Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is backing down from his threat to withhold school officials’ salaries if they resist his anti-mask rule, the Miami Herald reports.
“Those officials should own their decision — and that means owning the consequences of their decisions rather than demanding students, teachers, and school staff to foot the bill for their potential grandstanding,” Christina Pushaw, the governor’s press secretary, said in a statement.
DeSantis signed an executive order on July 30 giving parents the “freedom to choose” whether or not their child wears a mask to school and said the State Board of Education has the authority to cut funding from school districts who defied his rule and made masks mandatory.
However, two Florida districts—Alachua and Broward counties—have defied the rule and mandate masks unless the child can provide the school with a doctor’s note to opt out of wearing a mask.
In response DeSantis’ office threatened to withhold the salaries of the officials, suggesting that the State Board of Education could “move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members as a narrowly tailored means to address the decision-makers who led to the violation of law.”
DeSantis’s order doesn’t explicitly target salaries of officials, since it is not legal for the state to do so. But Pushaw told the Miami Herald that it was “technically” possible for local officials to make their own decision on how to address the cut.
“The issue is that … superintendents and school board members are not state employees. Therefore, the only way the state could tailor the financial penalty would be to withhold an amount of funding equal to their salaries,” Pushaw said. “In that event, it is possible that the officials who are violating the law could decide to take funding from other needs in their own district, in order to pay themselves salaries. It wouldn’t be fair to the students, but it would technically be possible.”
According to the Herald if the state follows through, Alachua County Public Schools would lose $300,000 of its roughly $537 million budget for the 2021-22 school year while Broward could be subject to a $700,000 cut to its $2.6 billion overall budget.
The feud between DeSantis and school board members are playing out as students are returning to school amid a delta surge in the state. More than 400 students in Palm Beach County were told to quarantine after just days of school and four teachers have died of COVID so far in Broward county within a 24-hour span.
