House leaders have revealed detailed plans for boosting charter schools after pledging for weeks to invest heavily in alternatives to traditional public education. House education committees this week approved three proposed committee bills that would ease the proliferation of charter schools, including giving them access to significantly more public money. Read More
The House and Senate are on track to start budget negotiations with a gap of $2 billion in their proposals, providing fresh reasons for skepticism that lawmakers will complete a spending plan by the scheduled May 5 end of the legislative session. The Senate on Thursday published an initial draft of its budget that would…
One of our sharp-eyed readers noticed an error in our quick comparison of the FEFP funding amounts in the House and Senate education budget proposals. We’ve corrected the mistake and posted the revised side-by-side on our 2017 Legislative Session page under the “2017-2018 Education Budget Materials” tab – please click HERE for a direct link…
Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran famously said “hell, no” last month to any property tax increases during the 2017 legislative session. That’s not scaring off the state Senate, though. Senators plan to test Corcoran’s hardline stance and are proposing to spend almost $540 million more than the House next year on K-12 public education by…
As we reported yesterday, the Chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees have released some preliminary budget documents. For the Senate PreK-12 Education Appropriations Chair David Simmons and the House PreK-12 Appropriations Chair Manny Diaz, these included the highlights and a short Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) funding summary. We have prepared a quick…
The House and Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittees have released some preliminary budget documents and we are already working on a comparison and analysis. However, won’t have budget proviso language and other details of the FEFP and non-FEFP allocations until later this week. We are preparing a side-by-side comparison of current FEFP funding and House and…
It appears that the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees will release their proposed budgets this week so attention will quickly turn to focus on debate and revisions to these documents so that each chamber can release their respective versions of the state budget. We will be preparing comparisons of the House and Senate budgets as…
The third week of the 2017 Legislative Session has seen several bills of interest moving forward in the process. You may wish to review the daily issues of the FSBA Session Spotlight for more details but, for a quick and comprehensive review of this week’s activities, please be sure to watch the FSBA Legislative Weekly…
Tallahassee, FL – In our Week 3 update, FSBA Member Communications Manager BillieAnne Gay covers assessment, government oversight, and legislative happenings from the 22nd Floor of the Capitol.