School enrollment: Enrollment growth in the Palm Beach County School District is slowing, with new students totaling under 1,000 for the first time in more than a decade. The latest head count shows 196,000 students, about 880 more than last year. “We did expect a little more growth,” says chief financial officer Mike Burke. “But smaller gains aren’t problematic. What’s bad is declining enrollment — it’s much more difficult to deal with.” Sixty-eight of the district's 168 schools are still near-full or over capacity. Palm Beach Post.
Security shakeup: Just three months after the Sarasota County School District's police department was formed, its head of security is leaving and the police chief has been reassigned to an administrative role away from the department. To replace them, the district has hired Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office Captain Timothy Enos to be both police chief and executive director of safety and security. Security head Michael Andreas resigned, and police chief Paul Grohowski will supervise the capital improvements program and the hardening of schools project. Enos is seen as a potential bridge to help repair the recently strained relationship between Bowden and Sheriff Tom Knight over school security costs. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. (more…)
Charter school closings: A watchdog organization reports that 38 percent of charters schools in Florida have closed since 2000, a failure rate that's 7 percentage points higher than the national average. Of the 1,091 charter schools that have opened in Florida since 2000, 491 have closed (the state Department of Education disputes that number and says 389 have closed). David Armiak, a researcher for the Center For Media and Democracy in Wisconsin, calls the closure rate "alarming." He says it raises questions about accountability for charter schools, which get funding from the state but have greater operational freedom than traditional public schools. Armiak also noted that the closures disproportionately affected minority students. Gradebook.
Effects of teacher turnover: A new study concludes that midyear teacher turnover has a negative impact on student learning, especially in schools that have large proportions of minority and low-income students. “While it is possible for turnover to be beneficial for school systems, an extensive body of research points to the ways that teacher turnover disrupts … the continuity of a child’s learning experiences, particularly in underserved schools,” write study authors Christopher Redding of the University of Florida and Gary Henry of Vanderbilt. The researchers studied data from 2008 to 2014 collected from of North Carolina schools. Chalkbeat. (more…)
