Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office on Monday suggested that he may take punitive action against local school district officials if they decide to move forward on requiring masks in their schools for the upcoming academic year.
A small number of school districts in the state are planning to keep or reissue rules on masking and facial coverings, in light of the continued threat that coronavirus poses for the state. Florida is one of the worst hit states in recent weeks, due to the prevalence of the Delta variant of the virus, and leads the nation on a per capita basis in how many of its residents are being hospitalized for COVID per day.
DeSantis, however, issued an executive order last month, forbidding schools from issuing mandates on masking. His order claimed that a set of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on masking in schools “lacks” scientific backing, despite studies that demonstrate just the opposite, which is that masking has helped to contain the spread of COVID-19.
The penalties for schools defying DeSantis’s order from last month would be monetary. The state board of education, under his orders, “could move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members,” a statement from the governor’s office said.
DeSantis’s administration has attempted to frame the issue as one concerning the rights of parents.
“Education funding is for the students. The kids didn’t make the decision to encroach upon parents’ rights,” a Twitter post from DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw read. “So any financial penalties for breaking the rule would be targeted to those officials who made that decision.”
Yet polling from within the state appears to show that most Floridians actually support a return to masking rules for students and school administrators. According to a FloridaPolitics.com poll published last week, 62 percent of residents think masks should be required inside school buildings, while less than 32 percent said they should not be mandated.
The order from DeSantis last month attempting to block school districts from issuing rules on masking may also be illegal — a violation of parents’ rights to have their children attend schools that are safe. A group of parents in Florida, some with children who have pre-existing health conditions that may make them more vulnerable to coronavirus, are suing the governor over his executive order because they believe it goes against a provision in the state Constitution that requires schools to provide a safe place for students to be.
“The Executive Order impairs the safe operation of schools. Students will become sick and potentially die as a result of the failure to follow the mandatory masking requirements” issued by the CDC, the lawsuit from those parents asserts.
Concerns about coronavirus in schools abound, particularly due to the additional dangers that the Delta variant poses to children, as Truthout senior editor and lead columnist William Rivers Pitt noted in a column earlier this week.
“Science has yet to comprehensively answer why Delta appears to affect young people more than the other strains have, but the steadily filling hospital beds stand as testament to the truth of it,” Pitt wrote on Monday.
“We reopened the country too much and too soon,” Pitt added. “Now we wait and see how much the jarring whiplash of that error in judgment will cost us.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.