The REAL Elephant in the Room
Or: What happened when a Skunk Showed up at A School Board Garden Party
ICYMI On November 19th, the Florida Legislature was briefed the Auditor General’s report, highlighting the 2024-25 School Year Funding Accountability Challenges, which found that Florida’s universal voucher system effectively bankrupted the K–12 funding formula, creating a $47 million deficit. The audit details substantial failures “at every level” of the FLDOE and Step Up for Students, the state’s politically connected, $4 billion/year voucher funding organization. In summary: “Whatever could go wrong, has gone wrong.”
Hundreds of millions were misspent. As USA Today reported:
“The amount of money we cannot account for as being in the right place at the right time exceeds $270 million on any given day.“ – USA Today
This was very much on the minds of Florida’s school board members as they gathered in Tampa for the 2025 FSBA/FADSS Annual Joint Conference.
During a planned networking luncheon and awards ceremony on Thursday, attendees were surprised by an unannounced speaker: Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas.
SPOILER ALERT: He did not address how his Department plans to respond to the devastating audit findings.
Kamoutsas’ surprise visit marked his first appearance before the Florida School Boards Association since his appointment in June 2025. He could have used the opportunity to introduce himself to more than 400 attendees, outline his vision for Florida’s schools, reassure members that the audit findings were being taken seriously, or, at minimum, show respect for the state’s locally elected education leaders.
Instead, he chose a different tactic—the proverbial skunk at the garden party.
You may have already heard about the booing. Here is the rest of what happened.
Kamoutsas opened combatively, announcing he was there to discuss “the elephant in the room”: the newly expanded Schools of Hope law, which allows select corporate charter chains to occupy underutilized public school buildings at no cost. Under the law, districts must also absorb all additional expenses—transportation, security, utilities, and more.
Rather than acknowledge the law’s very real fiscal impacts, he chastised the audience:
“Co-location of Schools of Hope in district buildings is only scary when adults prioritize entrenched systems over chasing the best possible student outcomes.”
He followed with a politicized retelling of the history of school choice, claiming critics had long predicted doom—defunding, dismantling, privatization—but, in his narrative, none of this had happened. Florida’s public schools, he said, were better than ever. As evidence, he offered a selective set of progress-monitoring data and declared:
“Because of school choice, student performance increased… competition leads to better results, and everybody wins.”
So much winning…
Kamoutsas dismissed legitimate concerns about Schools of Hope co-location and accused critics of refusing to “embrace innovation,” saying all he hears is “complaint after complaint, protest after protest.”
He was particularly irritated by “complaints” from DeSantis-endorsed school board members, questioning their leadership if they did not support co-location “even when it’s politically inconvenient.” Apparently, “strong leadership” means following whatever the Governor and his appointees demand.
He insisted that co-location was “efficient, effective, and unquestionably pro-student,” and that taxpayers should not have to fund “multiple school buildings… just because some adults don’t like sharing space.”
(Meanwhile, districts are expected to pay for the privilege—and, frankly, nobody likes a freeloader.)
He dismissed concerns about for-profit charter companies benefiting from co-location as “nothing more than a union talking point,” insisting:
“Every School of Hope operator is a nonprofit organization… It cannot be a for-profit company.”
What he omitted: though their charters are technically nonprofit entities, every Schools of Hope chain operates under a large, lucrative for-profit management company—a distinction that matters deeply when public assets are at stake.
Kamoutsas then criticized districts for celebrating their lack of failing “D” or “F” schools, claiming, “Everyone in the room knows that is not reality.” He accused districts of hiding low performance behind “technicalities,” which he said justified changing the definition of low-performing schools to benefit School of Hope. He claimed the growth of vouchers and homeschooling was “proof” that public schools were failing—even though the vast majority of those students were never enrolled in public schools, which remain the most popular choice in Florida.
He used these claims to justify forced co-location:
“Why should we reward school districts with low-performing schools and mismanagement by leadership… by allowing them to split costs of co-location with high-performing charter programs?”
So why not let Schools of Hope operators get everything for free?
Kamoutsas escalated further, announcing he planned to call out districts with the most underutilized space and send the CFO’s DOGE team to “help” them cut costs.
He argued that Schools of Hope operators outperform districts and reminded the audience that charters can be closed for poor performance—before lamenting that the state could not currently shut down entire districts: “Maybe we can talk about that with the Legislature this session.”
This is the moment when the audience, understandably, began to boo.
He had to beg to be allowed to finish.
He, then, took a swipe at Academica/Mater Academy for submitting hundreds of co-location notices, claiming hope operators had committed to only “a handful” of sites for 2027–28 and blaming “some chicanery” for the flood of applications.
But the truth is straightforward:
- That rule was written by his department and approved by his State Board.
- There is no cap—in law or rule—on the number of schools a Hope operator may apply to occupy.
- The FLDOE’s own administrative rule, not statute, created the first-come, first-served stampede.
Kamoutsas closed by warning that he expects districts to “innovate” and will hold systems “publicly, transparently, and relentlessly” accountable—“even if that makes people uncomfortable.”
He certainly achieved that.
But accountability, it seems, is reserved only for school districts—not the real elephant in the room: the bureaucrats and the Scholarship Funding Organization responsible for the FEFP audit failures and the daily mismanagement of hundreds of millions in public dollars.
Rather than use his first appearance before Florida’s local education leaders to build bridges, Commissioner Kamoutsas chose to scold, threaten, and deflect responsibility for his own department’s shortcomings.
The message was clear:
He expects superintendents and school board members to stop raising concerns and fall in line—even as the forced co-location of Schools of Hope operators generates escalating backlash across the state.
Florida’s public education system deserves transparency, collaboration, and genuine accountability – or at the very least, a modicum of respect.
Instead, it got a performance designed to intimidate rather than lead.
After his “performance,” Kamoutsas responded to a Tampa Bay Times report on his presentation, claiming he was booed for “suggesting accountability for school districts that fail students.”
What he left out, of course, is that he still has not taken responsibility for the catastrophic voucher audit under his own department’s watch—an audit documenting hundreds of millions misspent, systemic breakdowns, and a funding formula driven into deficit. Accountability, it seems, applies only to others.