Florida Wanted To Take Her Teaching License Over A Black Lives Matter Flag. A Judge Just Said No
From Forbes.com
You may recall the story of Amy Donofrio, the Florida teacher pilloried for keeping up a Black Lives Matter flag. The latest chapter in the saga just dropped.
The DeSantis administration was poised to make an example of Amy Donofrio, demonstrating that Florida is “where woke goes to die” by punishing her for refusing to take down her classroom Black Lives Matter flag. The state went after Donofrio’s license; instead, a judge has ruled that Donofrio will remain licensed to teach in Florida.
Donofrio had been teaching at the then-named Robert E. Lee High School in Duval County since 2012. In that time, she had established the EVAC movement, a program to lift up at risk youth.
The group developed a national profile. They presented at the 2016 Coalition for Juvenile Justice Youth Summit. They traveled to Washington D.C. where they met with John Lewis. They met with President Obama. They won first place in the National Harvard Kind Schools Challenge, for which Senator Marco Rubio wrote them a letter of commendation.
For her work, Donofrio was honored with her school’s Teacher of the Year award, as well as community awards celebrating her achievements.
Court documents note that as early as the 2018-2019 school year, Donofrio had a Black Lives Matter sign and t-shirt displayed in her room, with a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign outside her door that displayed hearts for the LGBTQ community, Black Lives Matter, a peace sign, and an American flag.
2020 was a year of rising tensions. In January, a former member of the EVAC movement was shot and killed by police, only four months before the nationally-galvanizing murder of George Floyd. Jacksonville saw controversy over pandemic masking (Duval County parents would eventually sue the district over mask mandates).
In the fall, the building principal told the staff to stay neutral on all controversies, including a proposal to replace the name of Lee from the school.
That fall, Donofrio put up a Black Lives Matter at the entrance to her classroom. Soon after, citing a district policy about advertising, the assistant principal suggested she remove the flag. By the beginning of November, the suggestion had become “the flag needs to come down.” But the district had no policy covering the flag in November; that policy wasn’t in place until March 19.
The next school day, Donofrio was told to remove the flag by the end of the day “or it will be taken down for you.” She chose the second, and that evening, the principal took down the flag. The next day Donofrio was pulled from her classroom and reassigned to the district warehouse while the district investigated “several allegations.” It declined to specify what the allegations were. The judge found no evidence “that any student, parent, or teacher ever complained about the flag.”