Florida School Boards Association
The State Board of Education is pushing for more accountability in how schools teach classes included in Florida statues including civics, the Holocaust and the history and heritage of African Americans, Hispanics and women. This week, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran cheered the board for its efforts to have schools focus more…
Following a scandal related to teaching the Holocaust and questions about whether African American history has been ignored, the Florida Department of Education is moving to require detailed annual reports from districts on what’s being taught across dozens of courses and topics. And the agency is essentially threatening sanctions if public schools don’t comply. That…
A year ago, with school safety still high on Florida’s list of concerns, the state’s school boards association focused much of its legislative platform on increasing campus security with armed officers and hardened facilities. Having gotten much of what it asked for, the association is looking to new ideas for the 2020 session, for which…
The State Board of Education is poised to consider new rules next week, including a requirement that all public schools begin teaching students each year about youth substance abuse. Schools would also be mandated to report the professional qualifications of people teaching the classes, according to the rule. The reporting proposal would require school superintendents…
Mental health. Career planning. Personal finances. The list of topics that Florida lawmakers have required school districts to cover in classrooms continued to grow this year — some with little advance notice or funding to support them. The mental health mandate, for instance, came from the State Board of Education less than a month before…
Lawmakers set new rules in the spring for who could qualify for a “Best and Brightest” teacher bonus this year. One of the categories it created was a “recruitment” award. It would be paid to newly hired teachers deemed “content experts” in mathematics, science, computer science, reading or civics. The Legislature left it to the…
Florida is planning to reinvent school-based mental health awareness, but Florida International University (FIU) psychologists are raising questions about the plan’s implementation. The goal is to help students identify the signs and symptoms of mental illnesses, how to get help for themselves and others and what to do or say to peers affected by a…
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 education department officials are taking steps to bolster the state-funded Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) program and turn it into the “truly really desired option” for early education, just two months after Gov. Ron DeSantis decried low readiness levels of children emerging from the system. Read More
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…