Florida Republicans Are Trying To Change A 25-Year Precedent

When Florida voters head to the polls next month, they will decide if school board candidates should appear on ballots in future elections as either Republicans or Democrats. It seems like a mundane administrative change, but Democrats and education advocates are worried about what that would mean for the state’s students and educators.

For the last 25 years, Florida’s school board races have been officially nonpartisan after voters decided by ballot measure in 1998 to remove the political affiliations.

But as Moms for Liberty, an extremist organization that espouses conservative ideology about public schools, grew in popularity in the last few years, attacking public schools has become a priority for Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. The actual motivation behind partisan labeling for school board races, critics say, would be to increase the politicization of those races in a state where Republicans are opening a wide party-affiliation gap in new voter registrations.

“You’ll no longer see educators, school counselors and parents,” Jennifer Jenkins, the lone registered Democrat on the Brevard County school board, told HuffPost.

“It’ll just be people doing this just for politics.”

Donald Trump won Brevard County by 16 percentage points in 2020, and DeSantis won it by 28 percentage points in 2022.

Of Florida’s nearly 14 million registered voters, 5.4 million are Republicans and 4.4 million are Democrats. The remaining 3.5 million voters are unaffiliated.

And the Republican Party has swung so far to the right that there is essentially no incentive for a moderate Republican candidate to run for school board. “They know they won’t have the support of their party,” Jenkins said. “You’ll end up with the most extreme on either side of the spectrum, it’ll cost more money and we’ll get less-qualified candidates.”

And while it’s true that Florida’s school races have already become extremely partisan, having unaffiliated races means that a variety of candidates are still able to run and serve as a check on the more extreme elements. But if the amendment passes, those candidates will go away.

“Ultimately, there will be less resistance to the hyper self-serving political agendas coming from the top,” Jenkins said. “You’re not going to hear any resisting voices.”

This amendment was introduced as legislation in the Florida House by Republican Rep. Spencer Roach and requires 60% of the vote to pass. It also seems to be just another avenue to further DeSantis’ goal of overhauling the state’s public school system.

For his part in the war on public schools, DeSantis supported legislation that censors what teachers can say in the classroom and that has led to the removal of books from school libraries. Before dropping out of the GOP presidential race in January, he touted himself as the only candidate who could end “woke indoctrination” in public schools and beyond.

Because of DeSantis, Florida has been on the front lines of the conservative culture wars. Republican school board candidates can be found attacking transgender students who want to play sports and use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. They have falsely claimed that schools are indoctrination centers and that students are receiving gender-reassignment surgeries at school.

Conservatives baselessly claim that books with LGBTQ+ themes are sexually explicit and materials about racial justice are really designed to make white students feel bad about their race.

DeSantis has long been trying to remake Florida’s schools as a haven for conservative ideology, with mixed success. When he made endorsements in Florida’s school board races in 2022, his candidates won 22 of 25 races. But in August, all but six of his candidates lost outright, with another six headed to runoffs this fall.

The amendment would also effectively disenfranchise millions of the state’s voters. Florida is a closed primary state, meaning that voters who aren’t affiliated with a political party are barred from voting in the primary in partisan elections.

“We would be shutting them out from a very important local decision,” Jenkins said. Though school board races are down-ballot, their impact is significant. In Brevard County, the school system has 74,000 students, 8,000 staff members and an operating budget of $1.6 billion.

But DeSantis and Republicans seem to believe that politicizing the schools even further is a good idea. In 2023, when DeSantis appeared to be a top candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, he lamented the nonpartisan elections, accusing school board candidates of running one way and then governing in another.

“What we’ve seen over the years is you have counties in Southwest Florida that voted for me by like 40 points. And yet they’re electing people, the school board, who are totally the opposite philosophy,” he said at the time, according to Politico. “But those people are running saying that they’re sharing the philosophy, then they get on and they do something different.”

Other Republicans believe that making the races partisan will simply provide voters with more information about whom they’re voting for.

“It’s simply about transparency,” Roach said in the legislature when lawmakers were debating the measure. “I simply think, as policymakers, that we have an obligation to furnish to the voters as much information about a candidate as possible.”

The continued politicization of Florida’s schools has led to an extremely toxic environment, Jenkins said.

“I’ve gone through absolute hell the last four years,” she said.

She has been on the receiving end of nasty rumors, death threats and false accusations of child abuse. “I can only see stuff like that happening more, the more you inject politics into it.”