Defunding Public Education With “Record Spending”… it is how we roll in Florida.
We are hearing word that Florida’s new Education budget will increase the Base Student Allocation (BSA) by $75/student, which would bring the BSA to approximately $4,279.42/student. This year’s new budget will be celebrated as record education funding. Here is a closer look.
Base Student Allocation represents the portion of the FEFP that district’s can spend for day to day operations in a flexible way. This is the pot of money districts can use to fund salaries, as well as other things like electric bills, toilet paper, sports and other essential programs, etc. The rest of the FEFP funding has specific use requirements, i.e. strings attached. (Learn more about the FEFP here)
This year’s proposed $75 increase in the BSA is better than the 2017 increase of of $43/student, and DEFINITELY better than last year’s 47 CENTS/student. However, while this year’s increase does keep up with inflation adjusted dollars over the past year, BSA funding still lags well behind inflation over the past 10-20 years.
For example:
In 2008-09, the BSA was $3971.74/student. Adjusted for inflation, that same BSA would be worth $4632.22/student today, or $352.80/student more than this year’s “record” funding.
In 1998-99, the BSA was $3223.06/student. Adjusted for inflation, that same BSA would be worth $5026.43/student today, or $747.01/student more than this year’s “record” funding.
So, if education spending had just kept up with inflation over the past 20 years, this year’s students (via the BSA) would each get almost $750 MORE than this year’s record setting budget will provide. That would fund ALOT of teacher salaries and a lot of special programs…
By not keeping up with inflation, the FL Legislature has been systematically defunding our public schools. By specifically underfunding the Base Student Allocation, Tallahassee has restricted the amount of money districts have available to give teachers salary increases.
The State of Florida has never determined what funding would be needed to provide adequate public education services and/or competitive teacher salaries. How much should education be funded? No one knows, but this much is true: perpetually failing to keep up with inflation is equivalent to defunding public education and, over the last 20 years, that is exactly what Florida has done.