Criminal racist charter grifter Ralph Arza becomes a hero of menstrual cycle sports reporting reform
We live in the weirdest timeline. It has made Arza, who Ron DeSantis claims to consider "disgusting," a board member for the Florida High School Athletics Association, maybe doing good.
I never thought I would write “Ralph Arza” and “your daughter’s menstrual cycle” in the same sentence. I would have preferred not to; but duty calls, and here we are.
How bad must your menstrual reporting policy be if it makes Ralph Arza a hero?
I won’t rehash the whole period reporting controversy. You can read about it here. But I will rehash Ralph Arza, the Forrest Gump of education sleaze in Florida. If something is icky and scandalous in our state, it probably has an Arza angle.
His official role is director of government affairs for the Florida Charter School Alliance. He was, by all appearances, former Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran’s unofficial vice chancellor of grift.
He’s also a convicted witness tamperer, who got run out of the Legislature some years ago for drunk dialing a fellow politico with racial slurs and threats.
Here’s the fullest accounting I can give of all that — plus Arza’s role in the massive DoE/Jefferson scandal that Ron DeSantis has actively covered-up for months — and for which Charlie Crist continues to give him an inexplicable pass.
Candidate Ron DeSantis in 2018 considered Arza such a “disgusting” criminal and racist that he banished him from participating in DeSantis fundraiser in 2018. And DeSantis will take money from anybody.
Marc Caputo and Politico once considered Ralph a significant story. Now that he’s more significant, lol, it’s crickets.
Ladies, FHSAA Board Member Arza has reasonable thoughts about your periods
And yet … here Ralph is still, in the middle of things again. He’s somehow on the Board of Directors for the Florida High School Athletics Association. (FHSAA). That’s the NCAA of Florida school sports.
I’m not sure how he got there. I’m betting his great partner in grift, disgraced (and wonderfully silent these days) former Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran appointed him in 2021. But it’s hard to tell.
And honestly, he seems to be doing the right thing.
At a special-called Palm Beach County School Board meeting Wednesday, visiting FHSAA board member and former state Rep. Ralph Arza said he is going to add an agenda item to the Nov. 6 and 7 meeting of the association's board of directors to permanently amend the form.
His recommendation will be to remove the optional questions about menstruation and update the form to ensure only the final physician sign-off sheet is turned into schools.
"This is egregious," Arza said in an interview. "There is no reason that we need to be collecting this information and there is no reason that schools need this. It's another example of the FHSAA not representing the people it's supposed to serve."
As I said, we live in the strangest timeline.