Florida ‘Learn Local’ legislation aims at cutting red tape in public schools

A new legislation passed by the Florida Senate Wednesday aims to reduce the “onerous and excessive regulations on public schools, empower parents, teachers, and local school districts and preserve strong accountability, transparency, and safety measures at neighborhood public schools.”

“Every year, more and more regulations are put on our school districts,” said Senate President Kathleen Passidomo from Naples. “Telling districts what to do and how to do it was supposed to ensure quality and demand accountability, but it can also stifle innovation. Reducing bureaucratic red tape will give public schools that have served our communities for generations a meaningful chance to compete right alongside other school choice options that are now available to every child in every family across our state.”

Lee County school board members like Armor Persons and Melisa Giovanelli agree.

Persons said certain mandates are put on public schools that make it hard for them to compete for students against private and charter institutions.

“There’s a lot of mandates. An example would be to get your high school diploma. You have to pass 10th-grade algebra, you can have all your credits [and] everything else, and you can even be accepted into a college, but if you can’t pass that algebra test, you cannot get a high school diploma. But if you withdraw from a public school and go to a private school and enroll for the last few weeks, you can get a diploma, it makes it difficult to compete on a level playing field if you have all these extra regulations that we have,” Persons said.

Giovanelli thinks it will help make public schools more attractive to parents and students.

“It’s about making the school district or school districts in public schools do better be held accountable. Competition, I feel like is always good, and it allows for people to make sure they are doing better. I see it as an opportunity to be better, do better, and making sure that we are the best that we can be, even in a public school system,” he said.

The legislation, among other things:

• Provides flexibility to districts in setting salaries for instructional personnel, in offering multiyear contracts, and in personnel evaluation systems. The bill maintains the long-standing expectation of fairness and transparency in this process to ensure Florida recognizes, retains, and promotes our most effective teachers and ensures our local schools can retain their highest-performing teachers in a competitive job market.
• Expands eligibility for the teacher apprenticeship program, a new pathway for individuals to work in education and ultimately become teachers.
• Provides flexibility in using federal funds for teacher recruitment in low-income areas and district support programs.
• Provides flexibility for school boards to delegate authority to superintendents for efficient district policies.
• Eliminates the separate high-stakes exit exam score requirements in Algebra 1 and 10th grade ELA needed to earn a standard high school diploma.

Yet, Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, the largest teachers union in the state, said the legislation doesn’t go far enough to address the major issues impacting public schools in our state.

“I don’t think that legislation goes far enough. There are certainly some good pieces in that legislation, but they’re calling it a deregulation bill, and that it was going to cut red tape, but there’s actually a lot of new regulations that are being proposed in that package of bills,” Spar said.

The legislation still needs to pass the House.