Florida School Boards Association
Of the 50 states, Florida’s prekindergarten program has the highest percent of 4-year-olds enrolled in the early learning programs. Only Washington D.C. has a higher percentage. Nearly 175,000 little students attended in 2017-18 — 77 percent of Florida’s 4-year-olds. That’s according to a 2018 analysis called “The State of Preschool 2018.” Read More Read the…
Florida school district officials are on alert in the days after an interim grand jury report found that some districts in the state’s 67 counties “have failed — or refused — to accept their responsibility for school safety.” The grand jury report is dated Friday, July 19, 2019 and found that “numerous school districts” in the state…
In part to settle a lawsuit contending the state’s Best and Brightest teacher bonus was discriminatory, Florida legislators in the spring changed the eligibility criteria for future awards. Gone was the reliance on SAT and ACT scores. In its place came the use of a school’s improvement in the state accountability points system used to…
Some Florida school districts and law enforcement agencies have not fully complied with security measures enacted after a 2018 high school massacre because they are bickering over who is responsible, an interim report by a statewide grand jury says. Read More Read First Interim Grand Jury Report
At Florida’s State Board of Education meeting this week, board member Michael Olenick talked about the realities of teacher pay in Florida. You can’t use a teacher “bonus” to get a mortgage or an auto loan, he said. You need overall salary increases that boost annual teacher pay. “I’m using the word ‘raise,’ Olenick said. …
The field of computer science offers plenty of well-paying jobs, but less than 1 percent of the undergraduates enrolled in Florida’s universities earned degrees in that major last year. State leaders hope a new $10 million investment to train more computer science teachers — the largest in the nation — and new flexibility in course…
Over six weeks, the vandals kept coming, knocking the school system’s network offline several times a day.There was no breach of sensitive data files, but the attacks in which somebody deliberately overwhelmed the Avon Public Schools system in Connecticut still proved costly. Classroom lesson plans built around access to the internet had come to a…
In support of the recommendations from the Federal Commission on School Safety’s (FCSS) final report, the U.S. Department of Education announced today it is now accepting applications for three fiscal year 2019 grant competitions that support locally tailored approaches to school safety. Read More
Following the major devastation caused by Hurricane Michael across the Florida Panhandle, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced today a $1.25 million Project School Emergency Response to Violence (SERV) grant award for Bay District Schools. According to local school officials, the funding will be used to provide students with much needed mental health services.…
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos released final non-regulatory guidance to support school districts’ compliance with the requirement that federal funds supplement, and do not supplant, state and local funds, under section 1118 of Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).…