Florida School Boards Association
Florida lawmakers have taken great pains to include charter schools in the pantheon of the state’s public education system. But the state Ethics Commission saw things a bit differently in a draft advisory opinion offered to a Lake Wales city commissioner who also serves as legal counsel to the Lake Wales charter school system. Read…
Private schools in Florida will collect nearly $1 billion in state-backed scholarships this year through a system so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records. Read More — Part 1 Read More — Part 2 Read More — Part 3
Just to get it on the record here, thirteen Florida school boards including Pinellas County filed suit Monday in Leon County court, challenging the constitutionality of several provisions within the law created by HB 7069. The lawsuit comes as no surprise. Speculation ran rampant that such a legal battle would emerge from almost the moment after the…
Aiming to reward the state’s top performing schools with fewer mandates, the Florida Legislature added a section into HB 7069 last spring creating the “Schools of Excellence” designation. This week, 640 schools from 44 counties, including Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando, will learn that they landed in that new category. Three lab schools also will…
Families from Puerto Rico who were displaced by Hurricane Maria won’t have to worry about having transcripts or immunization records if they enroll their children in Florida’s public schools this month, state education officials announced Friday. But for county school districts taking in the new arrivals, there is no guarantee the state will provide financial…
After Hurricane Irma kept Florida children out of classes for a week of September or longer, school district officials had a math problem to solve. If primary students had to receive at least 720 hours of classroom instruction over the year, and secondary students 900 hours, how much time would they need to make up?…
As part of its ongoing work to aid hurricane relief efforts, today the Department of Education released new non-regulatory guidance to help Department grantees and program participants remove barriers to restoring teaching and learning environments and to expediting the recovery process for all those impacted by the recent hurricanes. Read More
Some of Florida’s lowest-performing traditional public schools will have to wait a bit longer to find out if they’ll be among the 25 schools that will get financial help through a new state program called “Schools of Hope.” The State Board of Education was supposed to meet in Tallahassee on Wednesday to select the recipients…
Hurricane Irma could delay some Florida taxpayers’ voices from being heard. It’s an unavoidable case of timing. The powerful hurricane bore down on the state as cities, counties, school boards and other taxing bodies were scheduling two public hearings required by law before they can set property tax rates for the new fiscal year. Read…
Schools in at least 20 counties across Florida have cancelled classes for Hurricane Irma.The Florida School Boards Association confirms that response plans from the school district have improved since previous storms, and students should be able to return to school shortly after the storm. Read More