Sun Sentinel
Andrew Marra
August 24, 2020
A directive silencing health directors – first reported by The Palm Beach Post – proved the state’s safety assurances were “essentially meaningless,” the judge wrote.
A judge on Monday criticized a state order requiring all Florida public schools to open their campuses five days a week, skewering state leaders for having “essentially ignored the requirement of school safety.”
The ruling briefly blocked the reopening order, giving county school boards the freedom to keep their classes online-only without fear of having their budgets slashed by the state. But it was quickly appealed, delaying the ruling from going into effect.
Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran told school boards last month that they had to reopen their campuses five days a week in August unless they received a waiver from state or local health officials.
Those who didn’t, he said, risked having their funding cut.
The threat prompted school boards across the state to reopen classrooms, even as many protested that doing so would be unsafe for teachers and students.
But Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson ruled that whether to reopen school campuses is a local decision that school boards, not the state, are empowered to make.
“Because [state education officials] cannot constitutionally directly force schools statewide to reopen without regard to safety during a global pandemic, they cannot do it indirectly by threatening loss of funding,” he wrote.
The ruling arises from a lawsuit by the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, which accused Corcoran of violating the state constitution’s requiring that public schools be “safe.”
State education officials, Dodson wrote, “have essentially ignored the requirement of school safety by requiring the statewide opening of brick-and-mortar schools to receive already allocated funding.”
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The ruling was hailed by union leaders as a win for local educators and local control of schools.
“This win is about our public schools,” FEA President Fedrick Ingram said. “It’s about our children, it’s about our classrooms.”
Later in the day, the state Department of Education appealed his ruling, which blocks it, for now, from going into effect.
“We’ve said it all along, and we will say it one million times – we are 100% confident we will win this lawsuit,” Corcoran said in a statement. “This fight has been, and will continue to be, about giving every parent, every teacher and every student a choice, regardless of what educational option they choose.”
Though a political defeat for Corcoran and Gov. Ron DeSantis, it is not clear how much impact the ruling will have on schools’ reopening plans.
Most Florida school districts have already reopened their campuses, some of them reluctantly.
Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade County public schools have state permission to remain online-only until the three counties move into the second phase of the state’s reopening plan. Classes begin Monday in Palm Beach County.
Palm Beach Post investigation was key in judge’ ruling
A key factor in Dodson’s ruling was the DeSantis administration’s directive to county health directors this summer to not give school boards guidance on whether to reopen.
The directive, first revealed by The Palm Beach Post, denied school boards the ability to receive waivers from local health directors, eliminating the only avenue for keeping classes online in most of Florida.
After The Post revealed the guidance to health directors in an Aug. 7 article, FEA attorneys said they subpoenaed records from the state health department revealing details of the directive and presented them in court.
Dodson ruled that the directive rendered the state’s claim that health officials could help school boards decide whether it was safe to open schools “essentially meaningless.”
“Local school boards asked State health officials for their opinions as to whether it was safe to open their schools,” he wrote. “They would not give any opinion.”
“Local school boards wanted to know — is it safe to open our schools in our county?” he continued. ”[State leaders] reduced the constitutional guarantee of a safe education to an empty promise, in violation of the Florida Constitution.”