Will Florida Preempt Local Zoning Laws and Fund Expansion of Near Capacity Private Jewish Schools?
Will Tampa’s Hillel Academy Middle School become the poster child for using tax payer dollars to build private schools in Florida? Time will tell.
Hillel Academy is a private, non-profit Jewish Day School, serving pre-school to 8th grade. Established in 1970, it is a National Blue Ribbon School which has adopted K-8 Cambridge General Studies curriculumn. Tuition is $21,725/year and 70% of students are on financial aid. Hillel Academy accepts Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship vouchers (both EO and UA) which cover less than half of the school’s tuition. The school also offers financial aid beyond the state vouchers.
The school was badly damaged by Hurricane Milton. Their middle school suffered a roof collapse and incurred major interior damage, estimated at $500,000. The Early Learining Center flooded and there was damage to their primary school’s roof and multiple AC units, as well.
“Catastrophic is the word I would use. Part of the roof had come off, and as a result, extensive damage in the middle school building, flooding, anything like instructional materials, books, papers, technology, everything was impacted,” said the head of school, Amy Basham.
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-hillsborough/tampa-non-profit-academy-trying-to-get-back-to-normal-after-losing-middle-school
Currently, students have been relocated all over the small campus. The school is raising funds to meet their $200,000 insurance deductible for which they have no reserves. The school notes that as a non-profit, “we don’t have extra money lying around, because we put every dollar that comes into this school right back into our students.”
If you want to help this established private school recover from Milton, you can do so here.
Should State Funding Be Used to Build or Rebuild Private Schools?
Across Florida, communities are recovering from back-to-back hurricanes. Dozens of public schools in Tampa, in addition to Hillel Academy, were damaged by wind or flooding. Public school districts in Florida are required to maintain a minimum of a 3% fund balance or face possible takeover by a financial emergency board appointed by the Commissioner of the Florida Department of Education (f.s. 1011.051). Many Florida districts maintain a much larger fund balance as well as a “hurricane fund” large enough to cover insurance deductibles in the event of a hurricane. Private schools accepting vouchers have no such requirement.
For several months now, Step Up For Students, the massive “non-profit” that administers Florida’s $4 billion voucher programs, has been blogging about the recent “explosion” of Jewish Day Schools in Florida. Fueled by the use of state vouchers and the migration of families from New York, Florida’s Jewish schools are near maximum capacity. According to a new report, “Enrollment Trends in Florida Jewish Schools,” the number of Jewish schools has doubled over the past 15 years, student enrollment has increased by 58% and the percentage of Jewish school students using choice scholarships increased from 10 to 60 percent. The reported growth of Jewish school enrollment is probably underestimated because it does not include 2022-23, the first year of universal vouchers in Florida. The “Enrollment Trends” report, by the way, was written via a collaboration of Step Up For Students and Teach Coalition, which advocates on behalf of yeshivas and Jewish day schools for “equitable government funding and resources for non public schools.”
In August, Step Up blogger Ron Matus reported on the Jewish School Enrollment report and issued a cautionary note that “increasingly pressing issues that could limit future growth – and not just for Jewish schools.” He noted:
“The vast majority of newer Jewish schools are on the smaller side, with fewer than 175 students. That’s not a function of parental preference, the report suggests, but the result of challenges schools face in navigating restrictive local zoning laws to find adequate and affordable facilities.
‘With Florida’s existing Jewish schools at or near full capacity, more effort is needed to source suitably sized school buildings,” said Danny Aqua, director of special projects at Teach Coalition. “Without legislative and regulatory action to reduce the hurdles to opening new schools, the lack of school building space may throttle growth in Florida’s Jewish day schools.’”
https://nextstepsblog.org/2024/08/special-report-floridas-jewish-schools-are-booming-fueled-by-families-using-school-choice-scholarships/
The following month, Matus wrote about the report again when he highlighted the challenges of finding affordable private school locations for Pardes Day School, an expanding private Jewish school in Miami Beach where all 220 students are now taking advantage of Florida’s universal vouchers. The school’s owners claim then could serve twice as many students if they could find a suitable building in Miami Beach but anything they locate is “either totally unaffordable. Or it’s not big enough. Or we can’t zone it.”
The Jewish Enrollment report suggests some fixes to what they refer to the “capacity problem.” Specifically they recomend: “identifying and tackling the known zoning, school property inventory, and seed capital challenges that already appear to be constraining growth in Jewish schools.” Specifically:
- Preempt Zoning Laws: The report notes that many/most of municipalities and other localities in South Florida, where the greatest demand is for Jewish Day Schools, have “restrictive zoning laws” governing where schools can or cannot open and operate. The report recommends state preemption of local zoning restrictions interfering with private school placement. [Preempting laws of local municipalities is one of the Florida legislature’s favorite hobbies. Watch for a bill enacting this in the upcoming 2025 legislative session.]
- Increased Competition for Limited Property Inventory: The report notes, the rush to capitalize on Florida’s universal vouchers has led to increasing competetion from newly created private schools, all looking to acquire school buildings from the limited stock of suitable properties in South Florida. The report recommends creating “a comprehensive inventory of zoning in Southern Florida to determine which areas have favorable zoning” (and then, presumably, preempting any communities deemed to have “unfavorable” zoning restriction).
- State Funding of Private School Capital Projects: The report suggests that it may simply be too costly for a small Jewish Day School to build a new school in South Florida. Their suggestion, let the state fund private schools, perhaps through a revolving loan fund… Florida’s school districts are now required to share hundreds of millions of dollars of local capital millages with charter schools, on a per-pupil basis. Could funding private properties for private schools be next?
Will legislators use the post-hurricane facility needs of schools, such as Hillel Academy, to usher in the era of using public funds to build private schools? I will not be surprised.