Thirteen Florida school boards have challenged six separate provisions of the state’s sweeping new education law in court.
But court documents filed last week add a new argument to the mix. In a motion for summary judgement, the districts’ lawyers argue that even if some of those changes pass constitutional muster on their own, they’re part of a larger package that unconstitutionally undermines the authority of local school boards.
Among other things, the lawsuit takes aim at provisions in House bill 7069 that allow charter organizations to form their own local education agencies, create a more aggressive school turnaround system and allow Schools of Hope to bypass the normal charter school application process.The districts point to cases like Bush v. Holmes, in which the state Supreme Court found a voucher program violated the requirement for a “uniform” public school system, and Duval County School Board v. State Board of Education, which held only districts have the authority to authorize charter schools.
Those cases, they argue, show the state constitution gives districts exclusive power over Florida’s public schools, and forbid the legislature from creating “parallel,” publicly funded alternatives.
Even if the challenged provisions of HB 7069 did not each independently violate Article IX of the Florida Constitution (as the discussion above makes clear they each do), collectively they certainly do. It is plain to see that the Legislature is trying to do indirectly what it already was told it could not do directly. In 2006, the Legislature attempted to establish an independent network of charter schools not authorized by local district school boards. … In Duval County, the First District Court of Appeals held that permitting and encouraging “the creation of a parallel system of free public education escaping the operation and control of local elected school boards” violated Article IX, [section 4(b ) of the Florida constitution]. Read in their entirety, the challenged provisions of HB 7069 clearly permit and encourage the exact same thing; a system of charter schools free of the local control of public education mandated by the Florida Constitution.
In other words, the districts are building on legal arguments that have appeared in multiple school-choice related court cases in Florida, with mixed results.
