Florida School Boards Association
TALLAHASSEE – Florida’s teacher union sued Wednesday to block legislation passed last spring that expands the state’s corporate school-voucher program. The law, called the Career and Professional Education Act, or SB 850, started as an act to expand Florida’s collegiate high school program. But it morphed on the last day of the 60-day session with…
Florida’s teachers union announced a lawsuit Wednesday aiming to block a new law that, among other things, expands eligibility for tax credit scholarships and creates the second-in-the-nation personal learning scholarship accounts program. The suit doesn’t argue the programs themselves are unconstitutional. Like a recent challenge of Alabama’s tax credit scholarship program, it focuses on how…
Manatee County schools are holding summer sessions to train teachers how to set goals — and then use classroom data to meet those targets. On Monday, the district began the first of eight two-day data team training sessions to help school administrators and teachers use and analyze data to make smarter classroom decisions. About 36…
Blame science – and not your teenager – if they’re slow starters in the morning. Teenagers just can’t get eight hours of sleep if high schools starts much before 8 a.m. University of Minnesota researcher Kyla Wahlstrom said that’s because adolescents go through something called the sleep phase shift. “Teenagers are basically unable to fall asleep…
U.S. students’ understanding of personal finance might be average when compared with their peers overseas, as results from an international test showed last week, but some states and nonprofits are aiming to strengthen the teaching of financial in American schools. Last month, the state board of education in Florida adopted a financial-literacy strand to its…
More Florida elementary and middle schools earned an F rating this year, according to preliminary public school grades released Friday. But the number of schools earning the state’s highest rating also increased this year. “The increase in the number of schools earning an ‘A’ this year is great news for students and teachers who have…
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Legislature illegally drew the state’s congressional districts to primarily benefit the Republican Party, a judge has ruled, and has ordered them redrawn. Circuit Judge Terry Lewis said in a 41-page ruling Thursday that legislators relied on GOP political operatives who worked in secret to craft the final political maps adopted…
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida is being forced to stagger payments to schools and health care providers because of limits with its 30-year old computer-based accounting system. State officials took the drastic actions because the current system can’t pay out $1 billion or more in a single 24-hour period. The state was forced to delay…
Curtis Lanoue teaches music in a trailer behind Oliver Hoover Elementary School in Miami. His colleagues have interactive smart boards in their classrooms. Those are like 21st-Century chalk boards that can can plug into the school’s network — and the Internet. But Lanoue doesn’t have a smartboard — or the Internet — in his portable…
ST. PETERSBURG — Parents, teachers and public school officials are getting their first look at the new Florida Standards Assessment, and some are concerned with what they see. The Florida Department of Education unveiled a new website this week containing practice tests, test summaries, testing policies and administrator information about the FSA, which replaces the…