LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. – Florida Citizens Alliance is calling for a church and school in Lehigh Acres to practice civil disobedience after state regulators ordered them to shut down on Tuesday.
Additionally, FLCA is calling on parents and concerned citizens to contact lawmakers and demand that emergency action be taken to reverse the unconstitutional cease-and-desist order immediately.
The Lee Boulevard Baptist Church and Lehigh Acres Christian School unjustly received a cease-and-desist order over an alleged discrepancy related to the capacity of the septic system at the property. This is despite the fact that Florida’s regulations surrounding the matter are ambiguous, and the church and school have made every possible effort to abide by state laws. They had even offered countless solutions to attempt to comply with regulations, including offering to have air-conditioned portable bathrooms brought in until any such discrepancies could be resolved.
According to the order issued by the state, it means the church and school have been ordered to close effective immediately.
“We believe the church and school must refuse to comply with this unlawful order from the government,” said Pastor Rick Stevens, co-founder and director of Florida Citizens Alliance, a southwest Florida-based nonprofit that is a strong proponent of school choice and champions K-12 education reform in Florida. “As believers in Christ, we have a mandate from Jesus to go and make disciples, and one of the ways we do that is through education. The state’s unlawful actions to shut down a key element of exercising our religion is a direct violation of the First Amendment.”
“In spite of what some people may believe, our First Amendment is not granted by government,” said Stevens. “Our founders understood, and the Bill of Rights enshrines, that those rights are granted from God, and it is our civil government’s responsibility to protect those rights at all costs, not to infringe upon them or to ignore them altogether.”
According to Stevens, the church and school are being targeted, not only because of the school’s Christian foundations, but because the school has been such an effective model for alternative K-12 education outside of the public school system.
Founded in 2018 as a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Alva, Lehigh Acres Christian School moved to a new, larger location over the summer after rapidly outgrowing the school’s first space.
The school, which began with three students and has since grown to 138 students and 18 staff, provides scholarships from various education vouchers, including Step Up, the Hope scholarship and AAA. These mechanisms were designed by state legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis to allow students to attend a school of their choice instead of their local public school.
Further, nearly every student at Lehigh Acres is on a scholarship. But now, the school that has been a model for the state government’s own school choice policies, has become a target of the state.
According to Pastor Robert Roper, the head of Lehigh Acres Christian School, the controversy began with the school’s move over the summer. Florida Department of Education code requires that a school must wait until 15 days after a move to a new location to have an inspection of the new property conducted by the state, a process that Roper says Lehigh Acres Christian School followed.
But the Florida Department of Health cited the school for water and septic issues and issued a punitive shutdown notice for Nov. 30 if those issues were not addressed. The DOH claimed that per its guidelines, the new school property should have been inspected before they moved, conflicting with the DOE’s regulations.
According to the DOH inspection report, the school is required to use a municipal water source and municipal sewer, not well water and septic. Getting on the municipal water system would cost the host church about $150,000, while upgrading the existing septic system would cost $80,000, and neither of those upgrades would have been able to be completed by the original Nov. 30 shutdown date.
According to Roper, the school is ready and willing to make the upgrades, but was simply not given the time required to do so. Meanwhile, after multiple urgent requests for an extension, the DOE only gave Lehigh Acres Christian School a 30-day extension, which would have ended on Nov. 30.
Then, on Tuesday, the Florida DOH urgently circumvented the school and decided to shut down the host church effective immediately.
“In good faith, we made every effort to comply with state laws as we understood them, and now we feel that we have been unreasonably attacked by the Department of Health,” said Roper. “Not only is the inspection process from the Department of Health contradictory to that of the Department of Education, but we haven’t been able to get anyone from the state to even address our plight. Now we are being unjustly ordered to shut down, and our students will be displaced.”
Outside of the regulatory discrepancy, the Christian school has an extraordinary academic record, and more than half the students maintain an A or B grade average. It is culturally diverse, and its demographics represent the community of Lehigh Acres.
Along with the fact that most students are on a scholarship, no student has ever been dismissed from the school for lack of tuition payment, and at the end of each year, debts are forgiven if students cannot meet their tuition obligations.
“Not only is Lehigh Acres a model Christian school, but it is also a model for how school choice programs here in Florida benefit students,” said Stevens. “It is a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Alva, and it is rapidly growing because of its massive success in educating children. Something is very wrong with the way this school and church have been attacked by the state. We cannot let this aggression stand, and Lehigh Acres Christian School has our full and total support in this fight.”
About Florida Citizens Alliance:
Founded in 2013, Florida Citizens Alliance champions K-12 education reform in Florida. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, FLCA’s mission is to improve Florida’s K-12 education by uniting and empowering teachers, students, and parents. The three pillars of our mission are engaging local communities through our KIDS FIRST program, providing alternative education resources through our Microschool Initiative, and promoting legislative action.
For media-related inquiries, please contact our PR firm at 813.279.8335 or by emailing [email protected].
