Regulation Via Phone Call

This week Leslie Postal wrote a piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel covering the new edict from the state sex education in Florida must henceforth be non-sex education. 

Florida has told school districts around the state that they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence, according to district officials and an advocate for comprehensive sexual health education.

This is all sorts of a mistake for which future generations of Florida men and women will pay a price, but there is something else worth noticing in the story.

As several folks on Twitter have pointed out, the story indicates in several spots that the state's instructions were delivered via phone calls and discussion. In other words, not via anything actually written down. 

That's a problematic choice in Florida, where the government's most common reaction to complaints over a new law or policy is "You just didn't understand it right." The "don't say fay" law wasn't saying that at all. The book not-really-bans were being implemented so bizarrely and haphazardly because people were misunderstanding it or even trying to deliberately make it look bad. Or that chaplain law, where DeSantis was thrown off by the actual words printed in the law. 

It gets hard to keep reinterpreting rules on the fly when they are actually written down. So why not simply avoid leaving a paper trail at all. Deliver your edicts verbally so that nobody can prove that you said something in particular. "What?! Well, we never. Clearly these folks misunderstood the instructions we gave them." 

Delivering directives verbally also allows a level of tone that the printed word does not. It's a way to go if you don't think a memo is intimidating enough.

If this is the new SOP for Florida's department of education, there are more difficult times ahead for educators trying to do their jobs and keep their butts covered at the same time. Good luck to them playing a political game of telephone.