Florida Republicans Try To Make School Board Races Political

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…