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DeSantis suspends four female Broward County school board members and fills four vacancies with men [1]

['Danielle J. Brown', 'More From Author', '- August']

Date: 2022-08-26  

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Friday to suspend four elected school board members of the Broward County School Board in South Florida — Patricia Good, Donna Korn, Ann Murray and Laurie Levinson. The action was effective immediately, and related to alleged incompetence, neglect of duty and misuse of authority.

The four women elected by voters were replaced immediately by unelected four males picked by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The board had been investigated by a statewide grand jury that convened in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, where 17 students and staff were killed.

According to DeSantis’ executive order, “each (of the four board members, allegedly) committed malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, and incompetence in mismanaging” regarding use of funds from what’s called the SMART Program, described in the order as a “multimillion-dollar bond specifically solicited for school safety and renovation initiatives, among other things.”

The four women had been on the Broward County School Board since at least 2012 or longer, according to the executive order.

Florida lawmakers, more than once, have been in a battle over the monetary worth of local school board members — often female-dominated elected officials. The women became a target during the COVID pandemic over mask mandates. For some time, the Broward County School Board had a nine-member board of all women.

But that has changed dramatically.

DeSantis announced in a Friday press release that he had appointed four men to fill the new vacancies on the Broward school board.

It’s’ not clear how much education experience the men have had, with at least one exception. Here are the newly-appointed males, according to the governor’s press release:

Torey Alston, a former County Commissioner in Broward and President of Indelible Solutions;

“Manual ‘Nandy’ A. Serrano, a member of the Florida Sports Foundation Board of Directors, and CEO and Founder of Clubhouse Private Wealth;

Ryan Reiter, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and director of government relations for Kaufman Lynn Construction; and

Kevin Tynan, an attorney with Richardson & Tynan, who previously served on the Broward County School Board and South Broward Hospital District.

The DeSantis administration had previously penalized the Broward County School Board in the fall of 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing and there were heated debates about so-called “parental rights” and mask mandates.

The school board voted to implement mask mandates on schoolchildren to protect students and staff from the COVID pandemic. But state education officials believed that should be a parent’s decision.

Ultimately, the State Board of Education withheld the salaries of the school board until the district complied with the state and allowed parents to decide to send their kids to school in a mask.

Broward County is a Democratic stronghold, where nearly 50 percent of voter are Democrats, according to state voter registration records.

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[1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/08/26/desantis-suspends-four-female-broward-county-school-board-members-and-fills-four-vacancies-with-men/

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