An email from Mary@maryblanco-dot-com is obviously a personal account, not the public account of a Miami-Dade County School Board Member.
According to United Teachers of Dade, 15 teachers complained to the union that they were getting campaign flyers from that personal account in their work emails, saying the district’s rules on electioneering were being broken.
School board member Mary Blanco was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and is now running to be elected to that seat. She’s accused by those teachers of using school district resources, the work email addresses of teachers, to support her campaign.
“Politics and school shouldn’t mix,” said Helena Rosa, who teaches at Robert Morgan Educational Center.
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She received a Blanco campaign flyer in her school district email. It touts Blanco’s priorities and asks for her vote.
“I shouldn’t feel any pressure where I work to vote any specific way, and so I shouldn’t see that in my school email, my personal email is a different story, but this was not my personal email,” Rosa said.
The policy at Miami-Dade County Public Schools is clear. “Using the district’s email system for political activities” is forbidden. “This includes sending messages regarding those topics into the district’s email system from an external account.”
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“I don’t know why I was targeted along with some other teachers, I know I’m not the only one,” Rosa said.
The school board’s attorney, Walter Harvey, sent NBC6 a statement saying it’s not a widespread issue, and that Blanco may not have even been “aware of this until it was brought to our attention.” He went on to say the district has policies and spam filters to block electioneering emails but they are not always perfect.
“Let’s say it was a glitch or an error, why is it just coming to me and a few other teachers?” Rosa said.
For perspective, NBC6 asked former school board member and former congressman, Carlos Curbelo, to weigh in.
“This is not some serious violation,” Curbelo said.
Preventing candidates from using public resources for personal campaigns is always sound policy, Curbelo said, but pointed out that from personal experience, he knows that it’s easy for campaigns to make mistakes when they send out emails.
“If I had a public email account, when I did, I would rather not receive political emails there but when that would happen I would just delete them so this is an inconvenience, not really a crisis or a scandal,” Curbelo said.
NBC6 went to the school board meeting Wednesday, hoping to talk to Blanco in person, but we were unable to approach her.
NBC6 also emailed Blanco’s assistant Tuesday, and sent another email to her Wednesday asking for an interview with the board member or a statement, but received no response.
