Florida School Boards Association
TALLAHASSEE — Some lawmakers hope to ditch Florida’s controversial new state exams by requiring the Department of Education to instead administer existing national exams, like the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the SAT college entrance exam. State education commissioner Pam Stewart rejected the idea when it was originally proposed by Seminole County Public Schools,…
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP) nationwide include a new universal meal service option, the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which has been phased in by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the past several years. CEP was created through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and allows…
Every year, many state and local public officers and employees receive automatic fines because they file their annual financial disclosure forms late or not at all. The fines are $25 a day, and continue to accrue until the official either files the form, or the fine reaches $1,500—whichever comes first. In addition, recent changes in…
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s new online standardized test was the target of a cyberattack that caused delays at some schools, officials said Monday. The state’s top law enforcement agency has launched an investigation right as school districts are in the middle of giving the test, based on new standards linked to Common Core. The…
TALLAHASSEE — Nearly 40 percent of Florida’s 2015 high school graduates who took the ACT failed to meet all four of the test’s performance benchmarks predicting success in college. According to data released by the organization that develops the ACT, 130,798 students, or 79 percent of the state’s class of 2015, took the college entrance…
The Newsweek High School Rankings—recognizing the achievements of the best public high schools in the United States for college readiness—have been published for more than a decade. Since 2014, Newsweek has published two separate lists in an effort to address the complexities of assessing the “best” high schools when students’ socioeconomic backgrounds are taken into…
SARASOTA – Members of a task force formed to bridge the achievement gap between low-income students and their more affluent peers presented preliminary recommendations to Sarasota County School Board members Tuesday. The task force suggested the school district work to increase parental involvement, reform discipline practices, increase attendance loss and prevent summer learning loss, among…
For the first time in decades, the majority of U.S. school children come from low-income families. Florida has one of the highest rates in the country — federal data shows just seven states have a higher percentage of low-income students. That means more students qualify for — and depend on — free meals provided by…
The push to overhaul Florida’s testing system is regaining momentum with a proposal to replace the new Florida Standards Assessments with tried and true national exams. Seminole County school district leaders, who launched the effort this summer, suggest the national tests would be less time-consuming and easier to implement. The FSAs can take up to…
TALLAHASSEE—Students in some Florida districts are already back in school, but their administrators and teachers still don’t have the results from last school year’s state exams. After technical problems disrupted this spring’s computer-based state exams, the first administration of tests based on Florida’s version of the Common Core standards, Gov. Rick Scott and the state…