Lawsuit filed to keep proposed Amendment 8 off Florida ballot
A proposed constitutional amendment related to education is “misleading” to voters and should be stricken from the November ballot, according to a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida on Thursday.
The lawsuit says Amendment 8’s “proposed ballot title and summary fail to inform voters of the chief purpose of the revision and are affirmatively misleading.”
Amendment 8 includes three proposed changes to the state constitution, unrelated except that they all deal with public schools.
The lawsuit focuses on a section that would add a phrase that says local school boards could control only the public schools they established. It was proposed as a way to make it easier for charter schools — publicly funded privately run schools — or other new educational options to flourish. Now, charter schools need local school board approval to open, but that requirement would vanish if the proposal passed.
The lawsuit says the language voters will see does not make it clear that if the measure passes, it would “enable the Florida Legislature or some other entity (not necessarily the state) to create brand new, unspecified path(s) for the operation, control, and supervision of certain unspecified and undescribed newly-created public schools.”
The ballot summary says the change would allow “the state to operate, control, and supervise public schools not established by the school board,” but the lawsuit says the text of the proposal “does no such thing.”
The proposal, one of 13 to appear on the ballot, was proposed by the state’s Constitution Revision Commission. The commission included mostly appointees of Gov. Rick Scott and legislative leaders.
Amendment 8 was one of the most controversial and prompted much debate on charter schools. The other items in Amendment 8 deal with term limits for school board members and the teaching of civic literacy.
Like other proposed amendments, it would need 60 percent of voters to give it a “yes” vote in order to pass.
The lawsuit was filed in Leon County Circuit Court.