It looks like the Legislature's enrollment projections for this year were substantially off the mark, leaving schools to educate even more students with less money.
Published September 5, 2003
As students throughout Florida begin a new year, they return in many counties to schools that have laid off teacher aides and administrators and guidance counselors. Other districts have reduced instructional time or eliminated music or sports or after-school tutoring. Students may find fewer course offerings. Teachers may have gotten little or no pay raise.
Andy Griffiths, a Monroe County School Board member who is president of the Florida School Boards Association, describes the situation this way: "You've got A+
schools on a D- budget. It's not just the cuts we had to make this year. It's the cuts we've had to make for the past three years. We simply can't continue this trend."
Ken Pruitt, state Senate appropriations chairman, goes further. "They must be grading us on the curve," he said. "It's an F as far as I'm concerned."
A state government that has been quick with tests and slow with dollars is again shortchanging public schools. This fall, universities may not be the only places asked to educate new students without the money to pay for them. There is growing evidence the enrollment projections the Legislature used for public schools are substantially off the mark.
Already, Seminole County reports 1,000 more students, though the state forecast only 104. Hillsborough may have 1,500 more students than the state projected. More telling, one ill-considered estimate related to school vouchers could have been off statewide by as much as 15,000 students. Legislators decided that 12,400 new students would opt for corporate tax vouchers this year rather than attend public schools; so far, 3,613 fewer students than last year are using the vouchers.
Given the limited budget that schools are already facing, the prospect of adding more students - without state funding - only makes things worse. Last month, Gov. Jeb Bush asked lawmakers to issue an emergency $66-million appropriation for prisons because planners had underestimated the number of new inmates. But the mistake lawmakers made with estimating voucher students alone could cost public schools $88.5-million, and Bush has not said a word. Instead, he and Education Commissioner Jim Horne are spending their time blaming voters for approving a measure to reduce class sizes.
The class size amendment does have an impact on the budget, but even Horne acknowledges smaller class sizes could help students in kindergarten through third grade. Why, then, wouldn't the governor and Legislature use the voter mandate to truly enhance public schools, to invest more money so that schools aren't forced to make a choice between teacher pay raises and 18 students in a kindergarten class?
The reality is that Florida is cheap with education. As Griffiths noted, the state ranks 45th in per capita spending for public schools but 7th for prisons. In fact, Horne recently suggested that parents might opt for private school vouchers because "sometimes you get some of these public schools that are like an assembly-line-driven approach to education." An assembly line. Is that Florida's goal?
