Jacob Ogles
The Legislature has agreed to fully fund accelerated courses for high school students that earn them college credit.
The last Senate offer on a PreK-12 Education budget includes $596.7 million for Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE) credits.
That matches a House plan proposed last week to cover those programs through a categorical grant. Both chambers now include the funding as an “Academic Acceleration Options Supplement.”
That means the structure behind the funding has changed from an add-on model in place for decades, but the dollars will be sent to school districts.
Lawmakers this Session set out to change the level of oversight on funding as more schools offered the advanced course work.
But initial alternative models for the funding shorted the total spend. The House last week proposed a funding system that guarantees no school district in the state will receive less in this year’s budget than it did before.
“The $596 million equals 100% of what the add-on weights would have generated,” said Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, a Fort Myers Republican who chairs the House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee. “Every School District would receive the same or more under the categorical as they would if current add-on weights applied.”
At a meeting last week, one fundamental difference between the House and Senate involved a difference in per-student allocations to districts, and the impact of school choice scholarships.
At the last budget conference before issues were bumped to top House and Senate negotiators, Sen. Don Gaetz, a Crestview Republican and former school Superintendent, said the upper chamber would look at different calculation models.
“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,” Gaetz said last week. “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.”
That appeared to be shorting the Senate in available revenue to spend on advanced courses.
Proposals to cut the spending on the accelerated curriculum, though, generated rapid backlash from families across the political spectrum.
