Miami-Dade County – ��

DeSantis-Backed Candidates Rack Up School Board Wins Across Florida

Linda Jacobson — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 16:38:05 +0000

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s effort to fill local school board seats with candidates who embrace his conservative was mostly a success Tuesday night — even in some counties that lean to the left.

Unofficial results show 19 of the 30 candidates he endorsed won their races. Six others are headed to runoffs in the general election on Nov. 8 and five were defeated.

“Women with kids are the swing vote in Florida,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. DeSantis, she added, was “brilliant” in waiting until early voting was over Sunday to on behalf of his candidates. “He knows that the majority of Republicans are going to vote on Election Day.”

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The majority of the governor’s favored candidates won in counties that voted for former President Trump in 2020, but some also picked up seats in Democratic strongholds.

“We’re excited about the boards we flipped that now have a majority of parents’ rights members,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a growing conservative organization that, like DeSantis, is opposed to schools’ attention to LGBTQ rights and social justice issues. “Parents know their children the best.”

In Miami-Dade, the state’s largest district, DeSantis-backed Monica Colucci, an educator who worked in the governor’s administration, defeated longtime incumbent Marta Perez. And Roberto Alonso, who founded an ed tech company and owns an adult day care, beat two other candidates, including Maribel Balbin, who was endorsed by the teachers union.

Balbin said she didn’t want Alonso to “walk into a seat without at least having a challenge of some sort.”

In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, April Carney — who was part of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — beat incumbent Elizabeth Andersen, a licensed mental health therapist. Carney, one of DeSantis’s candidates, has not confirmed whether she was at the Capitol that day.

“I’m concerned for our teachers and students,” Andersen told ��. She rejected political endorsements because she didn’t want the race to be partisan. “This level of political involvement by the governor in a local race is unprecedented and un-American.”

Campaign volunteers turned out as early voting began Aug. 16. Monica Colucci, endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, defeated an incumbent on the school board in Miami-Dade. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The primary was a chance to gauge how voters would respond to DeSantis’s anti-”woke” education agenda.

DeSantis has made a cornerstone of his re-election campaign. In November, he’ll face U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat and former governor who released his of school board preferences. But some education advocates viewed the endorsements from both candidates as unwelcome intrusion into nonpartisan races.

“Parents don’t like it,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of the Alliance for Public Schools — an advocacy organization focusing on districts along the I-4 corridor, from Tampa (Hillsborough County) to Daytona Beach (Volusia County). “They want school board meetings to be boring again.”

In Hillsborough County, where Crist’s and DeSantis’s candidates went head-to-head, Erickson saw less of an impact. Incumbent Stacy Hahn, endorsed by DeSantis, was reelected, as was incumbent Karen Perez, who picked up Crist’s endorsement. Another DeSantis candidate, Patricia Rendon won an open seat.

“Two incumbents are going back to the school board. People are voting for who they know,” Erickson said. “Nobody massively outperformed their demographic.”

‘A one-size-fits-all’ agenda

DeSantis unveiled his initial in June. After Crist announced his preferred candidates in July, DeSantis expanded his list to cover 18 districts.

To earn the governor’s support, candidates had to complete a survey and commit to furthering his 10-point , which includes keeping “woke gender ideology out of schools” and rejecting critical race theory in the curriculum.

Andersen, in Duval, said the pledge runs counter to the principle of local control in education.

“To me that’s a one-size-fit-all education agenda,” she said. “We are not the same as Hillsborough or Miami. We want to make decisions that work for our schools and our kids.”

But she represents a more conservative, mostly white part of the county. Carney won 53% of the vote.

With the Florida governor expected to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024, the question is whether his education platform translates outside of Florida as well. He recently took his message to Arizona, Pennsylvania and Ohio, for Republican candidates. Republican Doug Mastriano, running for Pennsylvania governor, said he wanted to make his state the

“Many people have moved to Florida because of what we’ve done,” said Alysha Legge, who lost to incumbent Perez in Hillsborough. She pointed to above-average and keeping schools open during the pandemic as reasons contributing to the state’s growth. “I honestly would love for him to stay in Florida. We need him a little longer.”

and changing demographics have shifted the state in a . Part of that growth includes an influx of Cubans. While they tend to lean more Republican, , some experts on Florida politics said that doesn’t mean they are as far to the right as DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.

”Hispanics are more in the center. They’re trying to figure out what U.S. politics are all about,” said Marcos Vilar, executive director of , a nonprofit that has worked to get Hispanic candidates elected to school boards.

Vilar was more focused on races in Orange County, which has a large Hispanic population. DeSantis didn’t endorse anyone in those races, but there were still contests between conservative and more liberal candidates.

, incumbents Teresa Jacobs and Angie Gallo fended off conservative challengers, but Alicia Farrant, part of Moms for Liberty, will face Michael Daniels in a runoff. Many of DeSantis’s picks also received backing from the , a conservative group focused on removing any influence of critical race theory over K-12 curriculum.

In Manatee County, just south of the Tampa area, Sean Conley challenged DeSantis-backed incumbent Chad Choate. Although he’s a Republican — supporting for-profit charter schools, tighter security and fiscal responsibility — Conley said he knew it would be difficult to win. Even the chairman of the local Republican party got involved in the race. urging members in an Aug.18 email to be “laser-focused” on winning the seats for DeSantis’s candidates.

Rev. James Golden, another Manatee County board member who ran for re-election is a local leader in the Democratic party. But he said he has “scrupulously” avoided partisanship in his role as a board member.

With voters last fall renewing a for the school district, Golden thought that was a good sign they would vote him in for another term. But challenger Richard Tatem earned just enough votes to avoid a runoff.

The governor, Golden said, is “tearing down the fundamental premise behind public education.” Teachers, he added, shouldn’t have to worry about “whose mama is a Democrat and whose daddy is a Republican.”

Teachers’ Unions Leverage Reopenings

Mike Antonucci — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 21:01:00 +0000

The battles over school reopenings have raged for more than a year, but it’s safe to say we have reached the tipping point. Come the fall, the overwhelming majority of schools will provide in-person instruction five days a week, though the form it takes will certainly vary from place to place.

What comes next? Federal and state governments are funneling unprecedented amounts of new money into public education, and the teachers unions have plenty of ideas on how to spend it.

Watch a TV news segment or read an article about school reopenings and you’re bound to hear American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten speak to what she thinks schools need. But she won’t be making those decisions, not even for her members. AFT’s local unions will tailor their stances to their conditions and political realities.

Local unions in the nation’s four largest school districts — New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami-Dade County — each handled school closings in a different way, and they each will handle post-pandemic relations with school districts in different ways.

Unions in New York and Miami reached agreement on reopening last fall, while Chicago’s union didn’t come to terms until March. The Los Angeles union didn’t come to terms until April, and most LA schools won’t reopen until this fall. Some asked for additional staff to address mental health issues and learning loss, while others went further afield, wanting an end to standardized tests.

Some demands, however, are universal. Each union wants smaller class sizes, which means more teachers, and more support employees to occupy various new programs.

Let’s begin with New York City’s United Federation of Teachers. Some schools reopened in November 2020 after long and difficult negotiations, which included a strike threat. As large teachers unions go, the UFT is considered to be more of a political player than an ideological hard-liner, so it makes some sense that New York schools opened before those in Chicago or Los Angeles.

The UFT touted the protocols they negotiated as being responsible for schools being “.” Last March, the union released a for post-pandemic schooling, including spending more than $1 billion to address learning loss.

The UFT wants teams of academic intervention specialists and social workers/psychologists for each of the city’s 1,800 public schools. The average New York City public school would need three to four teams, a total of six to eight professionals, or roughly one team for every 200 students, according to the union.

The union estimates it will cost $1 billion to hire the estimated 10,000 new employees needed for this new program. Additionally, the union wants smaller class sizes in 100 of the neediest schools, requiring the hiring of 1,500 or more teachers, at a cost of $150 million annually.

How the value of these policies will be measured is not mentioned, though the hiring will have one indisputable effect: it will increase the number of potential union members by more than nine percent.

The Chicago Public Schools first reopenings didn’t occur until March of this year, largely because of the highly contentious relationship between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Even after negotiating the reopening deal, .

“Let me be clear. This plan is not what any of us deserve. Not us. Not our students. Not their families,” he said.

While the UFT used its deal to trumpet the safety of New York City schools, the Chicago union went in the opposite direction. When the city developed a follow-on plan to reopen high schools, , claiming “national health experts are raising concerns about the push to reopen schools, bars and other businesses as new variants drive a spike in cases.”

The CTU has its own list of post-pandemic remedies, which include more staff and resources for special needs students, bilingual students and homeless students. The union wants a nurse and librarian in every school, an additional 500 social workers and counselors, and “.”

The CTU also called for class size reduction. It bears mentioning that the city’s schools have been bleeding enrollment for two decades, and they .

The Chicago union has a strong social justice focus, and it is reflected in for spending the windfall of federal money, including adopting ethnic studies curricula, hiring restorative justice coordinators, and providing direct housing assistance.

The Miami-Dade County Public Schools had its first reopenings last October. The United Teachers of Dade’s response mirrored that of the Chicago Teachers Union, and its negotiating clout was much smaller, reflecting the realities of a teachers union in a red state.

The UTD’s actions were primarily on the communications front, raising the alarm about infected staff and students, and for the school board to hear teachers’ safety concerns.

Schools had been open for months, but , even though 89 percent of students returned to school on January 4. The union claimed the schools were “.”

While the UTD warned that the schools were unsafe, , stating “unionized educators are playing a critical role in clarifying potentially deadly misinformation.”

Fast forward to May, when . Miami also has declining enrollment, so the union wants to use the new money to shore up per-pupil spending and, of course, reduce class sizes while hiring more counselors, psychologists and social workers.

I saved Los Angeles for last, not only because the United Teachers Los Angeles was the first out of the gate with (which included defunding police and a charter moratorium, among other things). In its latest communication with members, the UTLA also addressed conditions in other large city school districts.

Los Angeles was the slowest to reopen its first schools, getting there only in April 2021. Most students still haven’t returned and won’t until the fall. The UTLA is arguably the most militant of the large teachers union locals, and its rhetoric reflects its slant, with President Cecily Myart-Cruz accusing “” of being responsible for the move to reopen schools.

“Union-negotiated safety protocols have kept their students and families safe,” she told members in a May 28 video update, adding that “UTLA negotiations are responsible for the lowest number of infections among the nation’s largest school districts.”

She asserted that New York City had nearly 26,000 coronavirus cases since reopening in September and Chicago had about 1,700 cases since it reopened in March. But Los Angeles, she said, had fewer than 300 cases since reopening.

The number of schools and students involved in the various reopenings are very different in each of the three cities, but Myart-Cruz did not address that.

In addition to its previous demands, the UTLA mentioned its desires regarding the estimated $2-$4 billion in one-time money heading LA’s way. Its top priority is lowering class size. “The most powerful way we can impact students is to have more caring adults on campus,” she said.

The next priority is salary increases. The union will bargain for “educator recruitment and retention measures,” and in support of that, “rallies and news conferences are in the works.”

Myart-Cruz said it was “time to fight for transformational change,” and that is a common message from many teachers unions. They see this surge in federal funding as a way to lock in their wish lists permanently.