ICYMI: No One Dislikes Their School Board More Than Randy Fine Does

Note: this post is not meant to comment on the pros or cons of current sex ed instruction in Florida. The purpose of the post is to suggest that watching the committee discussion around HB545 demonstrates just how readily certain elected officials openly bash our public schools and their duly elected school boards.

On April 15, 2021, the House Education and Employment Committee heard HB545 (you can watch beginning at 59:50). This bill was a legislative priority of the Florida Citizens Alliance, a right wing (Tea Party), politically connected group who state their primary goal is to “promote awareness of current k-12 failings” and advocate for solutions such as school choice. For several years the FLCA has been advancing bills aimed at banning books which it finds “objectionable” (like Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eyes” or Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize–winner Angela’s Ashes) from public schools. This session, however, much of their concerns seems to revolve around the presence of the award winning children’s health book “It’s Perfectly Normal” in public school libraries and their assertion that the book is being used as curriculum for state-mandated comprehensive health education classes in K-12 public schools. They refer to the book, which has cartoon illustrations of naked people engaging in sexual relations, as “pornographic.”

According to their testimony, the FLCA originally wrote the bills which ultimately became Rep. Chaney’s HB454 and Sen. Rodriguez’s SB410. The organization’s hope was that these bills would both require parents to formally “opt in” to reproductive health classes AND impose criminal penalties on school board members and K-12 librarians who did not proactively remove materials they deemed “objectionable” from public school libraries. After amendments through the legislative process, the bills no longer do either. Instead they require school boards to annually approve all reproductive health instructional materials in an open and transparent process, provide parents access to view the instructional materials and notify parents (including on their district homepage) of their right to opt their children out of such instruction.

When HB454, now amended to require the “opt out” provisions, was heard, FLCA Co-Founder, Keith Flaugh testified in opposition. Fifteen members of the FLCA and the Christian Family Coalition (CFC) joined Mr. Flaugh in opposition to the bill, likely in response to a “call to action” from the FLCA. One CFC member, a pastor from Pasco County who believes today’s sex ed instruction asks students to “choose what sex you want,” said he tells his congregation to “start moving your kids out of public schools… get them out of public school, get them out of there, take them to a private school, we’re opening private schools all over the place…”

Republican members of the Education Committee apparently don’t like it when their usual supporters, like the Christian Family Coalition and the FLCA, testify against their bills. Rep. Fine claimed “I like arguing with the people I disagree with but I hate arguing with the people that I agree with,” but that didn’t stop him from engaging FLCA founder Flaugh in debate for almost 8 minutes.

Again, without debating the content of HB545, here are a few of the Fine’s comments about public schools and school boards during the 4/15 meeting:

• “I’m generally disgusted about how my school board behaves, so I don’t want you to think I’m here defending them. The policies they’ve adopted recently are repulsive and the way they’ve ignored parents is disgusting.” -Fine 
• After Flaugh suggested Fine’s support for HB545 made him “sound very willing to trust your school district”: “I don’t trust them at all.” – Fine 
• “Look there’s no up here who dislikes their school board more than I do.” – Fine
• “We should move in this direction and we should continue, as I have tried for years, to hold rogue school boards accountable.” -Fine
• “I took my son out of first grade when I had an issue with what he was being taught in school and the administrator told me I wasn’t qualified to have an opinion about my child’s education because I didn’t have a degree in academic administration from the University of Central Florida and I don’t talk about it a lot but I have 2 degrees from Harvard and so I should have some ability to talk about education with people. Um, I put them (his children) back in public school this year but I have not spoke to a member of my school board in three years since that administrator, who told me I was not qualified to have an opinion, became the superintendent of schools in Brevard County because that is how screwed up our school boards are… they will say to parents ‘you’re not qualified’ and my school board just passed a view on this saying it is the role of the school board to raise children not parents.” -Fine

As, for that last part, it appears Rep. Fine is referring to Brevard County School Board’s recent guidelines protecting gay and transgender youth, a decision Fine referred to as “a disgrace.” Fine is a co-sponsor of this year’s Parent Bill of Rights bill, HB241 which he says will “override Brevard local politicians’ leftist policies and return the primary responsibility for raising our children to parents.”

Fine is also carrying HB7045, this year’s controversial voucher expansion bill, which he says will “help parents escape this radical indoctrination by increasing their options to take their tax dollars to non-government schools.”

Rep. Fine, in addition to serving on the EEC, serves as Chair of the PreK-12 Appropriations subcommittee and as a member of Appropriations. He was elected to the Florida House in 2016 and will term out in 2024.