The Miami Dade County school board voted Wednesday to require students and staff to wear masks during in-person classes when school starts next week, defying Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ order banning mask mandates.
As CNN reports, the board voted by a 7-1 margin to implement the mask mandate even though DeSantis has signed executive orders extorting local school districts to ignore public health guidelines by threatening to withhold funding or forcing them to pay for students’ private school tuition.
“For the consequences associated with doing the right thing, whatever that right thing is, I will wear proudly as a badge of honor,” Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said.
Carvalho was speaking at a meeting of the Republican-controlled state Board of Education, which had just voted to investigate Alachua and Broward counties’ school boards because they, too, passed mask mandates.
DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw told CNN, “No politician is above the law. The legislature passed the parents’ bill of rights and Gov. DeSantis signed it into law. Forced masking of all schoolchildren is not consistent with protecting parents’ rights to make health and education decisions for their own children.”