Once again, Orlando Sentinel reporters peered behind the curtains of Florida’s unchecked voucher-school system to see how $1 billion worth of public money is being used.
And once again, what they found was ugly.
Their reporting uncovered more than 80 schools with blatant discrimination policies that deny admission to gay children, expel or discipline students who reveal they’re gay and sometimes refuse to educate children of LGBT parents.
These schools want public money. But they don’t want to serve all of the public.
One school told a mother — a firefighter married to U.S. Air Force veteran — that her children were unfit to be educated there simply because the couple was two women.
The two women served their country and community. But the school — which received $371,000 in state scholarship money last year — told the family to get an education elsewhere.
We’ll talk more about these discrimination policies in a moment — and about the politicians and bureaucrats who defend them.
But first, let’s go back two years to the last time Sentinel reporters investigated the wild west of unregulated voucher schools in Florida.
In their “Schools without Rules” series, reporters found voucher schools forging safety reports, using factually incorrect curriculum and hiring unqualified teachers — some who hadn’t even finished high school.
Yes, high school dropouts teaching school … underwritten with public money.
They found voucher schools that stiffed teachers out of paychecks and some that shut down in the middle of the school year, stranding students.
Berate public schools all you want. There will never be a day when you take your child to a public school only to find it’s gone out of business.
The reporters found administrators accused of fraud, teachers accused of abuse, loads of problems — all of it swept under the rug by politicians who demonize public schools while promoting “school choice.”
Neither the Sentinel nor these reporters have it in for voucher schools. Heck, we spend far more time covering issues — and uncovering problems — at public schools.
These reporters wanted to see what was happening in Florida’s billion-dollar voucher-school system for a simple reason: No one else will.
In six months, our reporters visited more voucher schools in Central Florida — to see what kids were learning and how they were being treated — than the Florida Department of Education visited in the entire state in a year.
Florida drowns public schools in regulations and tests in the name of “accountability” but lets voucher schools run wild.
Some voucher schools do great jobs. And many welcome all children, regardless of race, faith or sexual orientation. This includes some Christian and faith-based schools that not only welcome LGBT students but teach students that discrimination against anyone is wrong.
But others discriminate — not only against LGBT students, but also students with even mild disabilities.
If these kids were denied admission because they were black, it would be illegal — and politicians would be outraged.
But Florida green-lights discrimination against LGBT citizens. In hiring. In housing. And yes, in schooling.
And Gov. Ron DeSantis and leaders in the Republican-controlled Legislature are fine with it.
They say the state doesn’t directly fund discrimination, since parents choose the schools. But the state chooses which schools are allowed to take the vouchers.
The politicians also say people of faith should be free to discriminate if that’s part of their belief system.
People used to make similar arguments for racial discrimination. In defending a 1965 ban on interracial marriage, a Virginia judge declared in 1965 that God “did not intend for the races to mix.“
Discrimination was wrong then. It is wrong now.
It’s especially wrong when underwritten with tax dollars.
When I first wrote about this issue last year and identified schools that refused to accept LGBT students, Step Up For Students — the nonprofit that made about $18 million administrating vouchers that year — went on the attack, claiming I was trying to hurt “disadvantaged children.”
The group’s president, Doug Tuthill, penned an op-ed that tried to downplay the issue, claiming Step Up found only 38 schools with anti-gay discrimination policies.
First, that’s 38 too many.
But the truth, as six months of investigating by reporters Annie Martin and Leslie Postal revealed, is that many more schools have explicit discrimination policies.
So, either Step Up’s research abilities stink, or the group was trying to downplay a pattern of institutional discrimination while it kept cashing checks.
Tuthill also claimed he’d found no evidence “of a single LGBTQ+ scholarship student being mistreated.”
Maybe he doesn’t view discrimination as mistreatment.
Maybe if he was the one being discriminated against, he’d feel differently.
I’m sure Step Up will attack again — especially since some of the corporations that chose to redirect their tax payments to the state’s scholarship/voucher program are rethinking their involvement. Rosen Resorts led the way, saying it would no longer allow its tax credits to fund discrimination.
What Step Up should do is back legislative efforts to ban discrimination against the disabled, against LGBT families, against people of different faiths — against anyone.
And they should welcome more accountability and standards in general, to make sure children are actually being educated at these publicly funded schools — just as Florida already demands of traditional schools.
Many lawmakers are fine with the status quo and publicly funded discrimination. If you’re not, speak up.
You can find contact info for your legislator at www.leg.state.fl.us
