Teachers won’t be hit by penalty

Educators no longer will lose bonus money due to mask mandates

Teachers who work in schools that perform well academically will no longer lose out on bonus money just because their school district imposed a mask mandate.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he won’t enforce a provision in an appropriations bill passed by the Legislature that would have made a dramatic change in a decadesold program to give extra money to employees at schools that receive an A grade or improve a letter grade, based on student performance.

This year, 12 school districts, including the three in South Florida as well as Orange County’s, were poised to be shut out of a collective $200 million pot as punishment for defying state rules that banned mask mandates.

Broward School Board members had said they wanted to file a legal challenge against the state.

But now all eligible schools will get money as in the past, regardless of actions taken by districts related to masks, DeSantis wrote in a letter to Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

DeSantis said a “plain reading” of the statute that created the program allocates money to schools, not to districts.

“At most, districts are a pass through, as districts have no lawful means to spend these funds,” DeSantis wrote.

Broward Schools Superintendent Vickie Cartwright said, “We’re thankful and appreciative for the Governor’s decision, which allows our schools and teachers to have access to the School Recognition Funds.”

Justin Katz, president of the Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association, applauded the decision. When he worked as a classroom teacher at a high-performing school near Boynton Beach, he would often get about $700 or $800 per year.

“That was obviously the right thing to do,” Katz said of the reversal. “I don’t know how a scheme that involved cutting teacher pay as punishment for

district decisions to require masks ever made any sense. It didn’t.”

The largest school districts in the state got into a war with DeSantis after defying orders by the state Health Department to allow parents to choose whether their kids wear masks.

Districts argued that the COVID-19 levels were high in their communities, and they were following guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Initially, the state Board of Education withheld the salaries of School Board members but later restored the money after the districts complied in November.

The plan to punish school districts a second time for violating mask rules was proposed by State Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay. His initial plan was to withhold the salary amounts of any administrators that made $100,000 or more from noncompliant districts. But the source of money changed in the final version.

“I articulated my support for holding administrators accountable, as long as classrooms and schools were not impacted,” he wrote.

In the letter to Diaz, DeSantis praised his administration’s requirement that schools stay open for much of the pandemic, while many districts in other states stuck with virtual learning.

“We have avoided the most devastating learning losses as experienced in states that locked kids out of school,” he wrote. “To do this, Florida had to overcome opposition from entrenched interests that were intent on shutting out our parents and students from opportunity, including union-controlled school board members.”

He said teachers “overwhelmingly wanted to teach in-person and did an admirable job under unprecedented circumstances.”