Florida School Boards Association
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…
The Florida Legislature gave school districts another bumper crop of new and revised rules for the year that begins next week, ranging from who gets teacher bonuses to how to treat incidents of anti-Semitism. Many of the issues got plenty of attention as lawmakers debated them, sometimes fiercely and furiously. But often, the details on…
The Florida Department of Education rolled out its database of student information late Thursday that’s designed to enhance school security in the wake of last year’s shooting in Parkland.The data is primarily for groups of law enforcement, counselors and other school staff charged with evaluating threats made by students and deciding which ones may need…
An effort to raise ethical standards for Florida politicians and public employees has passed a critical test. More than 6 million voters approved a Florida Constitutional Amendment 12 last fall, in hopes of strengthening the state’s rules against public officials using their positions for public gain. The amendment got the most votes among the dozen…
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…
Local schools are dealing with serious teacher shortages but an Action News Jax investigation has found thousands of prospective teachers are being kept out of the classroom because they can’t pass a mandatory test to become fully licensed. Read More
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 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…