Amy Donofrio outside of the high school she taught at in Florida (YouTube screengrab WTLV.)
After a yearslong controversy, Florida high school teacher Amy Donofrio will have her teaching license reinstated after she says she was unfairly fired from her Jacksonville classroom for displaying a Black Lives Matter flag.
The decision to reinstate her license was rendered by the Florida Education Practices Commission during a disciplinary hearing in Tampa on Thursday and followed a recommendation from Administrative Law Judge Suzanne Van Wyk issued this April.
Though her license is back in good standing, Donofrio did receive a written reprimand for allowing her students to wear face masks that said “Robert E. Lee is a gang member.”
Until she was removed in 2021, Donofrio taught at the nearly 70% Black school in Duval County named Robert E. Lee High School since 2012. It was renamed Riverside High School in 2021 after she left. Donofrio said she strived to make her classroom a welcoming, conducive and affirming learning environment. One of the signs at the entry to her classroom declared, for example, “Hate Has No Home Here” and during her tenure, she stood up a network for students known as EVAC, a youth-led movement where at-risk students are encouraged to come together to share their experiences about murdered love ones, incarceration, and police brutality in order to effect positive change and instill a sense of community.
The group had wild success: they spoke at the White House on invitation by former President Barack Obama and it was their feedback that Obama included in a youth justice proclamation in 2016. They appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, went on “Good Morning America” and created local partnerships with police, inviting officers to engage in group forums with students. They won Harvard’s KIND School Challenge and Campaign for Youth Justice Social Media Challenge, met with civil rights icons and lawmakers like the late John Lewis and participated in numerous high-profile panel discussions.
EVAC, according to its website, also helped students get their first jobs, become the first in their families to graduate high school and double their grade-point averages. Donofrio was given a Teacher of the Year award.
But in 2021, the Black Lives Matter flag that she had hung over her classroom door since the previous school year became the subject of pointed controversy.
At the start of the 2020 school year, tensions mounted after a former student and member of EVAC, Reginald Leon Boston Jr., 20, was killed by police that January. This was a few months before George Floyd was murdered by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin and not long after Floyd was killed, as tensions escalated around the nation, a principal at Donofrio’s high school issued a memo telling staff they had to stay out of the political fray. That included warnings that staff weren’t to take positions on whether Robert E. Lee High School should be renamed after someone who wasn’t the leader of the Confederacy.
Eventually, an assistant principal told Donofrio she should probably remove the flag due to school rules against advertisements but there was nothing formal on the books at the time specific to hanging it up. That policy wouldn’t be drawn up until the spring 0f 2021 but records show Donofrio was removed from her classroom anyway after she refused to take the flag down. She was reassigned to so-called warehouse operations for the school district while she was under investigation, according to Education Weekly.
Specifically what she was being investigated for was never made clear since the school district never disclosed its reasons. But in Van Wyk’s ruling the judge said she found zero evidence that any student, parent, or teacher ever complained about the BLM flag during the school year.
Yanked out of her classroom, Donofrio sued Duval County Public Schools in the spring of 2021 and the state’s education commissioner at the time, Richard Corcoran, didn’t mince words when he discussed the lawsuit publicly, declaring at a public speaking engagement for a community college that “We made sure she was being terminated.”
But Donofrio hadn’t been fired yet and by August 2021 she settled with the school district for $300,000 but didn’t return to teach. A year on, she still never learned what was underpinning the allegations against her but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was already stumping his “anti-woke” positions and the education commissioner who replaced Corcoran, Manny Diaz, was on board with Donofrio’s ouster.
A complaint seeking to remove Donofrio’s license was filed by Diaz. He claimed that she had violated professional codes of conduct, exposed her students to harmful learning conditions and failed to draw a line between her personal views and the school’s by permitting the display of “Robert E. Lee is a gang member” masks and hanging the BLM flag.
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 judge also said that it was clear the flag had been up long before any policy prohibiting it. Van Wyk did however agree that Donofrio overstepped by allowing the Robert E. Lee masks to be worn or displayed in her classroom since that occurred while the school was wrestling over its name change and policy on that was clear.
Donofrio told local NBC affiliate WTLV she was happy with the outcome.
“The last three years have been without a doubt the hardest years of my life,” she said.
“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 said.
Donofrio said she will stay in Jacksonville to continue to help students.
“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 decision by the education commission comes just weeks after DeSantis’ “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” law saw a huge setback at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Appellate judges ruled that the law, which bans discussion around race or diversity in the workplace, penalized certain viewpoints — “[t]he greatest First Amendment sin,” Judge Britt Grant wrote.
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