Florida School Boards Association
State economists on Monday found millions of extra dollars for the state’s public schools, but also a $29 million shortfall in takings from tobacco taxes and a landmark legal settlement with the tobacco companies. The Revenue Estimating Conference projected that $128.4 million would remain unspent at the end of this fiscal year within the Educational…
It’s not the kind of news you’d want emblazoned on that “Welcome to Florida” sign. Coming in at No. 15, between Tennessee (14) and South Carolina (16), the Sunshine State ranks among the 20 states with the highest rates of underprivileged children, according to a study from personal finance website WalletHub. Mississippi landed at No. 1, with New Jersey…
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…
The Sunshine State’s education system ranked right in the middle of the nation, according to a new WalletHub study. Florida came in at No. 26 — between South Dakota and Ohio. To determine which states had the best — and worst — education systems, WalletHub analyzed 25 key factors of a state’s education system including…
Florida issued its annual batch of school grades last month. Each elementary, middle and high school got an A, B, C, D or F. Those grades certainly matter if a school consistently earns a D or an F. According to state law, such low performers risk being closed, converted to charter schools or turned over…
One group, describing itself as the “framers” of an education constitutional amendment, was largely appointed by former Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles. Another group was appointed by 1990s-era Republican legislative leaders. But two decades after the groups served together on the 1997-1998 Florida Constitution Revision Commission, they are clashing in the state Supreme Court. The root…
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…