Florida orders school boards to relax mask rules or risk pay

MIAMI (AP) — Florida officials are threatening to withhold funds equal to the salaries of school board members if school districts in two counties don't immediately do away with strict mask mandates as the state continues to battle through high hospitalisation rates.

School boards in Broward and Alachua counties received a warning Friday from the State Board of Education giving them 48 hours to walk back their decisions to require masks for all students, only exempting those with a doctor's note. Broward County has the second-largest school district in the state.

“We cannot have government officials pick and choose what laws they want to follow,” said Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran in an emailed statement.

“These are the initial consequences to their intentional refusal to follow state law and state rule to purposefully and willingly violate the rights of parents.”

Corcoran said the two districts are violating the Parents' Bill of Rights and a late July executive order by Governor Ron DeSantis that prompted rules limiting how far districts can go with mask requirements.

The Republican governor has pushed for school districts not to mandate masks for all students, ordering the state's health and education departments to devise rules so that parents can choose.

Corcoran was recommended to the post by DeSantis and appointed by the State Board of Education in 2019.

DeSantis maintains masks can be detrimental to children's development and that younger children simply don't wear masks properly.

But board members in the counties of Broward, home to Fort Lauderdale, and Alachua, home to Gainesville, decided not to allow parents to easily opt-out of the mandate as surging cases fuelled by the delta variant began straining hospitals.

Florida on Friday surpassed 3 million total COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a weekly report from the state's health department.

It also reported 1,486 new deaths in a week, significantly raising the seven-day average of reported deaths per day from 153 to 212 over the past week.

The state continued to have the highest hospitalisation rates in the country, with 16,849 patients with COVID-19 — 3,500 of them in intensive care, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Later Friday, Sarasota County became the sixth school district in the state to adopt a stricter mask policy.

Two other school districts -- Hillsborough and Palm Beach counties -- had originally started the school year allowing parents to easily opt out of wearing masks, but tightened their measures this week.

And the school board of the state's largest district in Miami-Dade County adopted the same policy of only allowing mask exemptions with a doctor's note.

Because of the size of the school districts' budgets, the cuts are more symbolic than harmful.

According to the Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research, school board members in Alachua County make $40,000 per year and in Broward County, $46,000.

Alachua has about 30,000 students and a $258 million general fund budget.

Broward County has about 270,000 students and a $2.7 billion general fund budget.

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