In a sign that voters may be tiring of culture war issues in the classroom, Floridians voted down a proposed change to the constitution that would have made school board races officially partisan.
Amendment One received 55% of the vote, according to state voting results. It needed 60% to pass.
The vote means Florida will continue its policy of considering school board elections officially nonpartisan. Voters approved a constitutional amendment to that effect in 1998.
“This is a new page in the culture war chapter of Florida,” said Zander Moricz, founding executive Director at SEE (Social Equity through Education) Alliance, a nonprofit in Sarasota.
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“There is very clearly a shared understanding from Democrats, Republicans and non-party affiliate voters that what is best for our students is not political warfare in classrooms. It is not partisan politics in our school boards, but instead educational leaders and professionals working locally to determine what is best,” Moricz said.
Going forward, candidates will not be formally aligned with any party, and independents will still be able to vote for any candidate for school board. Political campaigning can still continue, however.
Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed a slate of candidates for school boards, but as many as two-thirds of them lost in August's election.
The Amendment One proposal was backed by Republican leaders in the legislature, who said it would bring transparency to a process that is already divided along political lines.
But six newspaper editorial boards in Florida had advised against it, and critics said it would harm the education of children by injecting state and national level politics into decisions that are best made locally.
“Stability is good for kids. Consistency is good for kids,” said Meredith Mountford, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University, who added that America has long been against partisanship in education because of the potential for destabilizing changes each time political leadership changed.
“The early founders who set up school systems believed strongly that there was danger in doing that for this very reason. That every time a political party changed at the state or federal level, there would be large scale changes to education.”
The Amendment One proposal was initially brought to the legislature by Sen. Joe Gruters of Sarasota. He said the goal was to increase transparency.
In Florida, where Republicans hold a majority in the legislature, advocates of Amendment One said it would have helped educate voters about the political parties of school board candidates.
“I think it would help vote voters if they knew the party affiliation because most voters simply cannot be informed from president to Senate to Congress to governor to their local legislators to county commissioners down to the school board. It's just too much,” said Rod Thomson, communications chair for the Republican Party of Sarasota County.
The word “partisan” in the proposed amendment may have made its approval an “uphill battle because people have a very negative connotation of partisan,” added Thomson.
“I think people are tired of the culture war on the school boards,” he said. “But it takes two sides to stop and so unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen.”
According to a report this month from the nonprofit PEN America, Florida leads the nation for the second year in a row in book bans, with some 4,500 titles removed across the state.
