Editor’s note: Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill appeared last week before the Florida House of Representatives’ Pre-K – 12 Education Appropriations Subcommittee to answer questions about how state scholarship programs are managed and how improvements could be made after passage of HB 7045, the nation’s largest education choice expansion. Here are his opening remarks edited for length.
We’ve made tremendous progress in Florida in expanding options for families. The families are voting with their feet, and it’s been extraordinary. The growth is amazing. We’re going to help about 300,000 families this year. That’s a very positive thing. And you did a fantastic job last session continuing to expand growth.
The improvement opportunity we have is there’s way, way, way too much complexity in these programs.
Complexity always causes problems … It’s a lot for families, a lot for us, a lot for everybody.
We have to work together, all of us together, to figure out how we create more simplicity and elegance in these programs. Simplicity and elegance are better than complexity and cumbersomeness. A lot of what you’re seeing is natural if you look at innovation. You start with a lot of complexity and make it simpler over time. That’s where we are right now.
My quick analogy is – imagine the national transportation system is all on trains. And we wake up one day and said, “Let’s move to airplanes.” Well, it turns out that airplanes can’t take off and land at train stations. It turns out they can’t follow the railroad tracks and they can’t follow the signals on the railroad tracks. It turns out that you’ve got to build airports, a whole new infrastructure, you’ve got to build a whole new air traffic control system.
That’s what we’re doing right now on the fly. We’re literally building a whole new infrastructure that allows families to be empowered to allow much more flexibility in the system. You’re seeing the growing pains of building an entire new infrastructure.
We have to do this together, and I hope that we can work together. We will bring you ideas on how to improve this process so that we have less complexity.
We do have to protect the public good. We appreciate that parents have got a lot going on. We know it’s a hassle to have to submit documentation, but we have to protect the public.
We have to make sure we get all the documentation we need. It’s a fine line between providing good customer service and meeting their needs but also protecting the public good.
