Can you imagine 30 people in a room today without masks? The governor can. If those people are children.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who has repeatedly failed to act responsibly on the COVID-19 emergency — has come under intense fire for his executive order forbidding local governments from making mask mandates. This came after the Broward County School Board voted to require masks of employees and students when school resumes later this month. Now they may be backing off that position, even though home rule clearly gives local governments, including school boards, the authority.
Let’s hope the Miami-Dade School Board has the backbone to do the right thing when it meets Aug. 18 to decide the policy here. It will take courage.
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Because DeSantis has threatened to defund school systems that defy him. Yes, the guy who blasted the ‘defund the police’ movement has now started a defund schools narrative.
Then he convinced his Department of Education to change the rules for the Hope Scholarship, which was created to help kids who are being bullied in school, so parents could use the vouchers to move their kids to schools that don’t require masks. But not Catholic schools The Archdiocese of Miami announced on Friday that it would require masks of their students indoors.
I’m sure voters will be reminded of all this in 2022.
“The Pied Piper of COVID,” which is what Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber called the guv, makes for a really good mailer graphic.
“He’s like the Pied Piper, just leading everybody off a cliff right now, letting them know that they don’t have to like the CDC, they don’t have to wear masks, they can do whatever they want in the midst of an enormous pandemic – and Florida, by wide margins, is easily the worst state in the country,” Gelber told CNN, adding that he feels his city is now being blocked from taking measures by the state.
“We’re not allowed a mask edict now,” Gelber said. “We were one of the first cities to require it and the governor stopped allowing us to do it, then immediately we saw a surge across our county and state.
“I’m the mayor of a hospitality town. I think most people coming here would rather be in a place that they feel safer than a place that they feel like they may be getting the virus,” he said.
By the bags under his eyes, it looks like Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has been losing sleep over this. Or maybe it’s all the television interviews, national and local.
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“Our decision is not going to be rushed. Our decisions is going to be based on science and the expert advice of our health and medical expert task force,” he told WPLG Local 10’s Glenna Milberg and Michael Putney on This Week in South Florida Sunday. That task force will report on Aug. 16, two days before the next school board meeting.
“That said… the options available to us have been greatly reduced,” Carvalho said. “We hope to negotiate a set of protocols and protective measures that guarantee two things that I don’t believe are mutually exclusive. umber one the health and well being and the protective school environment, side by side with some degree of parental choice.”
Ladra’s money is on masks. Read on.
“We have been a system that is absolute advised and directed and oriented by scientific principals and medical expertise rather than political pronouncements,” Carvalho said, adding that he would ask his staff and faculty to ignore the “loud disconnected voices and continue to embrace the advice of those who have the best interests of students at heart.”
We’re lucky, he added. We have more time to make the decision and bring down the numbers. Miami-Dade is the last county school system in the state to start the school year, on Aug. 23. Broward and Palm Beach open one or two weeks earlier. The rest of the state starts school tomorrow.
With no mask mandates.
Know more: Miami-Dade activist tells Ron DeSantis, Carlos Gimenez off on COVID19 fail
Everybody can see this ridiculous stance for what it is: political posturing to go after the Donald Trump voters in Florida by someone who has a competitive re-election next year and nationwide by someone who thinks he’s in the running for the Republican primary in 2024. In other words, DeathSantis, as he has been branded, is selling out his constituents for his ambition.
But this could backfire. Not only has the national media been mostly negative, but Florida parents seem to overwhelming want mask mandates at schools. CNN also reported two lawsuits against the governor on this.
The first is by a Broward father of three children, including one under 12 — too young to get a vaccine — with a history of asthma. The second is on behalf a group of parents from at least five counties, including Miami-Dade.
It would actually be politically expedient for DeSantis at this point to back off.
And he shouldn’t wait until an elementary school has to be shut down because of a COVID-19 outbreak — which we all know is going to happen — or, God forbid, a student dies. DeSantis can’t recover from that.
Ron DeSantis fails children with political posturing on COVID-19 safety added by Ladra on
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