In proposing to give community colleges $104.5-million more to spend next year, Gov. Jeb Bush acknowledged the colleges have been left, even in good times, with budgetary "crumbs."
As such, his request for a historic spending increase would begin to put some real food on the community college table, and he deserves the praise it has elicited from college presidents. But Bush, who now has submitted his sixth budget to the Legislature, also needs to place the education spending into proper context. The 7.6-percent increase primarily helps the community colleges to restore the money they have lost the past two years, cutbacks that caused them to turn 35,000 students away last fall. In other words, he is asking lawmakers to play catch-up.
The university and public schools budgets are much the same story. Bush is asking to give universities $144-million next year, half of it from tuition increases, and the money is welcome relief. But the universities accepted 22,000 new students over the past two years with no new state money and, in the past dozen years, have endured $490-million in budget cutbacks.
In public schools, the governor asks for an extra $1-billion. But that amounts to only a 4.5-percent increase per student, half of which is aimed at meeting the constitutional mandate to reduce class sizes. Some $99-million is targeted for reading coaches in schools with low test scores, which Pinellas School Board chairwoman Jane Gallucci noted with some irony at an education meeting in Orlando: "That's wonderful, but two years ago we took our reading specialists out of the middle and elementary schools because we could not afford them."
Lawmakers ultimately will decide how much to spend on public education when they meet in March, but they need harbor no illusions. Bush has pointed with pride to the fact that per-student K-12 spending will have increased 25 percent in his first six years. Think about what that says. Florida spends less, per capita, than 48 other states. Teachers are being pressured to leave for bigger paychecks elsewhere. Twice in the past six years voters have passed constitutional initiatives aimed at improving the quality of schools. The class size amendment, which Bush said would cause spending to skyrocket, is now in its second budget year. Yet during all this time, the public schools budget increased roughly 3.8 percent a year.
The governor is offering much more than crumbs for next year, but Florida, if its public education system is to thrive, will someday need to offer a steady, nutritional diet.
