National, state and local teacher unions blast DeSantis for ‘overreach’ in Broward schools
After watching Gov.
Ron DeSantis and his administration interfere with the leadership of the Broward school district, national, state and local teacher union heads slammed him Wednesday for attacking public education instead of supporting it, at a time when they said schools are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic.
“I know there’s a lot of problems in this state ... but the one thing that is not a problem is that teachers want to teach and kids want to learn, and we should be rolling up our sleeves to help them ... I’m asking the governor, ‘Why don’t you work with us to do that?” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which presents about 1.7 million Pre-K to 12th-grade teachers and other school employees across the country.
She denounced some of the educational laws that Florida recently passed and DeSantis’ rhetoric related to public schools, criticizing teachers and school boards to score political points.
Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary, said in a written statement: “It’s inconceivable that Randi Weingarten would travel to Florida and attempt to politicize the results of the findings of an independent grand jury formed in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas tragedy.
“That she would insert herself and make these statements is a slap in the face to a community who is seeking justice,” he added, linking to the statement released by Stand with Parkland, the group that represents 15 of the 17 victims’ families in the Parkland shootings. The group supported DeSantis’ suspensions of the board members.
Weingarten, along with other labor union representatives, spoke at the offices of the Broward Teachers Union in Tamarac during a press conference that followed three occasions in which the DeSantis administration has intruded in the Broward school district. School districts across the state are funded by local property taxes and school boards are made up of elected members who function as an autonomous, nonpartisan entity.
On Aug. 26, DeSantis suspended four elected members of the Broward School Board — Board
Chair Laurie Rich Levinson, Board Vice Chair Patricia Good and Board Members Donna Korn and Ann Murray, citing a grand jury report that recommended their suspension over what it said was “incompetent management and lack of meaningful oversight” resulting in major cost overruns and delays in the district’s $800 million school-safety program, which voters approved in 2014.
On the same day he suspended the four sitting board members, DeSantis appointed Torey Alston, who later became the new board chair, Manuel “Nandy” A. Serrano, Ryan Reiter and Kevin Tynan, all connected to either DeSantis or the Republican Party. Broward is a Democratic stronghold, with more than twice the number of registered Democrats than registered Republican voters.
In early September, Tim Hay, director of the state Department of Education’s
Office of Safe Schools, pushed Broward Superintendent Vickie Cartwright to get rid of three district administrators named in the grand jury report. She told Chief of Staff Jeff Moquin, David Watkins, director of diversity and school climate, and Ron Morgan, assistant chief fire official, to resign or face an investigation. They all left.
Finally, last week, the chair of the Florida Board of Education, Tom Grady, asked if the state board could suspend Cartwright. He was critical of the Broward school board’s 9-0 vote to impose a mask mandate at the start of the 2021-22 school year, defying DeSantis’ mask mandate ban, even though at least seven other school districts in the state, including Miami-Dade, had imposed similar mandates.
When Grady was told the state board could not remove a superintendent, who is hired or fired by a school board, Grady suggested the Broward School Board should take up the issue.
The grand jury report was the basis behind the three moves. But Cartwright, whom the Broward School Board hired as superintendent in February, was not part of the grand jury investigation, which concluded in April 2021.
The 121-page report, released Aug. 19, exists because the Florida Supreme Court impaneled a statewide jury, upon DeSantis’ request in 2019, to examine school safety measures following the 2018 Valentine’s Day mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, in which 17 students and faculty members were shot and killed.
Nandi Riley, the secretary and treasurer of the Florida Education Association, the largest labor union in the Southeast, representing about 150,000 school district employees, said the governor’s most recent actions “have thrown schools into chaos.”
“He has shamefully overthrown the will of the people while claiming to be for our freedom, only to take it away, using our children as political pawns,” she said.
Antonio White, the first vice president of United Teachers of Dade, the Miami-Dade teachers union, blasted DeSantis for axing the four Broward school board members, who were all women, and replacing them with “four
Republican men who could never get elected in a county like Broward County,” he said.
Of the four board members DeSantis appointed in August, only one, Alston, the newly elected chair, will serve past the November elections. He replaced Good, whose seat is not up for election until 2024.
White said the Florida Board of Education, which oversees public school districts in the state, “is simply coalescing to the will of one man,” referring to DeSantis.
“These are things that normally come out of authoritarian or dictatorship type of regimes, when they stretch down and bear down and tear down education,” he said. “Education is the only thing we have to go on to maintain a solid democracy.”
Elizabeth Ramsay, the president of the United Faculty of Miami Dade College, one of the largest colleges in the country, condemned what she called an “overreach from Tallahassee” in Broward and state policies that “prevent our children from having a welcoming, safe environment in our public schools.”
“This is a time when even those of us who are not very interested in politics in general feel motivated to come out and speak up,” she said. “It’s a time when each of us really needs to speak up and assert our rights as voters and as citizens.”
Jimena Tavel: 786-442-8014, @taveljimena