I am quoted in this story along with another Sarasota parent. – Seth Stottlemyer, Editor
The state has introduced new laws that affect nearly every stage of parenting. Some families are choosing between fight and flight.
In the Facebook group Brittany Minor created five years ago for Black mothers like herself in Orlando, discussions among the 2,800 members have reached new depths of frustration and fatigue. These moms are watching what is happening in Florida, the shifting of the political and cultural environment around them, “and they are tired, they feel helpless, they feel hopeless,” Minor says. “The common thread is that people feel broken.”
Adding to the members’ sense of distress and disorientation, Minor says, is the knowledge that so many of their neighbors supported the state’s pivot from purple to solid red. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who won reelection in a 20-point landslide in November and is poised for a potential presidential run, Florida has become the “center of gravity” for conservative policymaking, as James Nash, of the bipartisan ROKK Solutions public affairs strategy firm, has previously told The Washington Post. Florida families are now facing a slew of new laws and policy proposals that touch nearly every stage of parenting — from the reproductive health care a pregnant mother can receive, to the books available for an elementary school student to read, to the diversity and social culture awaiting students on college campuses.
The effects are already far-reaching: The Parental Rights in Education Act — widely referred to by critics as “Don’t Say Gay” — prohibits educators in kindergarten through third grade from addressing gender or sexual orientation in class, and restricts what teachers in upper grades can say on the topic. The Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act — or Stop WOKE — bars the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining systemic racism. Books for students of all ages have been removed from public school media centers and classroom libraries after a new state law mandated that all material made available to students be age-appropriate, free of “pornography” and “suited to student needs,” without providing clear guidelines about how those standards are to be applied. Just before the start of Florida’s legislative session this week, GOP lawmakers introduced a slate of new bills that would further overhaul both K-12 and higher education — expanding the limitations on teaching gender or sexual identity through eighth grade, and requiring teachers to use pronouns that match a child’s sex as assigned at birth, among other proposals.
Beyond the public school system, Florida has moved on several fronts. Its medical boards have imposed rules barring transgender children from receiving gender-affirming medical care. On abortion, state law now prohibits the procedure beyond 15 weeks’ gestation, with few exceptions, and a new bill would tighten that restriction to six weeks. And on guns, lawmakers are pushing for legislation that would allow Florida residents to carry firearms without a state license.
At the center of all of this are families trying to navigate the transforming legal landscape of their home state. Parents who do not support these measures describe feeling both fearful and furious. Some have embraced activism for the first time, while longtime advocates have grown more outspoken. Others are just trying to manage what this new reality means for their families and futures.
When Eli wanted to know why his classmate said he couldn’t talk about his father at school, Hotchkiss, a mom of three boys who shares custody of the older two with her ex-husband, sat her son down and reiterated that there is nothing wrong with saying “gay.” But, she told him, a new law in their state means that if teachers talk about sexual orientation in certain ways, they can get in trouble. She had discussed this with her sons before, she says, but now Eli was experiencing the reverberations of the law for himself, and he stared at her, confounded. “But why?” he kept asking.
For families like these in Florida, the difficult questions keep coming.
“How can we allow my kids to be proud of their family if they can’t speak about who I am?” asks Callen Jones, a nonbinary parent with two preschool-age children who refer to Jones as their “baba” rather than “mom” or “dad.”
“A lot of Black moms are saying, ‘Well, we teach our kids about Black history at home anyway’ — but what about the kids who aren’t being taught Black history at home?” Minor says.
“If I leave Florida, then who am I leaving behind?” says Angela Wynn, the mom of a 10-year-old daughter in Sarasota and co-founder of the statewide advocacy group Support Our Schools. “If we go, who is left to fight?”
What’s happening in Florida has made fighters of parents who did not expect to be at the center of such high-stakes political battles, and rallied some who never before considered their politics to be particularly “progressive.”
Seth Stottlemyer, a father of a 5-year-old daughter in Sarasota, has always described himself and his wife as political moderates. They’re both registered under “no party affiliation,” he says — his wife is a former Republican — and they have friends, neighbors and business associates from across the political spectrum. But their daughter is starting kindergarten this fall, and Stottlemyer is increasingly concerned about what is happening to the public school system that awaits her. He’s become more vocal about his views, connecting with other parents who feel the same. He started writing letters to the editor of the local paper, putting his opposition to DeSantis’s laws on record.
“It feels like there are certain elements that are trying to turn the clock back on America, and turn the clock back on our state. The banning of books is a big concern for us,” Stottlemyer says, as is the “whitewashing of American history.” He is also distressed by the targeting of LGBTQ children: “As a parent, and especially with a 5-year-old, I just don’t know what path my daughter’s life is going to take, and it’s scary to think that there are people who are wanting to try to marginalize her.”
In her life before the pandemic, Wynn, the co-founder of Support Our Schools, a nonprofit that advocates for children to receive a safe, inclusive and fact-based public education, had made a point to avoid political activism. Politics felt “like such a beast, this machine, and I felt I couldn’t do anything about it,” she says, “so I tried to not get involved.”
But when DeSantis took aim at mask mandates in public schools before her young children were eligible for vaccines, Wynn started going to school board meetings to push for continued safety measures. She was astonished by the hostility she witnessed there, the anti-mask activists who would spit or sneeze on her after she spoke. She kept going anyway and met other like-minded parents.
“We started to realize that this wasn’t just about masks. It was just the topic of the hour. Then it morphed into targeting critical race theory, and then it morphed into targeting social-emotional learning,” she says. So she and others co-founded Support Our Schools, one of several parent-led organizations that have emerged to counter the rise of conservative groups like Moms for Liberty, which launched in Brevard County with the aim of supporting “parental rights” and has since spread nationwide……..