Empowering Rogue School Boards Will Allow For More M4L Mayhem – That Appears to Be The Goal

After crowing about his ability to use his local school board to fire a superintendent he held a personal grudge against in November, Brevard Rep. Randy Fine now wants to expand the ability of that same board to hire and fire any member of the district’s executive staff. In today’s (4/19/23), Fine filed an amendment to HB1537 which would do just that.

Fine claimed it would expand “local control” but really it disrupts the defined roles and responsibilities of elected school boards and their appointed superintendents and allows rogue school boards, like his chaotic Moms For Liberty-disrupted board in Brevard, to wreak unnecessary havoc.

A recent Legal Opinion by State Attorney General Ashley Moody confirmed this separation of powers, confirming “it is the responsibility of the school board to appoint personnel recommended by the superintendent, not to select such persons. Absent good cause for rejecting the nomination of an individual, the school board must appoint and contract with the nominee.”

Fine made it clear that this amendment comes from concerns from a single member of the Brevard School Board who apparently feels the need to usurp their superintendent’s ability to hire and fire their staff. This might be why that board is now on their THIRD superintendent since they were sworn in in November 2022. You can read more about that here and here.

Last year, Fine was supporting bill after bill designed to limit the power of school boards and recommending punishing those who dared to exert local control. Now that he apparently has a board he can control, he is expanding their responsibilities, allowing them to target district administrators. This is not an amendment about local control, this is an amendment allowing further disruption of appropriate public school governance.

Disruption is the goal, it seems, and Rep. Fine is vying for “Disruptor-of-the-Year.”