Was DeSantis’ suspension of four Broward school board members politics or much needed?
During a Broward School Board meeting following the release of a scathing grand jury report in August, board member Daniel Foganholi confessed he read the wrong grand jury document.
“I pulled up the one from 2011 and that was a good read as well,” Foganholi said. “A lot of the problems that I noticed had been going on are still here. I thought I was reading the right report — that’s what was scary about it.”
Foganholi stumbled upon the 2011 document, but it could have been the one from 2002 or 1997.
READ MORE: Who is Daniel Foganholi, the new Broward School Board member appointed by DeSantis?
In the past 25 years, four grand juries have blasted the Broward County School Board, and the school district as a whole, for similar transgressions: corruption, mismanagement, neglect.
But while previous grand jury reports have hammered the same points, the most recent one sparked an unprecedented action: Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended four of the board’s nine members, all elected by Broward County residents. The four suspended were Board Chair Laurie Rich Levinson, Board Vice Chair Patricia Good and longtime board members Donna Korn and Ann Murray.
READ MORE: DeSantis suspends four Broward County School Board members, appoints replacements
The grand jury report recommended the suspension of the four, in addition to former Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie and former School Board member Rosalind Osgood, saying their “incompetent management and lack of meaningful oversight” resulted in major cost overruns and delays in an $800 million school-safety program approved by voters in 2014.
DeSantis cited the grand jury report when he announced their suspensions: “It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance,” he said in a press release.
DeSantis immediately appointed four new School Board members: Torey Alston, Manuel “Nandy” Serrano, Ryan Reiter and Kevin Tynan. Three of the four — Serrano, Reiter and Tynan — will serve only until November, as their terms end this year and they’re not on the ballot in the Nov. 8 election. The fourth, Alston, took over Good’s seat, which is not up for election until 2024.
DeSantis had installed a fifth board member in April, Foganholi, to replace Osgood, who resigned to run for the Florida State Senate. She won and now represents District 33 in Broward County.
The five appointees have ties to DeSantis, a Republican, and the Republican Party. In their first official act at a School Board meeting on Aug. 30, they voted 5-4 to elect Alston, whom DeSantis had appointed to the Broward County Commission in November, as School Board chair. The four incumbents dissented: Lori Alhadeff, Debra Hixon, Sarah Leonardi and Nora Rupert. The board elected Alhadeff as vice chair.
READ MORE: DeSantis appointees sworn into Broward School Board; new chair, vice chair named
Broward is the most heavily Democratic county in the state, with 597,190 registered Democrats, more than twice the 262,390 registered Republicans in the county, according to July 31 data from the Florida Division of Elections. Florida school board members are generally elected, not appointed, as school districts are funded by countywide property taxes.
DeSantis’ suspensions steeped in politics, say some
Critics of DeSantis say his decision to remove the board members stems from the board’s decision not to fire Runcie after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018, resulting in the deaths of 17 students and faculty members.
After the shootings, DeSantis said he had explored firing Runcie but said state law prevented him from doing so because Runcie was not an elected official. The Broward School Board hired him in 2011.
At a School Board meeting in March 2019, Good, Korn, Rich Levinson, Murray and Osgood — along with then- chairwoman Heather Brinkworth — voted 6-3 to retain Runcie as superintendent. Board members Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter Alyssa was among those killed in the Parkland shootings, Robin Bartleman and Rupert voted against keeping Runcie.
READ MORE: Broward School Board votes to keep Runcie in his job as superintendent
In a statement after her suspension, Rich Levinson, the former board chair, argued her suspension was politically motivated:
“This is all about political retribution for not firing Superintendent Runcie,” she said. “It’s about blaming the Superintendent, and any School Board Members who supported him, for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. Governor DeSantis impaneled a Grand Jury, under the guise of school safety, as a pretext to remove School Board Members who did not fire the former Superintendent. Do future Board Members need to pre-clear their votes with DeSantis? Could future Democratic Governors now remove locally elected Republicans?”
Desantis was right in removing board members, others say
Other Broward residents say DeSantis was right in asking the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether school districts were complying with mandatory safety requirements after the Stoneman Douglas shootings.
The Broward County school district, the nation’s sixth largest, oversees more than 270,000 students and more than 330 schools with an annual budget of more than $4 billion.
The board’s critics also cite the district’s mishandling of the $800 million bond for school safety and school construction that voters approved in 2014 — which has ballooned to more than $1 billion. They also note the grand jury found the district under-reported student discipline data.
READ MORE: Miami-Dade, Broward school districts targeted by state over school safety concerns
Nathalie Lynch-Walsh, a member of the Broward Facilities Task Force since 2011 and a Broward parent, said she wouldn’t be surprised to learn DeSantis smiled after reading the 122-page grand jury report, released in August.
“This wasn’t a persecution. They brought this onto themselves. They were warned by me, other people and past grand jury reports, and they ignored it all,” she said of the ousted members. “The appointees are political; that’s obvious. But the removing of them is absolutely justifiable because they failed to learn from past grand jury investigations and reports.”
READ MORE: Who are the four people Gov. Ron DeSantis just suspended from the Broward School Board?
Grand jury indicted Runcie
The investigation also led to Runcie’s indictment in April 2021. Runcie was charged with one count of perjury, a third-degree felony, stemming from when he testified before the grand jury on March 31 and April 1, 2021.
Runcie has pleaded not guilty but his indictment led the School Board to approve a nearly $755,000 severance package for him in May 2021. He left the district in August 2021. His criminal case is pending.
On the same day Runcie was charged, the board’s former general counsel, Barbara Myrick, was charged with unlawful disclosure of statewide grand jury proceedings, a felony. She chose not to enter a plea in the case, which is pending.
Runcie, Rich Levinson, Good and Murray didn’t respond to Herald requests for comment.
Rosalind Osgood, who had represented the School Board’s District 5 seat until she resigned last year to run for State Senate, didn’t comment directly on DeSantis. She said that as a state senator, her constitutional obligations preclude her from speaking about his decision, because if any of the suspended board members appeal, their case would go before the Florida Senate. DeSantis’ office, in announcing the School Board suspensions, said Osgood is not subject to the governor’s executive suspension authority.
In a written statement, Osgood defended her and her colleagues’ record, noting how they helped low performing schools, closed achievement gaps and increased graduation rates.
“I have not been privy to any grand jury transcripts, only reports,” she said. “If the conclusion is that a problem has occurred for twenty-five years in Broward County Public Schools or any organization, we would have to agree that it is a systematic problem not a people problem. The people have not remained the same for 25 years.”
She also described the decision to suspend some board members but not others as “mystical.”
“Specifically, Nora Rupert who voted in solidarity with the other board members 97% of the time when the major decisions were made related to the General Obligation Bond.”
In a written statement, Rupert, who was reelected for her District 7 seat in the Aug. 23 primary, challenged Osgood’s characterization:
“Every seated Board Member had to go through the investigative process and answer questions from the FDLE attorneys and the Grand Jury. It is no secret, that my voting record showed many, many instances where I was the lone no or one of a minority dissent,” said Rupert, first elected in 2010. “I stand by my record and will continue to be a strong board member who focuses on our children’s education and expects that our BCSB business is transparent and accountable.”
‘A well-documented train wreck for years’
The grand jury report, finished in April 2021, but kept under seal until Aug. 19, 2022, revealed serious issues with the 2014 bond referendum.
When the bond was passed, about 68 percent of voters agreed to pay extra taxes to finance the SMART Program (an acronym for Safety, Music and Arts, Athletics, Renovations and Technology). The program was intended to improve school safety, repair aging school facilities and purchase new technology.
But the cost of the program has soared by almost 50 percent from what was originally told to voters: The district’s latest projections have set the cost at roughly $1.462 billion. And with the eighth anniversary of the bond’s passage coming this November, many construction projects “are still mired with delays” and “students continue to be educated in decrepit, moldy, and unsafe buildings,” according to the grand jury report.
Lynch-Walsh, the member of the district’s Broward Facilities Task Force, said the former school board failed most with the bond program.
“Even with it over budget, we still need another a billion or billion and a half to actually bring things where they need to be — and that’s on the conservative side,” she said. “The SMART program essentially robbed a generation of kids from having the facilities they deserve, and it all boils down to a lack of planning. They rushed it to the ballot in 2014. It was a complete fraud.”
Criticism of grand jury
Korn, one of the board members suspended by DeSantis, said the report doesn’t “accurately represent the true issues” faced with the bond program.
“The impetus of the issuance of the grand jury was to give the Governor a path to remove duly elected officials and the outcome was predicated on the Governor’s own specific statements as to what he wanted the grand jury to find,” she said in a written statement.
“I have shared in the frustrations of the delays and increased costs for the delivery of Bond projects but the Board committed to delivering critically needed projects and we stayed true to this commitment to families and the community. I have diligently questioned and challenged delays and cost overruns throughout the implementation of the Bond Program and required improvements throughout my service on the Board. Completion of all the promised school improvements, outlined in the SMART Program, has been and continues to be my ongoing commitment to our community,” she added.
A spokesperson for Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, whose office oversaw the statewide grand jury, said in an email to the Herald the grand jury recommended suspending the School Board members because they violated their duties.
“The Governor, who has a constitutional duty to ensure the laws of Florida are faithfully executed, removed the school board members after the grand jury’s recommendations,” spokesperson Kylie Mason said in the email.
Korn is running for reelection in the Nov. 8 runoff election against Allen Zeman, a Broward businessman. In the Aug. 23 primary, she and Zeman each garnered about 30 percent of the vote among the four people running in the District 8 At-Large seat. To avoid a runoff, a candidate had to win 50 percent of the vote, plus one.
Ultimately, the grand jury report accused the suspended board members and Osgood of “deceit, malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty and incompetence.”
Article IV, Section 7a of the state’s constitution states a governor can suspend a state officer for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony.”
The four suspended School Board members have not been charged with a crime, a point reiterated by Osgood in a statement she released after DeSantis announced the suspensions: “It is my personal belief that unless someone commits a crime, no one has the right to remove them because then they go against the voters’ choice. And no crime was committed here or we would have been arrested.”
Florida International University law professor H. Scott Fingerhut, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, noted how grand jurors only hear from prosecutors, not defense attorneys.
“If you’re a defendant being investigated, you’re not allowed in the room. Your lawyer is not allowed in the room. And if you read all of the Supreme Court case law on grand juries, your head would explode, because it’s going to tell you prosecutors are allowed to tell the grand juries whatever they want. If they know that certain evidence will never make it to be admitted in court, they’re still allowed to tell the grand jury about it. If there’s mitigating evidence, they don’t have to tell the grand jury about it.”
“That’s why they say a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich,” he said.
Similarly, special grand jury investigations that scrutinize public wrongdoing usually involve a lawyer from the executive branch leading the research, he said.
This is not the first time that DeSantis has suspended an elected official who has not been charged with a crime.
On Aug. 4, the governor suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, after Warren pledged not to prosecute people who seek or provide abortions or cases relating to transgender healthcare. On Aug. 8, DeSantis replaced Warren, a Democrat who was elected twice by voters in Hillsborough County, with Judge Susan Lopez, a Republican.
Warren has since sued DeSantis in federal court, contending his firing was a violation of his First Amendment rights and prosecutorial discretion. DeSantis has asked the judge to dismiss the case.
READ MORE: Ousted Hillsborough state attorney sues DeSantis in federal court, citing free speech
Looking to ‘finally spark some change’
Alhadeff, in a statement after DeSantis announced the suspensions, praised the governor: “Thank you to Governor DeSantis for your swift action that holds school board members accountable based on the findings of the Grand Jury Report,” said Alhadeff, who was reelected in the Aug. 23 primary with 61 percent of the vote.
Alhadeff, who did not respond to a request for comment, was first elected to the School Board in 2018. She ran for the seat after her daughter died to tackle school safety issues. She’s a former teacher.
Hixon, who represents the countywide At-Large Seat 9 and is a longtime Broward teacher, declined to comment about the suspensions or grand jury report. She was first elected to the board in 2020. Her husband, Chris Hixon, was the Stoneman Douglas athletic director who was killed in the Parkland shootings while trying to disarm the shooter, Nikolas Cruz.
THE LATEST ABOUT THE CRUZ TRIAL: Jury can see swastikas school shooter drew in class
Leonardi, a former teacher who was elected to the board’s District 3 seat in 2020, said the grand jury investigation exposed some long-standing issues in the district, including those with the SMART bond program, which she called a “disaster.”
“I think that the grand jury report really speaks for itself, and I think that a lot of people have had concerns for a very long time about facilities and school safety — those were two of the reasons why I ran for office,” she said in an interview with the Herald. “I take those recommendations from the report seriously, and I look forward to reviewing them with my colleagues.
“I hope the report and the investigation can finally spark some change.”
