Ethics Opinion Recommends Restricting Flagler School Board’s Lauren Ramirez’s Business Activities in Schools

A proposed opinion by the staff attorney of the Florida Ethics Commission recommends restricting Flagler County School Board member Lauren Ramirez’s private-business activities in Flagler schools to unbranded and neutral volunteering. 

If ratified, the opinion would prohibit Ramirez from marketing her company on school grounds, recruiting students to her various programs, employing any school personnel either as company staffers or as volunteers, sponsoring any teams or events beyond unmarked donations, or using a district-wide communication tool to market her company’s fliers to students. 

The Ethics Commission will discuss the recommended opinion by its staff attorney at the commission’s June 6 July 25 meeting in Tallahassee. It will approve, reject or amend the findings. It is rare that the commission rejects its attorneys’ findings. (Shortly after this article appeared, the Ethics Commission informed FlaglerLive that the date was changed to July 25 at Ramirez’s request.) 

Notably, the commission’s inquiry and opinion are not the result of a complaint against Ramirez, but the result of an action Ramirez herself initiated. She did so after pre-emptively recasting her appearances in schools, essentially abiding by the opinion’s recommendations before it was issued.

There’d been rumblings during last year’s election campaign about Ramirez’s business relationship with the district and how that would affect her role as a school board member. Last year the district paid the company $49,546, including $47,500 that February. But there have been no payments since last June. 

Ramirez was elected to the School Board last August and was sworn in in November. Other than a $90 payment last June, the payments had dried up in May. She declined to be interviewed for this article as the matter is still pending. 

“As a newly elected School Board member,” Ramirez wrote Kerrie Stillman, the Ethics Commission’s executive director, on Feb. 15, “I seek guidance to ensure that I fully comply with ethical standards while continuing my commitment to community engagement and student opportunities. I own a women-owned small business and, before being elected, was actively involved as a volunteer at most elementary, middle, and high schools, discussing health topics and health careers.” Ramirez did not mention to Stillman that she had also been a contractor.  

Ramirez founded Salus Medical Training in December 2022, according to the Florida Division of Corporations, a for-profit company listing her as the only principal. The company provides CPR instruction, demonstrations on the use of a defibrillator, phlebotomy (using fake arms and fake blood), and through camps and classes provides hands-on training and various certifications. 

Salus Medical had done some of that work for the district. Ramirez had also participated in career fairs and similar events, representing her company. 

Ramirez was concerned about having a conflict of interest. So she asked the commission whether she could continue participating in school career fairs, with her business included in promotional materials, whether she could sign up students to her company’s camps or classes or direct them that way, whether she could hire district personnel as her representative, and other questions that came up later. 

The ethics opinion is clear: while Ramirez is free to continue to volunteer at such events, she would be prohibited from either marketing or promoting her company, or wear a company uniform with the company’s logo (a practice Ramirez ended after she began her campaign for the board). She had carried business cards to distribute and had actively recruited before her campaign. 

As a school board member, Ramirez’s agency is the entire district, the commission opinion states, which prohibits her from having any contractual relationship in any capacity with any part of a district operation. (While Ramirez had not disclosed her previous contractual relationship, she had ended it in anticipation of what she already knew, and what the commission attorney confirmed. The commission opinion is based entirely on facts presented exclusively by Ramirez.) 

“Nothing in your facts as you have presented them indicates that your business is either regulated by or doing business with the School District,” the opinion states. “Thus, it does not appear the [relevant part of the ethics code] prohibits you or your employees from volunteering in District schools on behalf of your private business.” But a conflict of interest is present, the opinion states, the moment she offers her private-business services to students in the district. 

The reasoning as set out by the attorney is that any business relationship with a student would set up the possibility of favoritism, even if school board members are not directly involved in the day-to-day conduct and classes of district students. Board members can and do refer issues about students that they learn about in the normal course of their duties and observations as board members. They also vote on disciplinary issues such as expulsions. That creates potential situations when they could view one student differently from another if that student is or is not enrolled in a class or a camp offered by the board member’s business. Recusal from votes on specific issues involving a student who may be enrolled in a private class makes no difference: the conflict still applies to the board member’s broader roles in the district. 

“We note that, by virtue of your being a School Board Member, you have ‘public capacity power or duties’ over each and every child within your School District,” the opinion states, citing precedent. “You relay, for example, that, as a School Board Member, you will vote on disciplinary matters such as the expulsions of students within your District. Likewise, in your capacity as a School Board Member, you have the ability to raise concerns regarding individual students with District administration, and your concerns will carry great weight. Additionally, we note that the nature of your business caters predominantly to children, and, more specifically, to children within your School District.”

In sum, Ramirez is to have no business with district students, apparently–and surprisingly–without exception, even if the students were to approach her business independently, outside of school: A conflict of interest “would arise if any student within your District signed up for and/or participated in any of your business’s courses, camps, or certification programs,” the opinion states categorically. “This is because if District students enroll in or participate in your private business’s programs, you may be posed with a temptation to dishonor your public duties to those students by, for example, voting against their potential expulsions or advocating to school administration about the individualized concerns of those students’ parents in an effort to maintain your private business relationships. Your responsibility to treat each child impartially could be affected by the desire to maintain a harmonious and profitable relationship with the children and parents who support your business as clients and customers.”

While the prohibition on recruiting or marketing on school grounds seems logically in line with the ethics code, the opinion appears overly broad, affecting students beyond the schoolhouse door in private, contractual relationships with Ramirez’s business. It is so broad that Flagler County students might be denied a service available in the community that they might need or want–and that they would solicit on their own–simply for being students in the district (as home-schooled or private school students would not be.)

Put another way, their status as district students makes any business owned by a school board member off limits to them–a prohibition that either Ramirez or commission members may reasonably challenge, as it would have wider ramifications beyond this particular case. As written, the opinion appears to prohibit a school board member who owns a business from, say, employing a student, or (if the board member is so inclined) offering piano lessons to students, or tutoring them privately. 

The opinion would allow Ramirez to continue showcasing her company’s services in school, events–as long as the materials used are not branded, as long as she does not show her company logo, and as long as she does not recruit students: “you may not sell to your District’s students and parents,” the opinion states. “Were you to market or promote your business within a District school while volunteering, the only audience for that marketing and promotion would be current students–the very people to whom the Code of Ethics prohibits you to sell.”

The prohibition on Ramirez hiring district personnel, or using them as volunteers, is equally strict, since the relationship “could undermine your objectivity as a School Board member” he moment that employee is part of a board decision.  

The opinion finds no issue with social media “tagging” of Ramirez or her business, if she has not herself solicited the tagging. It also finds no issue with Ramirez or her company donating money to various school causes–as long as there is no expected service in return. In this case, the facts Ramirez provided resulted in a prohibition. Ramirez had sponsored a school’s Future Problem Solver team. She had not merely donated money. In return, students wore shirts with her company logo, creating what the opinion called “doing business” with the school and the team. That’s not allowed. 

Finally, Ramirez had used PeachJar, the interactive platform that connects students, parents and classrooms in a closed-circuit communications network. Ramirez would send in fliers advertising her company’s services, and pay for that benefit. The fliers would have to be approved by each school she’d send them to. If approved, the fliers would then be distributed to the school’s student body. 

Not allowed, the ethics opinion ruled. Any such marketing effort through PeachJar “would create a prohibited conflict of interest between your public responsibilities and your private interests,” the opinion found. But the opinion leaves Ramirez free to use PeachJar in any other school district in the land. 

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