Republican leaders in a second Florida county are condemning the Florida School Boards Association and other groups for filing suit to end the state’s tax credit scholarship program for low-income students.
Dougher
A resolution passed late Monday by the Republican Executive Committee in Clay County, in suburban Jacksonville, calls on registered Republicans to oppose the suit and urges Republican school board members to “take all appropriate measures to force the Florida School Boards Association to remove itself as a litigant.”
The move follows in the footsteps of a similar resolution passed by the REC in neighboring Duval County last week. And it’s especially noteworthy given that the chair of the Clay County Republican Party, Leslie Dougher, is also chair of the Republican Party of Florida.
The 13-year-old Florida tax credit scholarship program is the largest private school choice program in the nation. It is administered by scholarship funding organizations like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog. The program is serving 68,450 students this fall (as of the latest count Wednesday afternoon), about 70 percent of them black or Hispanic.
