A budget bill passed last week by the Florida House of Representatives would strip $200 million from 12 school districts that defied Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools.
A plan advanced by Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay) called the “Putting Parents First Adjustment” would reduce funding to the 12 districts, including the public schools in Brevard, Broward, Leon, Miami-Dade and Orange. The idea is to shift that $200 million to school districts that followed the governor’s COVID-19 executive orders.
DeSantis expressed support for the $105 billion budget bill in a Twitter comment last week.
“Thanks to Speaker (Chris) Sprowls, Representative Fine and the House of Representatives for heeding my call to protect students and teachers from accountability measures affecting union-controlled politicians and bureaucrats who defied Florida law by force-masking kids,” he said in the Tweet. “Most students didn’t want to wear masks in the first place! Let’s also give parents recourse for harms imposed on their kids due to this defiance.”
The Florida School Boards Association (FSBA) expressed concern that penalizing specific school districts may not be appropriate considering the difficulties the districts faced during the course of the pandemic.
“The last few years have been extremely challenging for state and local officials to make decisions that are best for students and schools,” Andrea Messina, the FSBA’s executive director, told the Florida Record. “These issues show the divide that many local communities are facing. We are concerned that this approach might negatively impact students, whose needs are far greater now than ever before.”
Florida’s agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, sent a letter to the U.S. secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, last week urging him to stop state officials from taking funds away from the 12 districts. The districts were simply trying to keep students safe based on local COVID-19 conditions, Fried said.
The U.S. Department of Education previously sent a letter to Florida warning that withholding funds from school districts in this way could violate federal law. Fine, meanwhile, stressed that the funding shift would not affect student programs.