In early 2021, Rep. Byron Donald, R-Fla., and his wife, Erica, spoke at an event hosted by the Truth and Freedom Coalition, a group that promotes the inclusion of Christianity in public schools and other institutions and whose leaders say homosexuality is the work of the devil.
The couple were warmly welcomed into the movement, and Donald gained particular attention for opening charter schools in Florida. As a state legislator, he created a school voucher program that, in the words of one speaker, “gave children an education in a biblical worldview.”
Donald spoke to the audience with characteristic humility: He was “a poor kid from Brooklyn,” he said, and had only become successful by persistently pursuing his interests.
He urged the group to do the same: “Be bold.”
Donald’s career is a testament to his advice: His interests in public education reform, evangelical Christianity and the election of Donald J. Trump fueled his rapid rise into politics. Though only in his second term as a congressman, Donald, 45, has quickly become a leading surrogate for President Trump’s campaign and a regular in conservative media, providing a serious, on-message defense of the former president.
Trump has taken notice, personally introducing Donald as “the next governor of Florida” and discussing the senator with his advisers as a potential vice presidential candidate.
The national spotlight has gone unnoticed in Floridian, where the Donalds have spent years building their reputation and business on the back of a heated battle for the state’s schools.
The Donalds were early activists in an increasingly influential network seeking to reform traditional public education in Florida and beyond. Long before the recent book bans and fights over critical race theory, this movement was pushing to fail public schools as laboratories for liberal ideas and to funnel public education funding to charter and private schools.
Donald supported legislation to give outside groups a greater say over school curriculum years before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sparked a national debate by making it easier for groups to remove books from school libraries and limiting education about sexuality and gender.
The couple have deep ties to leading forces in this debate, including Mothers for Freedom, Hillsdale College and the Florida Citizens League, which has lobbied to ban books it deems inappropriate from schools. Both Donalds have been vocal in their derogatory comments about homosexuality.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Donald described heterosexual relationships as “the natural order that continues to move society forward.” In a 2017 tweet, Donald wrote, “Homosexuality is a sin just like any other sexual sin, and we sinners all need forgiveness and mercy for our shortcomings.”
The couple’s work is both advocacy and income: While Mr. Donald pushes for legislation to expand access to charter schools and voucher programs, he has begun building a company and nonprofit to take advantage of that expansion.
“Byron and Erica have long been known in Florida as warriors fighting for quality education for all children,” says Tina Deskovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative education group that started in Florida and has emerged as a political powerhouse. “And their reputation is spreading across the country.”
During his campaign, Trump touted new education policies, suggested public schools were run by “pink-haired communists” and vowed to shut down the Department of Education if re-elected, and has surrounded himself with like-minded supporters such as the Donalds.
Trump gave Rep. Donald a warm welcome at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser this month, saying he was “very special politically” and popular among the club’s wealthy elite. “There are no poor people at Mar-a-Lago. That’s the only thing I don’t like. I love diversity,” the former president said as he introduced Donald, who is black.
Trump has also publicly praised Donald, who currently sits on the Heritage Foundation’s advisory board, sparking speculation that he may one day serve in the administration.
“She knows more about education than anybody I know,” Trump said at the Florida Freedom Summit last fall. “So stay close to me,” he added, nodding to her in the audience. “Stay close to me, OK?”
conversion
Donald said in an interview that his interest in education policy dates back to his childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when his mother, a public school teacher and administrator, pulled him out of public elementary school and sent him to a private school because she felt he wasn’t being given the chance to try his luck.
“My mother believed there was more to me than a public school classroom, and she was right,” he said. “School choice was always important to me because that was my life. I think having options is important for every child and every family.”
It was Donald, whom he met in college, who first drew him to evangelical Christianity, and he fully converted when he was 22 and working as a waitress at a Cracker Barrel. He says he felt a calling and “dedicated his life to Christ.”
The couple settled in Naples, Florida, and Donald said he became active in school activism after seeing one of his children struggle in public school — she was elected to the local school board — and the couple began working to open a charter school, a school that is taxpayer-funded but independently run.
Donald was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2017, representing the Naples area. That same year, he founded OptimaEd, a charter school management company.
The couple’s work often overlapped. Mr. Donald co-sponsored a bill that would have allowed charter schools to secure additional funding from local tax initiatives. He supported term limits for school board members, a proposal Mr. Donald had long sought as a way to force turnover on boards and free up seats for charter school supporters.
It’s common for married couples to serve simultaneously in Florida’s part-time Legislature. Caroline Kranke, a former general counsel for the Florida Ethics Commission, said the rules for lawmakers are much looser than those for local officials, who are more restricted when it comes to potential conflicts with family-owned businesses.
“We weren’t funneling funds directly to her,” Mr. Donald said, referring to Ms. Donald, “we were setting up program changes for the state of Florida.”
In 2022, Donald ran several charter schools in Florida. Her company was paid about 10% of the schools’ public funds to provide human resources, marketing and other services, according to contracts. That year, the company collected about $4 million in public funds and returned about $2.6 million to the schools, public records show. Meanwhile, Donald was paid a salary of about $180,000.
Those numbers have caused tension with schools. Since then, three charter schools run by OptimaEd have terminated their contracts with the company after complaints that it was returning too little funding to the schools, according to three school officials who spoke on the public record and on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
Donald did not respond to a request for comment.
She has increasingly focused on online academies and virtual classes that accept vouchers, and in 2017 her husband led a successful effort to refund private school tuition fees to students who said they were bullied. Last year, Florida expanded its voucher program to all students, regardless of situation or income, opening up a new stream of public funding for private schools.
Sowing the seeds of a “parental rights” debate
Supporters said the couple helped lay the foundations for pandemic-era policies that put Florida at the center of the education debate.
In 2015, Donald launched the network of women and conservative school committee members who would go on to lead Moms for Liberty (of which she is an adviser).
The Donalds were among the founding members of the Florida Citizens League, said its founder, Keith Fuller, who has called for the removal of books from schools that he says indoctrinate children with liberal ideas, including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and classic works by African-American authors.
Donald has championed some of DeSantis’ education policies and taken credit for them: After the Florida governor passed a high-profile bill that would have allowed anyone to petition to remove books from school libraries, Donald portrayed the legislation as an extension of his own work in the Legislature.
Under pressure from schools, Governor DeSantis recently rescinded the law, limiting the number of complaints that outsiders could file, saying the process was being abused by outside groups.
These laws “robbed many students of their education and access to important reading material,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, who served with Donald on the Legislature and is now counsel to the LGBTQ rights group Equality Florida. “In the end, none of these laws were necessary.”
But in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, often seen as an audition for budding politicians, Donald made clear he was committed to his vision for the school.
“We’re going to fundamentally transform the United States government,” he said to applause. “The last major area where we really need a restoration of American leadership is our culture, our children.”
