The Broward County School Board has lurched from one crisis to another for too long. Learning, the No. 1 priority, is often clouded by controversy outside class at the expense of kids and their parents, whose tax dollars pay for the sixth-largest school system in the U.S.
So much has happened. Going back more than a decade, a board member and a former board member went to prison for misdeeds. Voters approved an $800 million school construction program, but long-overdue repairs are fraught with delays and cost overruns. The tragedy in Parkland led to a statewide grand jury and the indictment of a former superintendent. Its long-awaited report harshly criticized slow renovations and safety improvements.
Gov. Ron DeSantis last month suspended four board members for “incompetence, neglect of duty and misuse of authority.” Frustration is understandable, but the suspensions were an overreach, a power play by a Republican governor with a stated partisan agenda to take over school boards, which he could never accomplish at the ballot box in heavily Democratic Broward.
One suspended board member, Donna Pilger Korn, was elected three times and seeks another four-year term on Nov. 8, and here is where the forgiving tendencies of Broward voters must come to an end.
A clean break
The Sun Sentinel recommends Korn’s opponent, Allen Zeman, who comes from a family of educators, holds a doctorate in economics, had a high-level civilian career in the Navy and is focused on student performance. Zeman, 58, of Fort Lauderdale, is studious and well-prepared and represents a clean break with the status quo. “Enough is enough,” his campaign slogan, aptly sums up the community’s mounting frustration.
Zeman asks why Broward has been a B-rated school district for a decade when Palm Beach and Miami-Dade are A-rated. The county deserves an A-rated district, and getting there will be one of his main goals. He wants summer school to have a much greater academic emphasis.
Korn disputes the grand jury report as one-sided, malicious and politically motivated. Her prolonged and expensive effort to block its release is another major concern. The safeguarding of her constitutional right to due process has been costly for taxpayers, with $45,391 in fees through July. The new DeSantis-dominated board voted to stop paying any of her legal bills after the report’s release on Aug. 26.
The big question hovering over the countywide District 8 race is this: If Korn is re-elected in November, will DeSantis suspend her again, or will he respect the will of the voters?
Korn is adamant that DeSantis would not suspend her a second time, because of statements he made three years ago when former Sheriff Scott Israel ran for his old job after being suspended. Israel lost the election, so the issue was never resolved definitively.
Too great a risk
Zeman says the risk with Korn is too great, and we agree. Whether DeSantis wins re-election or not, he’s certain to lose Broward by a wide margin, so why would he care about county voters’ preferences? The temptation for DeSantis to put a right-wing zealot on this School Board is too great, especially after he showed his partisanship by replacing the four Democratic School Board members he removed with Republicans.
This is a countywide nonpartisan race, so the winning candidate must get a majority of votes. Korn and Zeman were the top two finishers in a four-person primary contest. Korn got 30.6% and Zeman 29.9%, and they are separated by 1,606 votes.
We recommended Zeman in the primary in part because he sees a need for higher ethical standards for board members.
Citing ethics issues surrounding Korn and her vacation stays at a board vendor’s home, which she said she paid for, Zeman vowed to go above and beyond lax state ethics rules and live by the stricter guidelines put in place for federal civil servants. As we noted in our earlier editorial, Zeman said he will refuse any gifts from vendors and supports creating an advisory panel chaired by former chairs of the Florida Commission on Ethics to advise board members.
We urge him to go further and prohibit political consultants in School Board campaigns from also lobbying the board members they helped elect. That is a glaring conflict of interest. The rule should be that political operatives can do one or the other, but not both.
To Korn’s credit, she displayed mettle by showing up for our recent candidate interview. Many others in similar circumstances would not face the questions. She did.
But Zeman is the better choice at this pivotal moment for Broward schools. For Broward County School Board District 8, the Sun Sentinel recommends Allen Zeman.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its staff members. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.
