Florida School Board Association Annual Conference Update

Last week School Board Members along with Superintendents from around the State of Florida gathered in Tampa for the Florida School Board Association Annual Conference.  These conferences are an opportunity for board members to receive continual training and be briefed on current issues facing our schools so that we can better serve our students, schools, staff and community.

I attended workshops in “Utilizing eGovernment Solutions”, “Social Media and Technology Policies” and “Hot Legal Topics”.  During these workshops much of the challenge (outside of budget) that the districts are facing is developing policies and guidelines in the better use of technology by staff, teachers and students.  As policy makers we need to balance providing excellent learning and work opportunities while maintaining high standards in the educational and work environments.  At times, policies can be your “friend” or your “challenge”.  In the use of eGovernment solutions we often are working to balance providing a more streamline way of providing information and doing business while not adding new costs and, perhaps, even additional work.  As the old saying goes we want to “work smarter”.  Citrus County has been continually working to advance and improve our eGoverment operations and, consequently, we have come a long way. New advances are becoming available and, when appropriate and within budget, I feel we will continue to improve and expand our eGovernment services.  Next year one of the ways we will be doing that for staff, schools, students and parents is through the Skyward, Student Information System and School Business System Software.

The main and hot topic throughout the conference was undeniably the state budget and educational funding.  The state of Florida is expecting about a $2billon dollar short fall in the budget for next year.  In addition Florida is expecting about 300,000 new additional students.  The Legislators have been having discussions regarding their hope to maintain “level” funding for education for next year but how this will be done is not entiringly known at this time. Many new and corrective legislative bills are in committee and the state’s Legislators will meet in session earlier than normal beginning in early January 2012.  In addition Governor Scott has indicated additional funding for schools in his budget (see news story) but it is not fully clear how this will be accomplished as the Governor wants to do this without increasing taxes.  An issue that will be discussed again a great deal during the upcoming Legislative Session will be “Unfunded Mandates”.  Just to give you an idea, in the Florida Education Statues (a.k.a. “EDUCATION CODE:  Ch.1000-1013”), the word “required” appears 5,519 times and the word “must” appears 14,770 times.  Those words come at a great cost to tax payers and have monumental effects on the educational budget, schools and most importantly our students.

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Citrus Out Scores on SAT test!

Citrus County high schools SAT scores are in and Citrus scored higher in all three areas of Math, Reading and Writing then both the state of Florida and the USA national average.  In addition Citrus outscored nearly all of its adjacent and sister counties as well. (see graph below)

The SAT Reasoning Test is a standardized test for college admissions in the United States. The SAT is owned, published, and developed by the College Board, a not-for-profit organization in the United States. The test is intended to assess a student’s readiness for college. (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT)

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Recap of Workshop & Organizational  School Board Meeting – Nov 22, 2011

Florida Statute requires that an annual Organizational Meeting of the Citrus County School Board must take place. This year the meeting was held on Tuesday, November 22, 2011.  The agenda for the meeting includes the election of the Chairperson and Vice Chairperson, approving the day and time for the Regular School Board Business Meeting, and the hiring of the School Board Attorney for the coming year.  At the meeting it was unanimously approved that Board Member, Linda Powers, would serve as Chairperson and that Board Member, Virginia Bryant, would serve as Vice Chairman.  Wes Bradshaw was approved to continue as the school board attorney for the coming year. It was also approved that the Regular School Board Business Meetings will be held on the second Tuesday of each month beginning at 3:00 p.m.

I wish to congratulations Chairperson Linda Powers and Vice Chairperson Virginia Bryant for their appointments and wish for them a smooth running, productive and successful experience during their service.

Before Tuesday’s organizational meeting, the School Board met in another goal setting workshop.  This was a continuation of the October 25^th goal setting workshop.  The meeting was held in the upstairs conference room to provide a more casual setting where we, as a board, could roll up our sleeves and plan.  The workshop was most productive.  Not surprisingly the school board’s main topic of discussion was how to maintain the high level of achievement that our schools and students have demonstrated in the past.  This must be achieved during extremely challenging economic times throughout our country and state.  As a team we shared that each of us, as board members, felt that one of the greatest part of our student’s and district’s success has been from the high quality educators in our schools.  The challenge is, knowing that information and keeping that in focus as we develop and approve next year’s budget.

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