Around the state:  Districts statewide are addressing school safety measures, an update on school vouchers, how college and career centers are helping Pinellas students and the hunt for new presidents at two universities. Here are details about those stories and other developments from the state’s districts, private schools, and colleges and universities:

Orange: Students at seven schools in this county will soon walk through a new weapons-detection system as they enter campuses each day as the district tests a device that school leaders hope will make schools safer. The pilot project will begin on Monday at Wekiva High in west Orange and then move to six other high schools in the next few months. The system, called Opengate, aims to quickly screen large numbers of people without requiring that they remove backpacks or purses. Orlando Sentinel. Aol. WKMG.

Pinellas: A college and career center is located in each high school in this county. The goal is to help students prepare for life after graduation. The district has now expanded the program to all 17 traditional public schools in the county, with numbers indicating the model is making a difference. Tampa Bay Times.

Polk: School officials here announced a step on Wednesday toward filling a local need for free, voluntary, Pre-K opportunities to district families. In a news release, the district said a tuition-free, full-day preschool called Bezos Academy will be setting up in a section of Oscar J. Pope Elementary in Lakeland. Lakeland Ledger. WFLA.

Brevard: The topic of arming school staff has returned to the Brevard School Board. Florida Today.

Volusia: Facing concerns about student safety, the Volusia County School Board voted this week to staff seven additional schools with resource deputies from the Volusia County Sheriff's Office. The seven deputies are in addition to the seven already requested and agreed to by the district on June 27. According to a district-sponsored slideshow, school resource deputies will serve as part of the district's threat management team. "Safety and security is of the highest priority for everyone in the VCS community," said Danielle Johnson, the district's director of community information. "We are trying to ensure all secondary schools have school resource officers since the remaining middle schools and all high schools do." Daytona Beach News-Journal. WESH.

Citrus: Peer counseling at Citrus High School allows students to help others. Student Kenzy Phelps shares that answering phone calls in the front office helped her “become more social” and “more comfortable” talking to people she doesn’t know. Taking on the role of a peer counselor also allows students to develop leadership skills, they learn to help solve problems and make decisions independently while helping their teachers. Citrus County Chronicle.

Flagler: School Board member Cheryl Massaro has decided to run again after only intending to serve a lone term. Flagler Live.

Voucher update: After weeks of complaints from parents about delayed payments, Florida lawmakers looked into how implementation of the state's voucher expansion is going and what can be done to improve the model. New guidelines for using voucher funds are due to be completed by the end of December. Since Florida has become the largest provider of public vouchers for private schooling in the country, lawmakers now expect organizations administering this money on the state’s behalf to clarify what parents can spend it on.  Meanwhile, state officials are looking into bringing more scholarship funding organizations to the state. Vouchers are typically worth about $7,700. For students with special needs who are eligible for a “unique abilities scholarship,” that figure can run up to $10,000, according to Step Up for Students, the state’s primary scholarship funding organization. Orlando Sentinel. Florida Phoenix.  Tampa Bay Times.

Colleges and universities: Florida Polytechnic University's board of trustees has officially launched a search for the school's second president after approving a search committee's criteria for the job. Randy Avent, the school's first president, will step down after almost a decade. The search committee will begin vetting candidates and provide the board of trustees with “an unranked list of more than two finalists to review,” a news release said. Tampa Bay Times. Lakeland Ledger. Meanwhile, Florida Atlantic University will have to redo its search for a president nearly a year after the start of its first attempt, officials decided Thursday. The decision by the Board of Governors came a week after the university system's inspector general concluded the first search process violated the state's open-government law and recommended a redo. “I think it’s the right thing to do based on the set of facts that we have heard," Board of Governors Chairman Brian Lamb said at a board meeting Thursday. But faculty members and administrators have said for months that the stalled search process is harming FAU. The Palm Beach Post. South Florida Sun-Sentinel. WPBF.

The Florida Education Association (FEA), along with several allies, recently filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s 13-year-old tax-credit scholarship program. The teacher union’s complaint seeks to expand the 2006 Bush v. Holmes decision that struck down Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship program. But the nearly decade-old voucher case has also drawn the attention of the teacher union in North Carolina.

Just a week before the FEA filed the suit, Wake County Superior Court Robert Judge Hobgood’s struck down North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program using similar arguments found in Bush v.  Holmes. In his ruling Hobgood argued that the voucher program “siphons” money from public schools, “does not accomplish a public purpose,” and appropriates funds to “unaccountable schools” that have “no legal obligation to teach [students] anything.”

Mark Jewell, vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, one of the plaintiffs, told the News & Record that “Hobgood’s decision was a victory for children.” The News & Observer applauded Hobgood stating that he “saw through the deception,” while the Charlotte Observer called the decision a “cogent, compelling constitutional case against bad law.”

But Dick Komer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice representing parents receiving vouchers in North Carolina, says that Hobgood over-read the constitution.

As in Florida, North Carolina’s constitution requires a system of uniform, free public schools. North Carolina’s constitution, under Article 9, Section 6 and 7, also prohibits money appropriated to the state’s K-12 public school fund from being used on anything other than public schools.

However, the state’s voucher program used money appropriated from the General Fund to the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority. This state agency not only administers scholarships, grants and tuition aid so students can attend public or private colleges in North Carolina, but its budget is also part of the state’s higher education fund, not K-12 fund.

Hobgood acknowledges the voucher funds were appropriated to the higher education budget, but he argues vouchers are unconstitutional because the funds “should be used exclusively for brick and maintaining a uniform system of free public schools (sic).”

“The plaintiffs believe that any money spent on K-12 education can only be spent on K-12 public schools,” says Komer. He believes the plaintiffs took their playbook from Florida’s Bush v. Holmes decision. Under Holmes, the Court found the voucher program unconstitutional because it “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools” and that those schools were not “uniform” with public schools. (more…)

As a stalwart defender of funding for public schools, the Florida Education Association (FEA) brings special expertise to the complex, sometimes arcane ways the state produces its education budget. So its oft-repeated claim this year that scholarships for low-income students increase the total cost of education is presumably a political, not fiscal, calculation.

Joanne McCall, the vice president for FEA, used a recent op-ed to press the case. “Vouchers,” she wrote, “do not reduce public education costs. Actually, they increase costs, by requiring taxpayers to fund two school systems: one public and one private.”

Two school systems? That description conveniently tracks the union’s combative narrative of public vs. private. But in a state that pays for 1.5 million preK-12 students to attend schools outside their neighborhood public schools, treating all these students as though divide neatly into two separately funded school systems is form of educational sophistry.

First, a little financial history is in order. In 1973, the Legislature created the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) in an attempt to remove disparities in funding from one county to another. As the Department of Education describes it, “A key feature of the FEFP is that it bases financial support for education upon the individual student participating in a particular educational program rather than upon the number of teachers or classrooms.”

In other words, the state funds students, not systems. More to the current point, it funds the education option the student chooses even if that conflicts with the district school to which the student is assigned. (more…)