Gov. Rick Scott has signed the $88.7 billion state budget, and stakeholders in education are crying foul. Superintendents, teachers unions and gubernatorial candidates fear cuts to K-12 programs. Now, they’re condemning Scott after calls for a veto and special session went unheeded.
Gubernatorial candidate Gwen Graham is on the road campaigning in South Florida, but news that Gov. Rick Scott signed off on the state budget stopped her in her tracks.
“If the governor had any spine and wanted to do what was right for students across the state of Florida, he would have vetoed this education budget,” Graham said.
Legislative leaders initially touted a $101 dollar increase in per-pupil spending, calling it “unprecedented.” But Graham joins educators across the state who say absent school security and mental health funding, base student allocation will see a 47 cent increase. She says students can’t even buy a gumball with that.
“It means that schools have to make significant decisions that negatively impact our students,” Graham said during her campaign stop.
Scott Mazur is president of the Leon County Classroom Teachers Association. He says as operational costs like gasoline for buses and insurance for employees continue to rise, the future of school programs will be compromised.
“We are working off of less money, being asked to do more, given less resources, and we’re still making our public schools great,” Mazur said. “They could be better than what they are, if the legislature would provide the opportunity. It’s not about money, it’s about opportunities.”
Mazur and Leon School Superintendent Rocky Hanna both say the funding tied to school safety won’t be enough to cover placing a school resource deputy at every campus in the district. Mazur says the district will come up short by more than half a million dollars.
“When you look at the school safety money, you’ll find out that even in Leon County, it doesn’t cover the cost of putting an SRO officer in every single school,” Mazur said. “Leon County Schools will still be short about 600 thousand dollars, in a budget that I think is a 1.6 million dollar increase from last year.”
Gov. Rick Scott stands by the K-12 portion of the budget.
“We do have more money for our student this year, but this year was an important year to listen to these parents, listen to these families and focus on school safety and that’s what we did,” Scott told reporters immediately following Sine Die on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Senator Bill Montford is saying it may be time to dip into the state’s $3 billion in reserve money to supplement what he feels is a paltry per-student increase in funding.