School boards must unite to protect kids, teachers
What started out as a decisive and necessary step by the Broward School Board to require students to wear masks with limited exceptions has expanded to eight other counties in Florida.
It’s a good start. But nine counties is not enough in a huge and highly diverse state overrun with COVID-19 cases, especially in communities of color. More districts must confront the reality of the dangers they face. Besides, there is strength in numbers, especially when the obstacle is Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has abdicated his duty to protect all Floridians, and a bureaucracy more interested in punishing local officials than protecting unvaccinated kids.
School board members who follow science and safety are on the right side of public health and public opinion. A new Quinnipiac statewide poll shows 60% of Floridians favor mandatory masks, while 54% said schools should be able to require them, with deep partisan divisions over masks. DeSantis has to live with the consequences of his disastrous decision to embrace anti-mask hysteria as hospitalizations and deaths keep rising.
Beyond Broward, mask requirements have been implemented or adopted in the counties of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange, Hillsborough, Alachua, Duval, Sarasota, and Leon, where a facial-covering order applies only to grades K-8. Together, those nine counties account for more than half of Florida’s public school students. Miami-Dade is the fourth-largest school system in the U.S. Broward is No. 6 and Palm Beach is No. 10.
The outlier in this group is solidly Republican Sarasota, which twice voted for Donald Trump for president. It’s also where Trump held his most recent Florida rally, and it’s home to the chairman and vice-chairman of the state Republican Party. So let’s see how aggressively DeSantis and the state Board of Education push Sarasota around or dock board members’ pay.
It’s easy, and probably smart politics, for DeSantis to play political games with Broward, an overwhelmingly Democratic county where he got less than a third of the vote in 2018. He probably couldn’t get elected dog catcher in GOP-friendly Lighthouse Point.
After the Florida Board of Education found Broward in violation of an emergency rule that allows for parents to opt out of mask requirements, the school board responded Tuesday with a rebuttal that cited “erroneous findings” by the state and asked the board to rescind its order. The point-by-point rebuttal wisely followed the law and avoided politics.
Broward said its “reasonable dress-related requirements regarding the wearing of face-coverings ... is squarely within the exclusive authority conferred upon district school boards” under state law. That law, passed by a Republican Legislature more than a decade ago, says school boards can “require uniforms to be worn by the student body, or impose other dress-related requirements, if the district school board finds that those requirements are necessary for the safety or welfare of the student body or school personnel.”
The rebuttal also cited a lawful school board policy that special clothing “may be required for safety reasons.”
Broward is considering a lawsuit challenging the state sanctions, including a threat to withhold money from the school district equal to the salaries of the superintendent and the board members who voted for the mask requirement. The Palm Beach County School Board called an emergency meeting Tuesday to consider filing its own lawsuit.
Lest readers think we’re cheerleading for the home county or a local school board dominated by Democrats (although they run as nonpartisan candidates), the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board has often been critical of past actions by the school district.
Following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018, we criticized the district for using a student privacy law known as FERPA to cover up crimes on campus and called on Superintendent Robert Runcie to resign. Both editorials were among the submissions that won this paper the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Earlier, we criticized the Broward County School Board after a board member’s arrest on federal bribery charges led to a grand jury investigation that found “malfeasance, nonfeasance and misfeasance” in the district.
That was a long time ago, back in the late 2000s, but we could go back still further, to the late 1990s and another grand jury investigation over school construction. For years, the Broward district was not merely poorly run, but was mired in cronyism, inefficiency and flagrant graft.
We live in very different and dangerous times. Florida is a major national trouble spot for the deadly virus, but DeSantis clings to his obsession with parental rights. As Miami-Dade School Board member Lucia Baez-Geller said on a call with Broward and Palm Beach educators Tuesday, “We have a constitutional duty to protect our students.”
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.