TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Education Association seemed to gain the upper hand this week in its court battle to overturn Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran’s executive order requiring Florida schools to offer in-person learning by Monday.
Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson this week sided with the FEA in a pair of lawsuits, which name Corcoran and Gov. Ron DeSantis as defendants. Dodson granted a temporary injunction against Corcoran’s order, which requires school districts to draw up reopening plans that include options for traditional in-person learning five days a week or risk losing state funding.
But DeSantis and Corcoran moved to appeal Dodson’s decision to the First District Court of Appeal. The appeal automatically places an automatic stay on Dodson’s order, according to the Florida Department of Education.
On Thursday, however, Dodson lifted the automatic stay in answer to an FEA request. That means school districts are now free to make their own decisions on reopening schools – using in-person or online instruction – without risking a loss of state funding, according to a statement from the FEA.
Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, the regions of the state most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, were exempted from the education commissioner’s order,
“We are appealing this ruling and are confident in our position and in the authority of the commissioner and the governor to do what is best for our students,” DeSantis’ communications director, Fred Piccolo, said in an email to the Florida Record prior to Thursday’s court action.
Meanwhile, Corcoran called the FEA’s complaint a “frivolous lawsuit” and encouraged Florida parents who favor the option of giving their children in-person instruction to tell the association to drop the lawsuit.
“We’ve said it all along, and we will say it one million times – we are 100 percent confident we will win this lawsuit,” Corcoran said in an emailed statement to the Record. “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.”
The FEA’s complaint argues that Corcoran’s order to force the physical reopening of schools statewide violates due-process provisions of the Florida constitution and poses excessive health risks for students and teachers during the coronavirus pandemic.
In his Thursday decision vacating the automatic stay, Dobson emphasized that the temporary injunction did not order all schools to close, as the defendants said in a response.
“This court does not have authority to enter such an order,” Dobson stated. “What the order did, for the reasons stated, is require that local school districts be given authority under their individual circumstances to open or close the local schools, based on local conditions.”