Senate panel OKs overhaul that would loosen public school regulations

A second Senate panel signed off on a package of bills that would vastly overhaul requirements for teacher training, governance issues and student promotion.

Republican Sen. Cory Simon has proposed three bills (SB 7000, SB 7002, SB 7004) — in all, nearly 200 pages of legislation — that would loosen public school requirements. The effort has been promoted as freeing public schools from regulations involving teacher qualification requirements, governance and what’s required of students. They all won unanimous approval from the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee.

First off, though, an amendment scrapped one of the bills’ more controversial proposals that would have ended the requirement that kids get 20 minutes of free play recess. Democratic Sen. Victor Torres started the hearing making sure that recess remained.

“Recess is going to remain the 20 minutes in our schools — is that correct?” Torres said.

“Yes, that’s correct,” Simon replied.

“That’s the only question I had, thank you very much,” Torres said.

Objections remained, however, to undoing regulations that were part of Gov. Jeb Bush’s A+ plan  — some of which have in place for more than 20 years.

Bush wrote an op-ed that appeared in the state’s newspapers warning that the proposal represented a step backwards. He took particular aim at Simon’s proposal that would remove the third-grade literacy policy that requires student to demonstrate they are reading successfully before being promoted to fourth grade.

“If we expect less, we will get less,” Bush wrote. “This cannot be the future we want for Florida.”

These loosened regulations were part of the bargain struck last Session when the Legislature passed a universal school choice measure (HB 1) which made public money available to all families who want to send their children to private schools, regardless of income.

Proponents say loosening these regulations will allow public schools to compete on a more even playing field with their private school counterparts, which are not regulated in terms of who is eligible to teach and other matters.

Robert Pearce, Superintendent of Wakulla County, praised the move to deregulate.

“It’s a great move forward for us as we go down this pathway to deregulation so that we can make those types of efforts and spend more time working on solutions rather than obstacles,” Pearce said.

Democratic Sen. Rosalind Osgood praised the extension that struggling schools are getting to improve their schools’ performance and other points of flexibility.

Companion legislation has not yet emerged in the House.