West Cocoa Chat

The subject of last night's Town Hall Meeting was the proposed $70,000,000 cutback to our County's School Budget from the State. One of the legislators had commented earlier that he would be surprised if 200 people showed up. He was only off by a mere 9,800 or so and he was one of the legislators that were late due to the traffic congestion.

As you can imagine, most of the night was consumed with ducking questions by the 2 State Senators and the 4 Representatives. That is, until they decided to whip out some mis-leading graphs about the amount of funding from the State Brevard Public Schools (BPS) has received over the last few years. Their chart showed Brevard's School funding from the State increasing when in reality BPS has had to cut $100 million over the past 3 years to 4 years due to funding being cut back from the State.

It was at this point that our Superintendent, Dr. Richard DiPatri unexpectedly took the microphone and called the State Legislators to task. In my 28 years for teaching I have never seen a group of teachers, administrators, parents, and kids give their Superintendent not one but several standing ovations. Perhaps his best moment was when he "reminded" the State Legislators that Florida's State Constitution mandates that public education is a "State Responsibility." He also reminded them that the "Class Size Amendment," which was a Constitutional Amendment voted on by the citizens of Florida, like many other mandates from Tallahassee, had not been funded by the State. The implementation was left to the local School Boards despite the State Constitution.

In fact, Florida is one of 3 states that did not qualify for Obama's Stimulus package due to the low percentage of the State Budget spend on Education.

In Florida, there are some solutions that do not involve instituting a State Income Tax or other drastic measures. Hopefully our Legislators heard their constituents and will take action.

// posted by cwinwc @ 8:44 AM