Legislative Session Starts Next Week in Florida

Florida’s 2024 Legislative Session begins next week, on January 9th, and is scheduled to last 60 days. What can education advocates expect? Here is my guess…

• House will drag its feet on deregulation.
• The Legislature will continue to chip away at the power of locally elected school boards and consolidate the power of the appointed Commissioner of Education.
• Bills will emerge dealing with Chronic Absenteeism, reducing the funding of Advanced Placement and other advanced high school courses, and expanding Career and Technical programs.
• Controversial bills will include rolling back child labor protections (at odds with chronic absenteeism), using chaplains in place of counselors in our schools and continuing to enable expansion of charter schools by allowing city officials to convert our public schools.

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First, unlike recent sessions, this year’s committee weeks have been VERY slow – very few education bills have been heard by committees, which barely met.

Florida Senate

The Senate has been most active. Senate President, Kathleen Passidomo, has made the deregulation of public schools, promised in last year’s HB1, a priority and the Senate deregulation bills (SB7000, SB7002 and SB7004) have moved through their required committee stops (Education and Fiscal Policy) and are ready to be heard on the Senate floor.

Outside of the deregulation bills, little has happened in the Senate education committees. The Senate Education committee heard an FLDOE presentation on Recommended Cut Scores for the new FAST Assessments and the Senate Education Appropriations committee heard a presentation on Governor’s 2024-2025 Budget Recommendations.

Florida House

In the House, education committees have heard ZERO bills There have been several presentations, which can give us an idea of what committee bills may be ready to drop.

HousePrek-12 Appropriations heard presentations on:

• Funding Charter Schools, specifically funding those sponsored by colleges or universities, within the FEFP. The presentation included specific information regarding Tallahassee Collegiate Academy (TCA), which opened in August 2023, and is currently funded outside the FEFP. TCA is Florida’s first charter school to have been authorized by a college or university following the passage of 2021’s SB1028 (which is more famous for having banned transgender girls from competing in girls sports).
• Add-on Weights for AICE, AP, CAPE and IB Students Funded in the FEFP Warning, this gets a little “weedy” – essentially, for the last 24 years, any student passing the corresponding exam earned an add on weight to their base FTE (Full Time Equivalent). Currently this is 0.16 added on to the base FTE and multiplied by the Base Student Allocation (BSA) to determine funding. When the legislature rewrote the FEFP last session, Increasing the BSA by eliminating categoricals and rolling their funding into the BSA, the value of the add-on weights for AICE, AP, etc., increased as well. The House is questioning whether “current values of the add-on weights generate sufficient funds to cover the costs associated with the courses/programs or if there is a surplus of funds.” I think they are really mostly concerned about that surplus…
• The Governor’s 2024-2025 Budget Recommendations.
• Update on the Implementation of last session’s changes to the FEFP, presented by committee chair Jessie Tomkow. She said, while a few minor adjustments need to be made (like funding TCA through the FEFP), there will be no substantial issues that need to change in the FEFP this session.

House Education and Employment only met once and talked about apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship policy and programs with Apprentice Florida — a partnership between the FLDOE, FloridaCommerce and CareerSource Florida. Look for bills expanding apprenticeship programs.

House K-12 subcommittees

The Choice and Innovation subcommittee heard presentations on:

• Charter Schools, specifically Tallahassee Collegiate Academy and the Florida Institute for Charter School Innovation.
• Career and Technical Education
• Implementation of 2023’s HB1 – Universal ESAs – where the take home message appeared to be that the Scholarship Funding Organizations, like Step Up for Students, believe they need more money to oversee the recent voucher expansion.

The Education Quality subcommittee heard presentations on:

• Implementation of Florida School Safety Laws
• Recommendations from the State Board of Education for deregulation of Florida Early Learning-20 Education Code
• Pathways to Teacher Certification in Florida
• Chronic Absenteeism, Chair Dana Trabulsy said during the meeting that members “have not heard the last of chronic absenteeism in this committee.” This is also a priority of the Biden Administration.

Meanwhile, outside of the education committees but relevant to public schools, the Regulatory Reform & Economic Development Subcommittee heard presentations on:

• How Social Media Affects Minors
• How Vaping Advertising Affects Minors and related solutions

Regulatory Reform & Economic Development was also the first committee to hear HB49, Rep. Linda Chaney’s to roll back Child Labor Laws. Read more about HB49 here but, basically, it allows 16 and 17 year olds to work midnight shifts on school nights (which will likely exacerbate chronic absenteeism).

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Other bills to watch

SB 996 by Sen. Danny Burgess expands the authority of the Commissioner of Education to hire and fire the head of the Education Practices Commission — the agency that oversees teacher discipline. Currently, a three-fourths majority of the commission selects its executive director. Remember, the legislature has recently passed several controversial bills which threaten teachers’ certifications.

HB 931/SB 1044 by Rep. Stan McClain and Sen. Erin Grall, allowing school districts and charter schools to create volunteer school chaplain programs in public schools. (A similar bill was recently promoted by self-proclaimed Christian Nationalists and passed in Texas, as part of an organized effort to  reach “the largest unreached people group inside of the public schools around the world.” While the program would be voluntary and require parental permission, it is clearly designed to allow proselytizing in our schools. Why not fund trained school mental health specialists instead?)

SB 246/HB109 by Sen. Harrell and Rep.Andrade, allow local municipalities to convert any or all of the public schools within their jurisdictional boundaries to charter schools if 50% of the parents voting agree. Teachers (and taxpayers without students enrolled in the schools) would have no say in the decision and the school district would be required to serve as the charter’s sponsor. This is like Parent Trigger 2.0. If this passes, expect charter school money to flow into the campaign accounts of local city commissioners…

HB735/SB734 Rep. Andrade and Sen. Ingoglia, prohibits a local school board from renewing or extending the contracts of their superintendent or school board attorney during the 8 month preceding a school board election.

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It is a simple process to sign up to track these bills and committees via the Senate Tracker. Sign up here.

Rest up this weekend. The work begins on Tuesday.