📚 School district settles
Good morning. For you today, PBC school district’s unsettling history of confining children; more on that $650,000 D.R. Horton payment; and our busiest businesses (thanks, Florida Trend).
Today’s newsletter is a 6-minute read.
🚨 School district agrees to pay hundreds of thousands in Baker Act settlement
Two years after children’s advocates sued Palm Beach County’s school district over students seized and forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, the case is closed.
The district agreed to pay a combined total of roughly $440,000 to settle with five elementary school children and their guardians.
Florida’s Baker Act narrowly defines the state’s power to forcibly take and detain a person for an involuntary psychiatric exam.
They have to be both mentally ill and an immediate, serious threat to themselves or others. People with a developmental diagnosis such as autism are exempted.
Four of the children had a developmental diagnosis.
None was a serious threat to themselves or others, a federal magistrate concluded.
All were handcuffed by school police and taken by squad car to a hospital or other locked facility.
Among them: An angry third-grader who ran from her classroom and later sat chewing strips of paper.
“I do not find that an 8-year-old child making verbal threats to a room full of adults while armed with nothing more than paper was an immediate threat,” the magistrate wrote.
Black children were disproportionately taken, lawyers contended: 49 of 50 children under the age of 8 who were subjected to the Baker Act between the 2016-2020 school years were Black, they said.
The district adopted a formal Baker Act policy in late 2021. New revisions to the policy aimed at bolstering student care are pending. And it has created a Behavioral and Mental Health Department.
But it balked at settling.
“They are convinced that they've done nothing wrong,” said Sam Boyd, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, after negotiations fell through in January. “And they don't want to admit that they've done anything wrong.”
Just weeks before the settlement, The Department of Justice unexpectedly boosted the children’s case, criticizing district legal defenses in a statement filed in the suit.
Read more: The original complaint, the district’s response to the court case and the Department of Justice letter critiquing those responses. Additionally, the district provided Stet with a point-by-point response of what it says are mischaracterizations about settlement terms.
And you can read the stories of the five children, and what led school police to Baker Act them, here.
Palm Beach County reporter John Pacenti contributed to this story.
🚜 D.R. Horton attorney explains $650,000 payment
The explanation behind a developer’s $650,000 contribution to a homeowners association came Thursday at the Palm Beach Gardens City Council meeting.
“We want to help our neighbors,” the local attorney for builder D.R. Horton, Brian Seymour, told the council, drawing derisive laughter from opponents.
After more than a year of negotiations, the Rustic Lakes Property Owners Association agreed to accept the money, payable only if the project is approved, in exchange for its support, a story first reported July 27 by Joel in OnGardens.org.
Why it matters: While it’s not unheard of for a developer to offer cash to win support, as reported in last week’s Stet, it’s rare enough that the act raised questions about whether the support sincerely reflected the views of homeowners.
While many Rustic Lakes residents opposed the project, D.R. Horton concessions and cash were enough to win the support of the homeowners board. The board voted in March to support the plan for 111 townhomes on 18 acres called Vintage Oaks.
Seymour’s comments, in front of the City Council, were his first public statements to explain the developer’s rationale.
The money would help Rustic Lakes improve its aging drainage system, he said.
“This is not like this went to a human being. This went to everybody in Rustic Lakes,” he said.
“I’m not going to talk about the money but it's a bit of an unfair characterization to say anything more than this was about trying to solve problems.
“This was about working with the neighbors the best we could,” he said.
After a two-hour hearing Thursday, the City Council voted 4-0 to approve Vintage Oaks on first reading. You can see a full account of the meeting at OnGardens.org, here.
🪗 The juice
Fresh-squeezed news from all over
🧳 A Jupiter town councilwoman elected in March 2022 announced during Thursday’s council meeting she would give up her elected position. Cheryl Schneider, who was on the losing end of the 3-2 vote over preservation of Suni Sands, told The Palm Beach Post she will continue her advocacy with the Jupiter Inlet Foundation. (The Palm Beach Post $)
🚮 What’s not to love about this quote: “You got about 20, 25,000 tons of Palm Beach County’s finest garbage right there.” PBC’s waste management efforts are featured in a Reveal news episode questioning renewable energy certificates. (Reveal)
💡 Is Lake Worth Beach rethinking its ambitious efforts to harden and upgrade the city-owned utility? At a July budget workshop, commissioners noted that millions have been poured into upgrading the electric utility. “I know we are going to be asked to borrow more money and I am going to need a lot more information,” said Commissioner Kim Stokes, summing up the sentiment. More budget workshops are planned. (Lake Worth Beach YouTube)
🗳️ Quiz Answer: Voter registration on the line
Last week we asked you to vote on voting: Which new Florida law poses an election headache?
The answer: Criminalizing voter registration efforts.
You would be forgiven — and really, correct — if you also checked off increasing hurdles to vote-by-mail and skimpy funding for educating voters about new rules.
In fact, the Legislature has for three years in a row passed laws making it more difficult to cast ballots.
But that’s not the newest law generating headaches. That would be restrictions on voter registration in 2023 legislation carrying potential $50,000 fines and the threat of third-degree felonies for individuals and third-party organizations.
Why it matters: The obvious 2024 reason, but there’s also this: Florida has one of the lowest percentages of registered eligible voters of any state in the country.
Two parts of the law have been temporarily blocked by a federal court. For now, noncitizens legally in the United States can help others to register to vote. And people or registration organizations retaining information about voters, typically to contact them later with election information, won’t face felony charges.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker has let the rest of the law stand for now, but not without a sharp critique.
“The challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled with in recent years,” he wrote, “namely, governing within the bounds set by the U.S. Constitution.”
Don’t take our word for it: You can read the Florida League of Women Voters’ legal challenge to the law here, an initial response by the state here and Walker’s preliminary findings in a companion case filed by the NAACP here.
🇺🇸 And if you have questions about new vote-by-mail requirements, the status of your voter registration or anything else, the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections has everything you need to know on its website, by phone (561) 656-6200 or by email info@votepalmbeach.gov.
🏆 561 insider: Four PBC firms make Florida Trend Top 20
The venerable Florida Trend magazine in its 65th anniversary edition is out with its list of the biggest Florida public and private companies by revenue, and it is studded with employers based in Palm Beach County.
What’s happening: No PBC company cracked the statewide Top 5 public companies: TD Synnex, World Fuel Services, Lennar, Jabil Circuit or AutoNation. However, Juno Beach-based FPL parent NextEra Energy took the No. 6 spot.
NextEra’s 23% revenue increase and $4 billion profit moved it up from No. 8 last year.
FPL’s presence is growing in Palm Beach Gardens with a 1,000-employee office open at Interstate 95 and PGA Boulevard and a twin building planned there.
Private companies: Sun Capital Partners, based in Boca Raton, took the top spot for private companies based in Palm Beach County and the third-largest in Florida.
Next is TBC of Palm Beach Gardens (No.11 statewide). In May, TBC said it would sell its 595 Tire Kingdom stores but continue to supply tires.
It is followed by West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals.
Taking the No.1 statewide spot on the Florida Trend list of private companies is the ubiquitous Publix Super Markets. No. 2 is Miami-based H.I.G. Capital Management.
Of note: The list brings home the emergence of Boca Raton and Palm Beach Gardens as business centers.
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