This year we have leadership who support real reform and accountability. The results tell the story. Here is an update of the highlights.
Advisory Councils must be made up of a majority of members who are not school employees. (When the Dade PTA Executive Board voted for this in 1989, then-Superintendent Joe Fernandez told then-PTA president Charlotte Greenbarg if she told him as a school principal that had to happen, he would tell her to go to hell).
Every school Advisory Council will get $l0 per student to spend on whatever it thinks is most needed in the school. This is about $23 million, coming from the Lottery.
Every school must send parents an annual report telling where schools get money and how it is spent, with specific areas being highlighted, i.e., teachers, supplies.
$75 million of the $800 million the Lottery brings in will be used for college scholarships.
Strict
accountability is now the law for construction funds. It phases out the transfer of dollars from capital to
operating, which bleeds billions from classroom needs.
This is the bill which the PTAs and the unions hated, and for which
we’ve worked since our inception. It
also counts portables in classroom space calculations; however, this is probably
going to be readdressed next session, even though it doesn’t count against any
dollars allocated to districts.
Tenure reform was begun, too. Now districts will have only 90 days to decide whether to recommend dismissal of teachers, instead of two years for the process to be completed.
Broward gets a chance to vote on single member districts in November. The school board, however, gets to draw them up, a bad idea. Ask your legislators to let you have the same, but with non-partisans drawing up the districts.
No new taxes were allowed. The PTA and the rest of the establishment were lobbying hard for them, even though we heard consistently during the debacle of the 1995 sales tax drive in Broward that a deed transfer tax and a half-mill increase for construction would only be “drops in the bucket”.
If we hear of more, we’ll be sure to update you. If you know of more, please let us know.
Download this article in MS Word Format
From IVBE's newsletter Voices -- Fall, 1997
