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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