Special Session Education

The Florida Legislature meets in the coming days to figure out how they bit into a multi-billion fiscal pickle and how best to climb out.

If history provides any indicators, education is sure to be a casualty.

Actually, the question is becoming more and more whether the state desires to heal the wounds of years of playing shell games with education funding and pushing more and more onto the backs of local taxpayers.

Unless one is just emerging from a cave it is no secret that the Gulf County public schools are navigating troubling economic waters, buffeted by a real estate market that has gone south and too many state lawmakers interested more in pulling pork to their districts than reinforcing the social safety net of the state.

Florida, according to a recent report, is ranked No. 4 in the country among states on a scale that determines the financial wellness of each state. It is not the ranking that evokes much confidence.

Nor is a ranking of 49 or 50, which is where Florida stands among all states in terms of spending on public schools.

In Gulf County, the real estate boom of the first half of this decade resulted in the county's becoming, under Department of Education guidelines, a "property rich" county even though the county continues to be considered by other state agencies a county of "critical economic concern," according to a dictum from the governor's office.

Typical bureaucratic speak, a foreign language to most.

What has occurred in Gulf County, as a result of that "property rich" designation that for many homeowners is evaporating by the day, is that more and more of public school funding fell onto the shoulders of local taxpayers.

As the DOE report of the third calculation of the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) demonstrates in black and white.

The DOE calculates student enrollment four times a year and bases funding for a particular district's public schools on those calculations.

Those DOE calculations during the school year can mean the difference in hundreds of thousands of dollars and that is on top of the governor's office requiring school districts to hold back 2-4 percent of funding in December with another cut likely before the school year is out as the state's budget spirals.

What the funding for Gulf County reflects is that the "property rich" designation is forcing local taxpayers to foot three times the bill for public schools as the state is willing to cough up.

State funding, according to numbers just released by the DOE, amounted to $3.8 million under the FEFP formula, while local funding, gleaned from local property owners, is roughly $10.7 million.

The required local effort, state mandates for receiving money from Tallahassee, has steadily grown over the past five years to the point that it represents one of the largest single components on Truth in Millage (TRIM) notices in the county.

The district is also not helped by steadily declining enrollment; a problem that is being felt throughout the state as more folks leave the state for job and family-building opportunities elsewhere.

The third state FEFP calculation showed the overall number of students and the funding both in decline.

The real issue, though, is that with a budget of over $65 billion, down from previous years, yes, but still a prodigious number, the state spends just $8 billion on FEFP funding. Less than 13 percent of overall funding goes to public schools.

At the same time, state lawmakers have long made lottery money the state equivalent of Social Security - a pot of dollars to be moved around the ledger sheet to balance the budget or fund pet projects; money to be earmarked on things other than the classroom.

The result is school districts that are shedding jobs, seeking loans and other borrowing mechanisms just to get through the year with the promise that more pain is surely on the way.

This is no way to run any school system. This is no way to maintain the morale of the troops in the trenches who do the actual work of educating our younger generations. This is no way to address the reality that the country is falling behind others around the world in too many areas of education to count anymore.

A school teacher-turned-legislator once said that local school officials hold their breath each year to see just how state lawmakers were going to screw up the system.

 During the upcoming special session, state lawmakers should pledge that they are done messing with school districts annually.

And at the same time decide that No. 50 is no spot to be when it comes to providing the children of Florida a quality education.

The cliché is that all local school board decisions are about the children. Apparently the message hasn't reached Tallahassee or has been long forgotten.