Gov. Ron DeSantis said the Broward public school district is “a disaster” being run to benefit “the entrenched interests, particularly the school unions, rather than the parents and the students,” and that the state should consider taking it over.
“There’s a handful of spots around the state where maybe thrusting some of these entities into receivership may be the best way going forward,” DeSantis said in answer to a question from a reporter at a news conference Monday in Davie to talk about a reduction in property insurance premiums.
He suggested Education Commissioner Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas or the Florida Legislature could explore taking control of the large school district.
“Going forward, I think you could work things out pretty quickly,” DeSantis said.
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The governor’s comments come at a time when the school district — the nation’s sixth-largest — is under intense financial pressure because of declining enrollment and project mismanagement. It is currently trying to cover a budget gap of nearly $100 million by closing schools and imposing a hiring freeze to save money.
Broward County School Board Member Adam Cervera blames the dire financial straits on what he describes as a “pattern of long-standing financial mismanagement."
“These problems are not isolated, they reflect a pattern of long-standing financial mismanagement while our District is cutting programs, freezing hiring, and considering closing schools,” said Cervera in a statement on Monday.
“Our students, parents, and teachers deserve better than this. Taxpayers deserve better than this,” he said. “Broward families expect transparency and accountability, not waste.”
Cervera, who was appointed to the seat by DeSantis, said he has scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss what he calls the “alarming financial and oversight failures” by school district administrators.
Among those failures, according to Cervera:
— A $2.6 million office space lease at a Wilton Manors nonprofit at a time when the school district has “dozens of under-utilized school campuses.”
— A “botched multimillion-dollar procurement process” of $1.2 billion in SMART Bond projects. The money was approved by Broward taxpayers in 2014 to renovate schools.
— The “misallocation of teacher referendum dollars, with hundreds of thousands diverted to high-ranking administrators instead of educators” through a 2022 referendum that was supposed to boost the pay of teachers and the lower-paid staffers. Instead, the district’s highest-paid staffers were given annual bonuses of up to $14,000, the Sun-Sentinel reported last week.
"I'm not surprised by the Governor's comments," Nathalie Lynch-Walsh, a longtime district volunteer who served on the district's audit committee, told WLRN. "Things have never been worse in terms of fraud, waste, and mismanagement."
Lynch-Walsh also served ad chair of the district's advisory council before being removed by the superintendent.
In defending the school system, Broward School Board Chair Sarah Leonardi told WLRN that it's "inaccurate" for DeSantis to call it "a disaster."
" No one here is denying the fact that we've had a chaotic history over the last few years," Leonardi said. "While there are certain operational issues that'll come up in any large organization, I think we, as Broward schools, have really turned a page."
She noted that Broward schools — for the second year in a row — received an A grade from the Florida Department of Education, and had no D- or F-rated schools.
"I welcome the governor and his team to work collaboratively with us to find those inefficiencies and fix them so that we're spending taxpayer dollars as best as possible to deliver outcomes for students," she said.
