Florida School Boards Association
It’s hard to imagine how toxic Florida’s political landscape might be today, had its legislature and governor been free to act over the past decade without the oversight of the judicial. Certainly Democrats tested their limits back when they were in power. But the GOP has pushed legislative trickery to all new levels. Read More
The Leon County Courthouse was the scene Friday for the first of what looks to be several showdowns over the fate of Amendment 8, a Constitution Revision Commission proposal to change portions of the state constitution’s education article. The proposal aims to do three things — set school board term limits, embed civics education in…
Teacher pay and school security topped the list of concerns for Florida Board of Education members Wednesday as they kicked off their annual legislative budget request process. Though they wondered where they might find the money for any added expenses, board members stressed the need to increase teacher salaries to keep them in the schools and…
Retired Florida chief justice Harry Lee Anstead has asked his former panel to require justification for why six proposed constitutional amendments including Amendment 8 should remain on the November ballot, or to toss them out. Anstead, joined by former Florida Elections commissioner Robert Barnas, contend in their filing to the state Supreme Court that the six…
Students across the country are heading back to school this month, amid a growing crisis to hire and keep qualified teachers. At the start of the last school year, more than 100,000 classrooms were staffed by teachers not fully qualified to teach, equivalent to about one classroom for every public school in the U.S.Nationally, about…
For years, Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee have boasted about Florida’s charms as a low-tax state, and according to a recent report, Sunshine State residents do have the lowest tax burden in the continental United States (trailing only Alaska nationwide.) But with more than 21 million people in the state and hundreds more coming by the day,…
The practice round was rough. When Florida implemented a new Kindergarten Readiness test last fall — designed to determine if the state’s thousands of Voluntary PreKindergarten (VPK) programs were preparing children for school — 42 percent of providers statewide missed the minimum threshold of having at least 60 percent of their former students pass a…
It’s still a long way to November, when voters will be asked to vote up or down on 13 proposed amendments to the state constitution. But only a few so far have generated as much debate as Amendment 8, a measure that is the subject of a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters. Read…
As part of their efforts to prevent school shootings, Florida lawmakers mandated the creation of a centralized database that will combine individual-level records from the state’s law-enforcement and social-services agencies with information from people’s personal social media accounts. The provision, tucked within the 105-page law passed in March following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas…
A Leon County circuit judge will hear arguments Aug. 17 in a dispute about a proposed constitutional amendment that calls for changes in the state’s education system. Judge John Cooper on Monday scheduled the hearing in the lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida, which is trying to keep the constitutional amendment…