Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pressing his education culture war, took the extraordinary step of endorsing school board candidates in nonpartisan races. Now the winners are beginning to make their mark.
School board races in Florida are nominally nonpartisan, but the Republican governor jumped into the fray and endorsed 30 candidates whom he said would carry conservative values into local districts. Moms for Liberty, a conservative parent group with similar goals, made an overlapping set of endorsements as well. In response, Florida Democrats and teachers unions endorsed some candidates on the other side, turning school board races in some communities into de facto partisan political contests.
In Sarasota County, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, three DeSantis-backed candidates won, giving conservatives a 4-1 majority on the school board, which moved quickly to fire Superintendent Brennan Asplen without cause.Members gave few hints about why, though activists with the local Moms for Liberty group had raised questions about the district’s equity committee and leveled vague charges that Asplen was a tool of the political left.
“You have to get the politics out of this school district. You have to,” he said. “I spend more time on politics and nonsense than anything else … It needs to end.”
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