Amy Donofrio outside of the high school she taught at in Florida (YouTube screengrab WTLV.)
Florida high school teacher Amy Donofrio will have her teaching license restored following a protracted legal dispute. She claims she was wrongfully fired from her Jacksonville classroom for flying a Black Lives Matter flag.
Following an April recommendation from Administrative Law Judge Suzanne Van Wyk, the Florida Education Practices Commission decided to reinstate her license during a disciplinary hearing in Tampa on Thursday.
Donofrio received a written reprimand for permitting her students to wear face masks that read, “Robert E. Lee is a gang member,” even though her license is now in good standing.
Donofrio taught at Robert E. Lee High School, a nearly 70% Black school in Duval County, from 2012 until her removal in 2021. After she left, it was renamed Riverside High School in 2021. According to Donofrio, she made an effort to create a warm, supportive, and encouraging learning atmosphere in her classroom. During her tenure, she established EVAC, a youth-led movement that encourages at-risk students to come together and share their experiences about murdered loved ones, incarceration, and police brutality in order to effect positive change and instill a sense of community. One of the signs at the entry to her classroom read, for example, “Hate Has No Home Here.”
The group was wildly successful; former President Barack Obama invited them to speak at the White House, and Obama included their input in a 2016 proclamation on youth justice. They made an appearance on “Good Morning America,” the front pages of the New York Times, and formed local partnerships with the police, inviting them to participate in group discussions with students. They took part in multiple high-profile panel discussions, met civil rights leaders and lawmakers like the late John Lewis, and won Harvard’s KIND School Challenge and Campaign for Youth Justice Social Media Challenge.
According to its website, EVAC also assisted students in doubling their grade-point averages, landing their first jobs, and becoming the first in their families to graduate from high school. Donofrio received the title of Teacher of the Year.
However, in 2021, she faced sharp criticism for the Black Lives Matter banner she had been hanging over her classroom door since the previous academic year.
Tensions increased at the beginning of the 2020–21 school year following the January death by police of Reginald Leon Boston Jr., 20, a former student and member of EVAC. This occurred a few months prior to the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. Shortly after Floyd’s death, as national tensions rose, the principal of Donofrio’s high school sent out a memo instructing staff to keep out of the political controversy. Among the cautions were directives to the staff not to take sides on the renaming of Robert E. Lee High School to a non-Confederate leader.
Donofrio was eventually informed by an assistant principal that she should probably take down the flag because of school policies prohibiting advertisements, even though at the time there was no official policy in place regarding its hanging. Even though that policy wouldn’t be created until the spring of 2021, according to records, Donofrio was expelled from her classroom for refusing to take down the flag. While she was being investigated, Education Weekly claims she was moved to the school district’s warehouse operations.
The school district never disclosed the specific reason for its investigation, so it was never made clear for what reason she was under investigation. However, the judge in Van Wyk’s decision stated that she could not find any proof that a teacher, parent, or student had ever voiced a complaint regarding the BLM flag during the academic year.
After being ejected from her classroom, Donofrio filed a lawsuit against Duval County Public Schools in the spring of 2021. Richard Corcoran, the state’s education commissioner at the time, spoke candidly about the lawsuit when he addressed it in public, saying at a community college that “We made sure she was being terminated.”
However, Donofrio had not yet been fired. In August 2021, she reached a $300,000 settlement with the school district, but she chose not to return to the classroom. Even after a year, she was still unaware of the truth behind the accusations made against her, but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was already campaigning on his “anti-woke” views, and Manny Diaz, the commissioner of education who took Corcoran’s place as commissioner, supported Donofrio’s dismissal.
Diaz filed a complaint asking for Donofrio’s license to be revoked. By allowing the display of “Robert E. Lee is a gang member” masks and hanging the BLM flag, he said she had broken professional codes of conduct, exposed her students to hazardous learning environments, and failed to draw a boundary between her personal beliefs and the school’s.
Judge Van Wyk disagreed, saying
“the record is devoid of any evidence that display of the masks in respondent’s classroom failed to protect her students from conditions harmful to learning or to their mental or physical health or safety.”
“To the contrary, the record reflects that the school environment became hostile after administration removed the flag and that Principal [Timothy] Feagins had to work hard, meeting with students and making extra efforts to assure students that he supported them and that their lives did indeed matter to him,” wrote Van Wyk.
The flag had been flying long before any policy forbadding it, the judge added. Van Wyk acknowledged that Donofrio went too far in permitting the Robert E. Lee masks to be worn or shown in her classroom, given that the incident took place during the school’s dispute over a name change and that the school’s policy on the matter was unambiguous.
Donofrio expressed her satisfaction with the result to the local NBC affiliate WTLV.
“The last three years have been without a doubt the hardest years of my life,” She stated
“The circus that DCPS put not just me but our community through, our children through — this painful, painful chapter, it was all completely unnecessary.” she added.
Donofrio declared she would remain in Jacksonville to carry on her student assistance work.
“Affirming Black students is our professional responsibility as teachers to do, it’s not something that should cost someone their job, it’s not something that should cost someone their teaching license and today in the state of Florida, it didn’t,” she said.
The education commission’s decision was made just a few weeks after the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals severely rejected DeSantis’ “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” legislation.
Judge Britt Grant of the appellate court held that the statute, which prohibits talking about diversity or race in the workplace, penalized some points of view and was therefore “the greatest First Amendment sin.”
