into voucher schools with antiLGBTQ policies:
“They decided to go school by school and fabricate this picture that there are hundreds of students who are being discriminated (against) … no newspaper should co-opt this program and try to single-handedly dismantle it.”
If Sullivan, a Mount Dora Republican, had read the story, which we doubt, she would know the Sentinel fabricated nothing.
Two reporters did, in fact, painstakingly go through hundreds of policies of private schools in Florida that accept voucher students. It took months, and they found more than 150 schools with policies that expressed anti-gay sentiment. More than 80 of those explicitly stated gay students weren’t welcome. In some cases the policies threatened expulsion if a gay student’s sexual orientation was discovered.
Sullivan could go read the policies for herself in a database the Sentinel created.
The reporting focused on the discriminatory policies, not on specific acts of discrimination against students. Those probably are rare because few parents who know their children are gay would dare send them to a school where they aren’t welcome.
The policies are likely quite effective in deterring parents from putting their children through the pain and humiliation such schools would inflict on them, in much the same way mid-20th century forms of official discrimination kept most black people from breaking the rules of that era.
Sullivan likely recognizes that Florida’s voucher programs do, in fact, subsidize anti-LGBTQ discrimination. The state gets away with it — for now — because Florida law doesn’t protect people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
So people like Sullivan (who announced deflect and attack the messenger with, in this instance, a lazy lie.
She’s aided and abetted by people like Rep. Kimberly Daniels, the Jacksonville Democrat and pastor who once thanked God for slavery, because otherwise she might be worshiping a tree in Africa.
Daniels went full George Orwell during Monday’s debate, essentially pleading for everyone to be more tolerant of religious schools’ intolerance of LGBTQ kids.
Monday’s theater of the absurd continued with Rep. Al Jacquet, a Lantana Democrat, defending voucher schools by saying the focus should be on quality, conveniently ignoring the fact that there is no publicly available, objective measurement of quality for most private voucher schools.
In fact, another Sentinel investigation, this one in 2017, did focus on voucherschool quality, uncovering problems at schools that reporters visited. Libraries with no books or computers. Teachers with criminal records but not college degrees. Forged fire inspections. Shabby buildings. Eighth-graders doing worksheets on how to tell time.
Yes, Rep. Jacquet, let’s focus on the state’s unwillingness to impose any type of quality standards on state-supported private schools.
Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orlando Democrat, tried his best Monday to reason with voucher school advocates.
He appealed for more transparency by simply requiring voucher schools to post their policies online. Or conduct a study into the schools’ policies. He got nothing.
His plea for the state to stop supporting schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids went nowhere, too.
In the end, the House passed an expansion of the state’s Family Empowerment Scholarship Program from 18,000 scholarships last year to 46,600 next year, at a cost of about $200 million. The changes would make families with incomes of as much as $81,000 eligible for scholarships.
Officially speaking, the House voted to expand the program, but each of those yeses amounted to an affirmative vote for continuing discrimination and avoiding accountability at Florida’s voucher schools.