Displaced students: More than 2,500 Puerto Rican students have enrolled in schools in Orange and Osceola counties since Hurricane Maria hit the island in September, and many more are expected. School officials are lobbying state lawmakers for more money and waivers from class-size rules and testing requirements, especially at the high school level. The state has yet to respond to the request. State laws don't provide extra money unless a district's enrollment is 5 percent or more than expected. Orange and Osceola schools aren't likely to hit that benchmark, but say they still need financial help. Orlando Sentinel. WKMG. Osceola News-Gazette. A displaced teacher is teaching displaced students at Lake Nona Middle School in Orlando. Fewer than 20 percent of Puerto Rico's schools have reopened since Hurricane Maria swept through. CBS News. Hillsborough County has enrolled 326 students from islands devastated by hurricanes this year, and they're spread all around the county. Gradebook.
Segregation at lunch: Students at Hudson High School in Pasco County are being segregated at lunch based on grades and attendance. Those who have a 2.0 or better grade point average with fewer than four absences are issued an ID and wristband, and receive special perks like eating lunch outside the cafeteria. School officials say the program is an incentive to get students on-track, but some parents say it's unnecessarily creating division among students. WTVT.
Bullet-resistant backpack: Florida Christian School, a private school in Olympia Heights, is offering parents the opportunity to buy a $120 bullet-resistant backpack insert. The insert is made by Applied Fiber Concepts. In active shooter drills, students are taught to wear their backpacks on their chests, and the insert could help stop a bullet from a handgun. “We want to protect our students’ center mass,” says George Gulla, the school’s head of security. Miami Herald.
Florida's charter schools have a major competitive edge of their district-run counterparts. With a few exceptions, their teachers aren't unionized. That means they aren't tied to step-and-lane salary schedules that treat all teachers the same, based on post-graduate degrees and years of experience.
Daniel Woodring, an attorney who represents charters and works on other school choice issues, said charter schools should take advantage of that flexibility.
Schools sometimes struggle to keep high-caliber teachers because they flee to other fields with bigger paychecks. High performers may get frustrated because, no matter how well they do, they can only expect a pay bump of a few hundred dollars each year, or maybe a few thousand if they're lucky.
In charter schools, Woodring said, it doesn't have to be that way.
"If you have a fourth-year teacher who's a phenomenal teacher, you can negotiate what you have to do to keep that teacher," he told a group of charter school educators gathered in Daytona Beach. (more…)
Florida's public charter schools and tax credit scholarships have a few things in common. Both are growing by at least ten thousand students a year. And both are facing new legal hurdles, or in the case of the scholarships, an outright constitutional challenge.
Daniel Woodring, a former general counsel in the state Department of Education whose clients now include both charter schools and tax credit scholarship parents, says that's no coincidence. This school year, Florida's charter schools grew to enroll more than 250,000 students - about one of every 11 children attending the state's public schools.
Speaking on Saturday to a global gathering of education reform researchers and practitioners in South Florida, Woodring said that growth helps explain why some charter organizations now have to fight legal battles or overcome new roadblocks in the same Florida school districts that approved them a few years earlier, and why even charter schools with solid track records are having trouble opening new schools.
"Their concern is very simple," he said of districts subjecting charters to new levels of scrutiny. "It's competition. It's economics."
Earlier this year, when a lawsuit by the Florida Times-Union forced the release of evaluation data for thousands of Florida teachers, Daniel Woodring saw an opportunity.
The release of value-added model, or VAM, scores meant that for the first time, the public had access to a trove of quantitative data on the effectiveness of teachers all over the state.
Woodring, a Tallahassee attorney whose clients include charter schools, used the data to create a website, myflteacher.com.
The site uses the unprecedented release of data to help people find the most highly rated teachers. Woodring (who also provides legal counsel to Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog) hopes the data could also change the way charter schools recruit top teachers.
Parents can search the site by school to see which teachers are among the top 30 percent. But the more intriguing aspect of the project may be the password-protected area for charter schools, where they can log in and find the top teachers in surrounding schools.
The idea is charter schools could search the data for top teachers in their area. Since they are not unionized and not bound by collectively bargained salary schedules, charters could, in theory, look up the teachers with the highest ratings in the database and offer higher salaries to lure them to their schools. (more…)
