Trouble began when her supervisor learned she had publicly identified herself as the dashboard’s manager – on Facebook, in a vendor interview, and on a personal blog – without clearance from the department’s communications office.<\/p>\n
Things worsened from there. The employee testified that a then-deputy secretary told her to reconfigure county reopening figures by lowering infection rates and dropping smaller counties from a “scorecard.” She said she saw that as a directive to falsify data and refused. The court pointedly declined to decide whether her account was accurate, calling the veracity of her allegations “immaterial” to the result.<\/p>\n
In the following weeks, she kept posting data the department had not approved. On May 5, 2020, she was told to take a data hub offline for vetting but, the court said, was “openly defiant.” She admitted that on May 7 she altered dashboard files and removed colleagues’ administrative access, then ignored an instruction to restore it.<\/p>\n
Managers had first planned supervisory counseling, not dismissal. That changed. On May 14, she texted her supervisor about filing a whistleblower complaint over “how I’m being treated, the Dashboard mess, gross mismanagement.” She was terminated on May 18, 2020.<\/p>\n
Two months later she filed a discrimination charge – her first written complaint – alleging retaliation under Florida’s Whistle-blower’s Act. The department’s inspector general investigated and found the firing was justified by policy breaches and performance problems, not retaliation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trouble began when her supervisor learned she had publicly identified herself as the dashboard’s manager – on Facebook,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11754,28,30,29,65241,147081],"class_list":["post-361291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-covid-19","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-health-department","tag-retaliation-claims"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}