Ron DeSantis shows how to bring the teachers’ unions to heel

Leftists want schools to replace parents and provide children with everything — except for a decent education. That is why schools are increasingly funded to provide children with every meal — even during the summer — while they are teaching children about gay porn and made-up pronouns.

Believe it or not, this cancer is spreading to varying degrees in almost every red state — except for the one state where the governor is denying the left money and power to indoctrinate and transform our kids.

DeSantis is trying to make freedom, not dependency, permanent in Florida.

It’s something every Republican has promised for years but has never delivered. While most red states struggle to eradicate union influence even from rural education districts, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is on the cusp of decertifying United Teachers of Dade, the largest teachers’ union in Florida and one of the largest in the country.

In May, DeSantis signed SB 256, which required that all public employee unions receive 60% support from membership or face a decertification vote. The law also allowed members to reject automatic deduction of membership dues from their paychecks. As a result, enough members decided to keep their own money, which resulted in UTD’s membership dues dropping to 58.4% of members.

After repeatedly failing in court to get the law blocked, UTD leadership worked arduously through the fall to regain a 60% threshold. They offered $100 gift cards to members who signed up additional dues-paying teachers and flew in staffers to bolster their sign-up campaign. They also eliminated the substitute teachers from the bargaining unit in order to lower the number of teachers needed to meet the standard.

In the end, enough teachers voted with their brains and pocketbooks, decided to keep their money out of the hands of the greedy union grift, and even formed a new local association to ensure their pooled resources didn’t leave Dade County. By the way, those paychecks have grown larger, as DeSantis raised teachers’ salaries while cutting taxes and reducing the union’s control over their destinies.

Thanks to a provision of SB 256 lowering the threshold for new ballot certification of startup alternative teacher’s associations, the Miami-Dade Education Coalition was born. This alternative will permanently imperil United Teachers of Dade’s ability to remain viable in the long term.

Under the new law, existing unions must show a 30% interest threshold in unionizing to vote for certification. They can still gather signatures from 30%, present the results to the state’s Public Employees Relations Commission, and then reconstitute the union with a 51% vote for affirmation. However, the union would still face that 60% threshold to maintain its certification yearly.

The law artfully allows new competitors to get on the ballot with signatures from just 10% of the population (instead of 30% for existing unions), increasing their viability. Eventually, the upstart organization could siphon off some of the remaining support for the status quo union, leading to a decline below the 50% threshold to exist at all.

While some will complain the law is unfair, SB 256 is a superb example of how to break the incumbent power.

When the government empowers private grifters to create a stronghold over entire professions and the education of our children, the only way to reconstitute choice and competition is to balance out generations of tendentious pro-union treatment with provisions such as the 10% threshold for new associations. It once again demonstrates the cunning of the DeSantis administration in using power to achieve conservative ends the same way the left has acted in blue states — and even red states — for decades.

Florida is also rejecting $248 million in eligible funding from the Department of Agriculture for the Summer EBT Program, which provides food to children enrolled in the school lunch program.

This is how the government owns us: by making as many people as dependent as possible for every need under the sun. The federal government owns red states by making their governments dependent on its funding streams and then attaching so many strings that the state can’t help but morph into California lite.

DeSantis is having none of it. The Florida Department of Children and Family Services declined to opt in to the new funding for school meals. The state had until January 1 to sign up for the additional funding, which our useless Republican Congress authorized in December’s budget bill.

“We anticipate that our state’s full approach to serving children will continue to be successful this year without any additional federal programs that inherently always come with some federal strings attached,” Florida Department of Children and Families spokeswoman Mallory McManus told the Orlando Sentinel.

DeSantis clearly understands that dependency on federal funding is what makes red states act like blue states. Most Republican governors are addicted to federal funding and then wonder why they have blue-state problems. The Summer EBT Program started as an “emergency” program during COVID. But like all such “temporary” spending, it’s become permanent.

DeSantis is trying to make freedom, not dependency, permanent in Florida.

Regardless of who wins the nomination for president, we should all strive to turn the red states into sanctuaries for our values. Nobody has offered a better blueprint than DeSantis when it comes to freeing red states from the officious tentacles of both federal funding and union bosses.