Today’s question: Should School Board member Jackie Rosario face consequences for using her School District-provided digital calendar to schedule and keep track of political activities related to her re-election campaign?
The other four School Board members say the matter should be referred to the Florida Ethics Commission to determine if Rosario’s actions rise to the level of wrongdoing.
So does the community activist who filed a written complaint with the board last week, also asking that Rosario be “censured” and ordered to “cease and desist all political usage of district resources.”
To support his allegation, Michael Marsh attached to his letter copies of Rosario’s calendar entries from earlier this year, saying he obtained the information more than a month after submitting a public-records request in April.
The calendar entries include references to a fundraiser; picking up petitions; submitting petitions to the Supervisor of Elections office; serving as a judge for a contest organized by a local political group; candidate vetting by another local political organization; arranging for a booth at Main Street Vero Beach’s Downtown Friday; three campaign financials sessions; and contacting a local political activist about canvassing.
“It’s as clear as day that she violated School Board policy prohibiting the use of district resources for her own political gain,” Marsh said during a phone interview Monday. “If the board isn’t going to enforce its own policies, why have them?”
If Marsh’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the target of Rosario’s one-woman crusade last winter to find out why the School District donated $70 worth of soon-to-expire bottled water to a local, feed-the-needy Thanksgiving event he organized.
Rosario, you might remember, wasted the School District staff’s time and resources to chase a scandal that existed only in her mind, motivated by her frustration with Marsh’s relentless social-media attacks on her steadfast alliance with a small-but-vocal fringe group that claims to advocate for parental rights.
Rosario’s supporters, then, might argue that Marsh’s complaint about Rosario’s calendar was merely another attempt to discredit her as a board member and candidate.
Even School Superintendent David Moore, who has faced stiff criticism from Rosario, doesn’t believe Marsh’s allegations amount to much, because he said many professional people synch their personal and work-related digital calendars.
“I don’t think it rises to the level of a problem,” Moore said. “I don’t see an issue with synching your calendars. If you take it at face value, I don’t see any ill intent. Plenty of people do it.”
Plenty of people, though, aren’t running for re-election against two challengers who don’t enjoy the benefits of a district-provided Microsoft Outlook calendar to plan their political activities.
And we’re not talking about Rosario using the calendar for personal matters, such as picking up her kids, remembering a dentist appointment, or dinner with friends.
She used the calendar, synched or not, to assist with her campaign.
So, yes, I was a little surprised by Moore’s response, particularly since he knows the board policy. Maybe I shouldn’t have been.
District sources have told me Rosario was upset because she believes she should’ve been given the opportunity to redact the non-board-related information before Moore’s staff provided the calendar entries to Marsh.
Indeed, Marsh received an email from Cristen Maddux, the district’s public information officer, who stated that the record he received wasn’t “properly redacted.”
She then asked that he “not share the record that was provided due to it containing items that were not related to board business and would not be considered public record.”
Marsh, of course, disagreed with her assessment.
“Why would it be redacted?” he told me Monday. “There’s nothing personal there, nothing about kids or family or students. It took them nearly 40 days to give me the records I requested. They had plenty of time to redact it.”
Marsh makes a point.
If Rosario were allowed to redact the non-board-related entries from the calendar before making it available for public inspection, she would have effectively been able to hide her alleged wrongdoing under the guise that the information was personal.
Florida’s public-records law doesn’t tolerate such gamesmanship, or dishonesty. I don’t believe the redaction would’ve survived a legal challenge.
The bigger question, then, might be: Does any of this matter?
Certainly, it should.
Rosario should’ve known better.
She’s is in her fourth year as a board member, has been planning her re-election campaign for more than a year, and should be fully aware of the policies regarding the use of district resources for political purposes.
At the very least, she should’ve known to avoid even the appearance of impropriety as she embarked on her campaign, especially after Moore sent out a February memo advising all employees of the School Board policy governing political activity in the workplace.
So why did she do it?
Rosario did not respond to a text and email sent Saturday morning in an attempt to get an explanation. She did, however, find time the past few days to log into her Facebook account and thank the parental-rights group for its formal endorsement of her campaign.
She also found time to rally her parental-rights allies to attend Monday night’s School Board meeting to speak against the district’s guidelines for administrators dealing with LGBTQ+ issues on their campuses.
And, again, it’s a concocted controversy, similar to the parental-rights group’s efforts – also fully backed by Rosario – to remove from school libraries books the kids didn’t know were there, and weren’t reading anyway.
This time, the group is trying to remain relevant by claiming the district’s LGBTQ+ guidelines will allow boys and girls to use the same bathrooms, pretending that this issue is a causing an uproar in our public schools.
Actually, the guidelines are in place for only a tiny percentage of the district’s students, and Moore said there are enough single-entry bathrooms to accommodate them.
This isn’t a problem.
This doesn’t endanger anyone.
This is just another distraction, another waste of time and effort that should be spent on improving education and student outcomes, another attempt to intimidate anyone who opposes the group’s agenda.
Obviously, Rosario is fine with that – just as she was OK with the other culture-war battles over masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, library books and critical race theory, which wasn’t being taught in our schools anyway.
In each of those engagements, she worked hand-in-hand with the parents group.
So it doesn’t matter, really, that Rosario might try to dismiss the calendar issue, saying it’s nothing.
For most of the past two years, she has wasted countless hours at School Board workshops and meetings talking passionately about trumped-up topics that have amounted to exactly that.
Nothing.