Earlier today, elected and community leaders from Florida and Pennsylvania held a virtual press conference ahead of Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign stop at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Harrisburg tomorrow.
For those who missed the press conference, it can be viewed online here.
Speakers highlighted the extreme policies being pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis that attack Florida’s public education system, his proposal for a near total ban on abortion, the epidemic of gun violence being fueled by policies like permitless car and the affordability crisis gripping the state while outlining how that agenda is wrong for the people of Pennsylvania.
“As Governor Ron DeSantis prepares to run for president, he has basically leveraged every bully pulpit he has to be as extreme as possible… Governor DeSantis has not prioritized the needs of everyday people… We do not want this type of demagogue in the White House.” – Florida State Representative Anna Eskamani
“When all you can offer as a political leader is a list of people to hate, a bevy of things that we should ban, and then a marginalized group that we should blame for all the things wrong in the world, you do that because you do not have serious solutions to address the things that people are actually worried about. We know whether it’s Florida or it’s Pennsylvania, we have families who are desperate to know that their kid is going to get a quality education and that we’re not going to use our classrooms as political battlefields to push a political agenda… Drag queens are not the threat to our kids, but guns are. Books are not a threat to our kids, but an underfunded education system, that’s a threat to our kids.” – Pennsylvania State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta
“I’m not a politician so this is a bit out of the ordinary for me but I felt compelled to speak up today because I have grave concern about recent trends in education in some parts of the country that Pennsylvania really cannot afford to follow. What we’ve seen in Florida is really at odds with what school communities in Pennsylvania need and want. When politicians like Ron DeSantis try to do things like ban books or tells schools what classes they can or can’t offer or which words teachers can or can’t say, it’s not just an unnecessary distraction to those meaningful discussions we need to be having, it’s an affront to the hardworking, decent people from all walks of life who make our schools function.” – former Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Eric Hagarty
“Our children’s freedom to learn is under attack by a Governor who is a bully and is forcing his extreme right-wing politics into our classrooms, indoctrinating the minds of our children by trying to whitewash history… Free states don’t ban books. Free states don’t ban ideas. Free states don’t ban our children from being their true and authentic selves… Florida’s dirty little secret is this: not only is the Governor attacking our freedoms to appeal to his presidential primary voters, but we are now the most unaffordable state to live in in the nation.” – Florida State Senator Shevrin Jones
“We fought hard to protect these schools, we pushed back on these extreme bills… All of our kids who deserve an education, especially our students with disabilities who know that in public schools they are guaranteed a legal right to that education and if we don’t have public schools, that goes away… As far as the Florida extreme policies are concerned, we say no thank you.” – Director of the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools Moira Kaleida