Two awful ideas deserve swift School Board rejection | Letters to the editor
More controversy swirls around the Broward School Board, but a reader urges swift rejection of two very bad ideas.
Broward Schools’ Alert!
The Broward County School Board on Tuesday will consider two actions that, if approved, will harm Broward schools and set appallingly bad examples for our children.
One proposal (by board member Daniel Foganholi) would fire the board’s general counsel, Marylin Batista, after she has worked tirelessly for our students. Ms. Batista has always used her considerable legal talents to represent Broward children, parents and citizens on a variety of issues over the years.
Are we sending the message, “Thank you, but we don’t reward hard, effective work and dedication”?
Another agenda item is a proposal to “rescind” teacher raises for this year. Pay raises are hammered out through weeks of negotiations between employers and employees. How do you “rescind” an agreement made in good faith?
Is this to demonstrate to our students and our citizens that we do not keep our word? Will this drive even more teachers out of Florida?
We can’t allow state interests to bully our School Board. Vote these two proposals down, board members.
Maureen Dinnen, Fort Lauderdale
The writer is a former Broward County School Board member.
Closed-door ceremony not so rare
Your otherwise excellent editorial on Florida’s six-week abortion restriction (“Making Florida relevant again, immediately,” April 3) was marred by a logical absurdity regarding the “closed-door ceremony” in which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law.
You wrote that such “weird late-night secrecy signaled that he knew he was on shaky ground.”
Considering that the Florida Supreme Court, made up mostly of DeSantis appointees, had just supported the horrible new law in a 6-1 decision, it’s hard to imagine that he felt he was on shaky ground.
But your description of the “closed-door ceremony” is a gleaming red herring.
You realize that, except for a few news conferences in various cities, hundreds of bills are signed routinely in the governor’s office. In this case, DeSantis signed the bill on a Thursday night and immediately put out a press release and color photo of the event, attended by about two dozen legislators and anti-abortion activists.
That was about as stealthy as those big white boots he wore to a hurricane cleanup, in another crisis the media just can’t seem to get over.
Maybe DeSantis thought he could sign the hottest law of 2023 and nobody would notice. Or maybe he knew the Legislature doesn’t meet on Fridays in the first half of sessions, and everybody had flights home for the weekend, and the misguided supporters of the six-week bill wanted a signing ceremony.
So it was either do a bill signing when he flew in from Iowa that night, or make everybody stay over Friday and sign it at a decent hour.
In this contentious election year, please stop letting your intense dislike of DeSantis and all things Republican cloud your thinking on these big issues.
Bill Cotterell, Tallahassee
A threat to democracy
In response to a recent letter writer who said he doesn’t understand why Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, here’s why: He tried to overthrow the 2020 election.
I watched live TV coverage of an angry mob invading our Capitol building and threatening members of Congress. Despite having no evidence or proof, Trump has constantly claimed that he won.
He does not care about our Constitution. I do not believe he cares about America. He only cares about Donald Trump, and holding onto political power. Trump is an absolute threat to our democracy. He has promised to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies. He wants to free those who were convicted of crimes from the January 6 insurrection.
Trump does not believe in our system of checks and balances. But the fact that he tried to overthrow our government and our constitutional order is, by itself, overwhelmingly sufficient.
Lori Levin, Delray Beach