State: Board tackles school code

TAMPA -- Less than two months into its existence, Florida's new Board of Education already has proposed an education budget and is learning to choose its battles carefully.

No sooner Wednesday had the board unanimously approved a $12.7-billion unified budget for public schools, community colleges and universities, than Education Secretary Jim Horne gave them a peek at some of the hot-button issues they'll be taking up in the near future.

Up next month, school construction -- a multibillion-dollar morass that always seems to be in crisis mode. Soon after, a reworking of the state's method for assigning A-through-F grades to public schools. And in the near future, a redesigned formula for allocating money to schools.

While those challenges are coming soon, a group advising the board in a rewrite of the state's entire school code also met Wednesday and did its best to try to avoid getting bogged down in controversy.

In its systematic dissection of a part of the school code Wednesday, the group avoided debate on issues such as school choice and requiring flags in public schools.

"I think the debates on this one are well recorded, and things are not going to be resolved here today," said John Winn, deputy secretary for the Board of Education, speaking of the school choice issue. The resolution? Winn is convening a sub-group to tackle that issue.

Though much of the advisory group discussion Wednesday was limited -- simply so the group could make some progress on the massive school code -- Winn said that ultimately the group would recommend significant changes. Some of the biggest controversies, though, might have to be bumped up to the Board of Education or sent down to a sub-group.

The work group itself stirred a little controversy last month; when board members learned of the group and its task, they wanted to know who was in the work group, and what they were doing. Since then, Horne has expanded the work group from 15 to 25, bringing in a diverse bunch that ranges from the head of the state's teachers union to the president of the home education foundation.

"The governor wanted to make sure there was a lot of input," Horne said of the expansion of the group working on the school code. "I want to do this right, and I want to do this one time."

The budget proposal approved Wednesday will be sent to the governor and will act as a recommendation to the Legislature. With that task out of the way, the board is turning its attention to school construction next month.

Horne's introduction of the issue foreshadowed the potential controversy. He mentioned the $2.9-billion the Legislature provided for school construction back in 1997 when Horne was in the Senate, and added that "four years in and they haven't spent it all."

Board member Linda Eads questioned why the money hadn't all been spent. Horne responded that, among several reasons, districts engaged in "bad construction practices."

That drew a wince from Tom Weightman, sitting near the back of the room. The director of the Association of District School Superintendents decided there and then to put together a paper explaining how school construction works.

"See, that's what gets superintendents upset," Weightman said. "They make it sound like the money is being wasted, but there's a lot of steps and procedures school boards have to go through before they can spend that money."

The Board of Education is inviting the public to make recommendations on the rewriting of the school code at the Web site www.flboe.org.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk