Robert Morgan Senior High English teacher Helena Rosa was checking her work email in her classroom when she notice an email encouraging her to vote for Mary Blanco in the upcoming school board election.
She was shocked and reported the email as spam, she said.
But when a second email arrived at her Miami-Dade County Schools email address, she began to wonder: could this be real?
After asking a few fellow teachers, she found she was not the only one to have received an email like this from Blanco’s campaign.
The Miami Herald confirmed that at least two of her colleagues at Robert Morgan Senior High School received similar emails.
Mary Blanco, a DeSantis appointee to Miami-Dade’s school board who is currently running to keep her seat in District 7, isn’t supposed to be sending emails about her campaign to district emails. In fact, doing so violates school board policy , which states the district’s email system cannot be used for political activities. According to the policy, Blanco would be violating it even if the email was sent from an external email account.
Rosa says that in the past years, politics and education have become increasingly intertwined, and as a teacher, she is frustrated to see those lines being blurred even more. In this election, voters will even decide if school board candidates should run with party affiliations. The school board elections have been nonpartisan for decades. Blanco has publicly stated she is in favor of making school board races partisan, even if it means no-party affiliation voters will not be able to participate in primary elections for school board.
“I am all about understanding these things, but not when you are telling me through my work email who I should vote for when you are also a person who has a say in my livelihood,” said Rosa who teaches in Mary Blanco’s district.
Mary Blanco was appointed to the school board by Governor Ron DeSantis after Lubby Navarro’s resignation in 2022 because her job as a registered lobbyist prevented her from holding public office. Lubby Navarro was later arrested for using close to $100,000 of Miami-Dade County Public School district funds for personal expenses.
The United Teachers of Dade, the union that represents teachers, said in a statement that “these politicians use their positions of power to break policies, and people are tired of the abuse of power.” The UTD said they received at least 16 complaints from teachers in District 7 who received campaign emails from Blanco.
When approached at a school board meeting on Wednesday, Blanco declined to respond to the Miami Herald. A statement from Walter Harvey, the General Counsel for the school board stated that he is not aware of any widespread distribution of campaign-related emails. He said that the district has a system for filtering political emails, but it is imperfect and may have missed some emails.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publishing.
Blanco is currently in a run-off election against Max Tuchman for District 7 as no candidate secured the 50 percent plus one vote required to win the primary back in August.
The Herald reached out for comment from Tuchman about Blanco allegedly sending email blasts to district employee’s emails. “You have to keep things separate because it’s an abuse of power to use your office to gain political favor,” said Tuchman.
Wendi Werther, a chemistry teacher at Palmetto Senior High School also received an email from Mary Blanco to her work email address. Werther, who has been a teacher in the district for 33 years, says she was amazed.
Receiving campaign email from a school board member made her feel pressured to vote for Blanco, said Werther. “It makes me angry.”
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