Gabrielle Russon
The House and Senate are still negotiating a preK-12 education budget as lawmakers propose changes to the management of taxpayer-funded private school vouchers and a host of other issues, including Jewish day school security training and teacher and professor development.
“There’s still more work to be done, but I believe we were able to accomplish a lot at the sub-level,” House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee Chair Jenna Persons-Mulicka told reporters Thursday, standing next to Pre-K-12 Education Chair Sen. Danny Burgess after the budget conference. “It’s an area where there are very complex issues, and those issues deserve for us to give them that time and thoughtful consideration.”
One major issue remaining for lawmakers to address is managing private school scholarships. A fundamental difference between the House and Senate remains in how to calculate the number of students receiving vouchers in the basic budget allocations.
“On any given day of the week, the Department of Education cannot locate 23,000 students. They’re moving back and forth between private schools, public schools and homeschooling,” said Sen. Don Gaetz during Thursday’s budget conference. “And when you look at it, that’s about $300 million in our budget, which we’re not sure is going to the right place or the right people in the right amounts at the right time.”
To better project student enrollment and make sure funding follows students, Gaetz said the Senate is proposing fall and spring application windows, requiring the Florida Department of Education to cross-check students’ enrollments and assign IDs to track all scholarship recipients, among other changes.
The last Senate budget proposal calls for expanding the Education Stabilization fund to $15 million. The House left it at $0.
The Senate excluded voucher students from the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) and instead added a line item for K-12 scholarships for $713 million, which the House had allocated as $0.
Other areas of divide include School Readiness funding, with the Senate offering to fund it with $76 million compared to $42 million from the House.
The Senate proposes funding Jewish day schools’ security with $15 million, while the House proposes allocating $7 million.
The House wants to restore $6 million for Schools of Hope, something the Senate did not seek to fund at all.
