Palm Beach Post. June 19, 2024.

Editorial: The Juneteenth federal holiday should be celebrated in Florida, not shunned

Enjoy Juneteenth, the latest celebration to join New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and Christmas Day as a date-specific federal holiday. While relishing time away from work is to be enjoyed, it’s important to appreciate the rich history and significance behind the holiday.

Juneteenth celebrates freedom. It marks the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when Union troops informed slaves in Texas that they finally had been set free, under the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln had signed more than two years earlier. The proclamation officially ended slavery in 10 southern, Confederate states, including Florida. Note that Florida still doesn’t recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday but that shouldn’t diminish its significance.

The holiday deserves recognition. Florida apparently thought so, long before June 17, 2021, when President Joe Biden signed legislation making what was a popular commemoration into a federal holiday. Florida was one of the first states outside of Texas to recognize Juneteenth in 1991 as a day of observance. Later efforts to make the observance a state holiday were blocked in part due to the state’s own version of Juneteenth — Florida Emancipation Day, recalling a similar event when a Union general read the Emancipation Proclamation in Tallahassee.

In a state now known for its disdain rather than appreciation of American history, it would behoove Floridians to cherish and celebrate what many Americans have come to understand as “America’s Second Independence Day.”

Florida has its own version of ‘Juneteenth’

Truth is, Juneteenth has been part and parcel of American history for some time now. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 but making it a reality in the old Confederacy took time. The news didn’t get to Texas until 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston two months after the Civil War’s end to announce that the more than 200,000 slaves in the state had been freed by executive decree.

In Florida, that announcement of freedom occurred in Tallahassee on May 20, 1865. For the estimated 60,000 slaves in the state, the arrival of Major Gen. Edward McCook and the news of emancipation couldn’t come soon enough. The annual celebrations that followed throughout Florida’s Black communities came in the form of parades, picnics, seminars and community events. Florida’s “Juneteenth” may now be overshadowed by the federal holiday. However, Florida Emancipation Day remains a part of Florida history and shouldn’t be forgotten.

It’s clear that Juneteenth provides an opportunity for all Floridians to learn more about their state and nation following the Civil War. Unfortunately, there’s no specific mention of Florida Emancipation Day or Juneteenth in the Florida Sunshine State Standards, which is the basic curriculum for all public schools in the state. It’s not a part of the AP United States History course, the nation’s most advanced history course for high school students.

Such a fix is necessary but unlikely anytime soon, given the so-called ‘Free State of Florida’s’ misplaced notion it must protect public school students from the hard truths of American history. The state’s Stop Woke Act bans school instruction and employment training that suggests that a person is either oppressed or privileged because of their race, sex or national origin. A federal lawsuit has resulted in a preliminary injunction against the law as an appellate panel figures out its constitutionality.

The reality remains that many Black residents in Florida and much of the United States see the traditional Fourth of July Independence Day holiday through a different lens. For 246 years, slavery was both accepted custom and law of the land, until a brutal war between the states ended with both the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Still, a stronger measure of freedom wouldn’t come for another 100 years, thanks to legal racial segregation in Jim Crow laws and Black codes.

It’s almost too easy to forget that our state and nation’s great strength is its diversity. The varied backgrounds, cultures and histories of our residents are building blocks for a far better society than one undermined by narrow minds and misinformation. Juneteenth reminds us of the agonies of slavery, of the gains that have been made, and of the work that remains to be done. This American holiday that should be celebrated here, not shunned.

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Tampa Bay Times. June 19, 2024.

Editorial: Florida teachers need higher pay, not more politics

Starting pay has increased, but average teacher pay in Florida is the lowest in the country, according to one report.

There are things to like about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to back a $202 million pay increase next year for Florida teachers. It provides a significant bump for new teachers, who will see their average pay rise to among the highest in the Southeastern United States.

There’s just one problem: The additional money will do little to help the vast majority of veteran teachers in Florida, who are doing most of the hard work instructing the state’s children. Those with at least 10 years of experience — in other words, those with actual track records — still won’t be paid much more than their rookie counterparts.

This short-sighted approach appears to be as much about weakening teachers unions — a stalwart of the Democratic Party and a longtime target of Florida Republicans — as it is about strengthening education. It’s also why this prosperous state will remain near the bottom of the U.S. in overall teacher pay even after the $200 million hike.

It’s a disgrace and a major reason for Florida’s longstanding teacher shortage, which the state teachers union said left more than 4,000 classrooms last year with no instructor or a less qualified substitute.

“We have to recognize the fact that ... teachers can’t afford to be teachers,’’ Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said after the governor announced his decision. “All they’re asking for is to be paid enough so they can pay their bills, go to the doctor when they’re not feeling well and do their jobs.’’

Numbers show why that’s so difficult.

The average starting teacher salary in Florida was $47,178 in 2023, according to the National Education Association. That ranks a commendable 16th in the U.S. But the average salary for all teachers in Florida last year was $53,098 — or just $6,000 more than what the newbies are getting. That ranks Florida dead last in the U.S., which is simply inexcusable.

Teachers here are supposed to be paid according to their length of service; the more years you teach, the higher your salary. But these step increases have been paltry, leading to a phenomenon called compression — a term used to describe the squeezing of veteran teachers’ pay.

We agree it’s important to pay new teachers enough to get them to come to Florida. But it’s as much or more important to pay all teachers enough to keep them in Florida, which isn’t happening. That’s because it would get in the way of Republican efforts to weaken or eliminate teachers unions, which have long been allied with state Democrats.

It’s not complicated: Make it look like unions aren’t doing enough to raise pay for the rank and file and the rank and file will start withholding their union dues. It almost worked last year in Miami-Dade county, where the teachers union barely escaped decertification.

But who is really being hurt here? Florida’s more experienced teachers are certainly feeling financial pain from this ideological battle. Sadly, so are the many schoolchildren who are having to make do with substitutes.

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South Florida Sun Sentinel. June 21, 2024.

Editorial: A partial DeSantis court victory means less sunshine

The worst fears did not happen when a Florida appeals court sidestepped Gov. Ron DeSantis’ preposterous claim to have an “executive privilege” to flout the public records law.

Even so, the outcome leaves state government in more shadow and less sunshine than before.

On balance, it was a win for DeSantis in the First District Court of Appeal. He lost only in the sense that he did not get blanket approval for executive privilege as an excuse to refuse to share his secrets with citizens to whom the Florida Constitution and laws entitle them.

The court’s refusal to rule on the point leaves him free to raise it again whenever he’s sued to make him obey the law. Sooner or later, a higher court may put him in his place. But until then, a court has handed him a free ticket to delay, delay and delay.

So what’s DeSantis hiding? We still don’t know.

Request was too broad

The worst part of this ruling was that J. Doe, the anonymous plaintiff who sued to find out who secretly advises DeSantis on Supreme Court appointments, did not make the original public records request specific enough.

“What I’m more concerned about is the ruling on specificity,” said Michael Barfield of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, in an e-mail to the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “Never before has a Florida court applied a specificity requirement to the Public Records Act. That will have much broader implications for requesters. It will also allow an agency to dither about what a requester is seeking and lead to increased fees assessed by an agency.”

The three-judge panel objected that Doe had “broadly requested records between many people during an unspecified period of time,” which would have required the records custodian “to consult with the Governor to determine exactly who he was referencing.”

“This is akin to an interrogatory seeking information, not a request to produce public records,” the court said.

So? It was obvious what Doe wanted and shouldn’t have been difficult to produce. The request was for any documents revealing the “six or seven pretty big legal heavyweights,” as DeSantis described them in an interview, who were secretly vetting his Supreme Court nominees.

It’s well-known that one “heavyweight” is Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society guru who stacked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The governor’s secrets

But it’s still DeSantis’ secret as to who else has been helping him rig the Florida Supreme Court, and what causes or clients they may be serving.

In any case, the governor himself is the official custodian of his records under Chapter 119 of Florida laws. He may hire someone to manage them, but the responsibility to release them is his.

Moreover, the court gave no credit to a 2014 precedent set by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach.

In that case, the court held that people have the right to request public records anonymously. While that case, Chandler v. City of Greenacres, didn’t deal with suing anonymously, the language in DeSantis’ favor effectively undermines it. There is no value in a legal right if one can’t go to court to enforce it.

The 2014 case cited an opinion by former Attorney General Bob Butterworth that people seeking records can’t be required to disclose their identities unless a law specifically requires it.

The Fourth District seemed to be saying that Doe should have simply asked the governor’s office to say who the secret advisers are.

Fat chance (cue the laughter from the Governor’s Office).

Some saw last week’s decision as a defeat for DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody, because it did not uphold the poisonous concept of executive privilege. But it didn’t dispose of it either.

The Constitution embraces no such notion; neither does any state law. Nor had any judge imagined it before Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey accepted it as DeSantis’ defense against Doe’s lawsuit.

The appeals court held that Dempsey had other grounds to dismiss Doe’s case, and shouldn’t have ruled on the privilege defense.

The other grounds had to do with whether Doe’s request was too broad and whether he or she shouldn’t have been allowed to sue anonymously without articulating a strong reason. The door remains ajar, if barely so, for anonymous requests.

Transparency takes a hit

The danger is to the requests themselves.

The appeals court avoided the executive privilege issue by invoking the old fundamental judicial principle that “normally the court will not decide a constitutional question if there is some other ground on which to dispose of the case.”

DCA Judge Clayton Roberts, a former deputy attorney general and state elections official, wrote the opinion, and judges Stefanie Ray and Susan Kelsey concurred.

Twelve media groups, including the Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, the Associated Press, the Miami Herald and the New York Times, had filed friend-of-the court briefs on Doe’s side. So did four public interest groups, including the League of Women Voters and Florida Center for Governmental Accountability.

Such broad public and media interest reflects the significance of DeSantis’ attempts to undermine Florida’s constitutional open government.

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Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel. June 21, 2024.

Editorial: Story of a Florida teen outed, harassed and driven from school reveals cruelty of Florida anti-trans law

A Florida law that shattered the life of a Broward teenager, threatened her mother’s job, smeared the reputations of six school administrators, triggered student walkouts and provided work for 32 trial lawyers has become a wrecking ball.

The 2021 law barred transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams (SB 1028), and it bears all the signs of being based on feelings, not facts. Twice a Senate subcommittee balked at passing it. It took an 11th-hour, back-door amendment to get it to the governor. One Republican lawmaker left the Senate floor in tears. This bad law has had terrible outcomes.

The daughter of the bill’s co-sponsor publicly opposed her own mother’s legislation. That sponsor, Sen. Kelli Stargel, a Lakeland Republican, said she had received no complaints about transgender athletes, according to a pending federal lawsuit.

No surprise, given the minuscule numbers. In 2017, only 16,200 Florida teens between age 13 and 17 identified as transgender, according to the UCLA Williams Institute.

A manufactured ‘crisis’

If half of them were transgender girls and every one of them wanted to play on a girls’ sports team in Florida, the “crisis” that so set off lawmakers amounts to less than 1% of all Florida teenagers.

This was not a problem needing a solution, it was a sound bite seeking a platform, and naturally Florida obliged.

No one seemed terribly concerned about what would happen to transgender girls like D.N., then a Broward middle schooler with a passion for soccer and volleyball.

She identified as a girl at age three. At puberty, she took hormone blockers. Her gender officially changed on school records in 2017. D.N.’s mother, Jessica Norton, said then-Broward School Superintendent Robert Runcie told her it was allowed.

D.N. thrived, her mother told the Broward School Board Tuesday, as she spoke publicly for the first time. Now 16, D.N. was president of her freshman and sophomore classes, director of student government philanthropy and a homecoming princess.

How one bad law damaged lives

It took one bad law and one anonymous tip about her gender to change all that.

But bad state law won’t explain and can’t excuse the Broward school district’s response, which was simultaneously too fast and too slow.

Before an investigation could even be finished, former Superintendent Peter Licata reassigned four officials at Monarch High in Coconut Creek where D.N. attended, including the principal and D.N.’s mother, Jessica, a technology specialist.

Not content with just one school, the district worked backwards, targeting D.N.’s former middle school and investigating three other school officials. Then everything ground to a halt. Norton’s reassigned duties included janitorial services. She said she frequently got news of the lingering investigation from the press — not from the district. That’s inexcusable.

It took half a year for a panel to finally determine this month there was no clear evidence that six of the seven knew they were breaking the law.

D.N.’s mother was the exception. The panel recommended she be suspended 10 days. The new superintendent, Dr. Howard Hepburn, wants her fired. The Board delayed a vote on that request Tuesday.

A family’s suffering

Norton allowed her child to play girls’ sports, despite knowing it was against the law.

The district says it had no idea that the woman it now seeks to fire is the same woman who, with her husband, sued the Broward School District to overturn that law in federal court. The suit is pending.

Similarly, attorneys for the state Department of Education, also named in Norton’s suit, had two years to figure out who D.N. and her parents were. Presumably, that had nothing to do with its rapid-fire warning that Broward officials should make sure anyone involved in allowing D.N. to play suffered “serious consequences.”

D.N. was effectively outed by the school district investigation. She left Monarch High the day it was made public and hasn’t been back. She was banned from high school sports for a year.

Investigators for the district sometimes referred to D.N. as “It,” her mother said, and refused to use her legal name or gender.

“She was probably one of the favorites on the team that everyone loved,” Jordan Campbell, captain of the volleyball team, told NBC-6. “She’s a human, and deserves to be treated like one.”

The Broward School Board can’t return D.N. to the life she had. It can’t undo bad law or stop Tallahassee’s callous and atrocious record of using children as political pawns in its endless culture wars.

The Board can do the next best thing, however. It can let D.N.’s mother keep her job.

This family has suffered enough.

END