DeSantis Win: Court Says Judge's Block of a Mask Ban in Schools Unjustified

Florida’s First District Court of Appeal on Wednesday held that a Leon County judge’s decision blocking the DeSantis administration’s ban on school mask mandates is incorrect, in a win for the prominent Republican governor.

In September, Leon County Judge John C. Cooper “lifted an automatic stay of his decision … that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and state education officials exceeded their authority by imposing the blanket ban through executive order and tagging defiant pro-mask local school boards with financial penalties” after initially blocking the order in August. This series of actions led DeSantis to file an emergency appeal to the First District Court of Appeals in Tallahassee, requesting a stay, which it ultimately granted.

The DeSantis administration scored another win Wednesday after the court explained why the Leon County judge was wrong. The appellate court explained it reinstated the stay because it “concluded that the appellees failed to carry their burden of demonstrating that they are likely to prevail on the merits.”

The court continued: 

Indeed, we had serious doubts about the appellees’ standing to bring the underlying lawsuit and the trial court’s authority to require the education Defendants to follow (or ‘enforce’) the executive order only insofar that doing so did not violate the statutory Parents’ Bill of Rights.

The court said it is “unlikely” the appellees “can establish standing for at least three reasons,” one of them being that the appellees “challenged the alleged ‘usurpation’ of authority from the local school boards and DOH.”

“Those entities alone must advance their own institutional rights,” it wrote. 

The court also said the appellees “likely lack standing because the executive order did to appear to take any state action against them.” And finally, the court said the stated purpose for bringing the lawsuit “was to safeguard the health and welfare of public-school students and the general public from the spread of the COVID-19 virus.”

“But this allegation demonstrated a speculative injury that was not redressable by the trial court. Accordingly, the appellees did not appear to have ‘demonstrated any concrete, palpable injury sufficient to confer standing,” it wrote. 

While the Parents’ Bill of Rights undoubtedly played a role in the governor’s issuance of the executive order—and was even pleaded as an affirmative defense—the [Plaintiffs] never sought relief in their complaint based on an alleged violation of the Parents’ Bill of Rights. They certainly never requested an injunction against a state administrative actor proceeding in some way in contravention of the Parents’ Bill of Rights.

…

Despite the absence of any allegation that a state administrative actor was breaching—or planning to breach—the Parents’ Bill of Rights, the trial court still ordered the Education Defendants not to. That is, the trial court appeared to have awarded relief that was not requested, based on a theory that was not pleaded. It appeared to us, then, that the trial court issued an injunction that it did not have authority to issue, because the injunction was predicated on matters “‘wholly outside’” the [Plaintiffs’] causes of action.

Ultimately, the court concluded that the trial court “abused its discretion by vacating the automatic stay in the face of some clear doubts about the appellees’ ultimate success in this appeal.”

“We in turn quashed the vacated and reinstated the automatic stay,” the court added. 

The full appeal is still pending, but DeSantis’s office said the ruling “shows that the Plaintiffs have little chance of saving the trial court’s ruling, so this is a win for Governor DeSantis and parents’ rights in Florida!”

The case is Scott v. DeSantis, No. 1D21-2685 in the First District Court of Appeal in Florida.

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