The Senate Goes Squishy

Don Gaetz 
05/10/05

In 2002, Northwest Florida voted overwhelmingly against putting class sizes in the Florida Constitution. It was a bad idea then and, as things have turned out, it's a worse idea now.

We have California-ized our Constitution with pregnant pigs, slot machine rules, and kindergarten class limits. The Florida Constitution is like the Book of Leviticus and about as useful.

A previous Legislature wimped out and refused to put repeal of the billion dollar bullet train back on the ballot. Thank goodness Governor Bush and the voters knew better and that boondoggle is out of the Constitution, no thanks to some in the Florida Legislature.

But, this past Friday, the Legislature lost its nerve again. The Florida Senate voted 19 to 21 against the Governor's plan to modify the class size amendment and thereby avoid a budget crisis. Seven Republicans joined the Democrats to kneecap Bush and squeeze both schools and taxpayers.

Northwest Florida Senators Clary and Peaden stayed with the Governor and thereby represented their constituents well.

No parent wants his child jammed into a classroom with 45 or 50 students, as is the case in some south Florida public schools. But parents in our part of Florida know that educational results depend far more on the quality of teaching than any other variable. Besides, here in the Panhandle, we've voluntarily kept our class sizes within reasonable bounds without formulaic mandates from Tallahassee.

Our problem with state education formulas isn't about class sizes; it's about equitable funding. On average, coastal Northwest Florida counties (Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa. Walton, and Bay) receive $150 per student less in legislative revenues than the state average. This despite the fact that we pay the same for books, bricks, and buses - and the same or more for teachers - as those counties that get the biggest slices of the budgetary pie.

Simply put, our tax money goes east and south. The meddlesome mandates come north and west.

The class size mandate requires that, by 2008, every kindergarten through third grade classroom in Florida may contain no more than 18 students; fourth through eighth grade classrooms must have no more than 22 students; and high school classes are restricted to 24 students.

This means that, when the 19th child moves in on February 1, parents get told that their children have to change teachers as classes are split to ensure that, not for a nanosecond, the constitutional limits are exceeded. It won't matter that a child and a teacher have bonded. It won't matter that disrupting a classroom may be educationally unsound. It won't matter that a new and maybe less experienced teacher will be less effective or get less-than-wonderful results. It won't matter that there's no place to put the new class that was subdivided by governmental edict. It won't matter that the money to pay the extra, unneeded, unwanted, unqualified teacher has to come from laying off the music teacher or closing down the art class.

Nothing matters except the mindless, inflexible, illogical decree from Tallahassee that - regardless of anything - 19 students is unconstitutional in a second grade class.

Governor Bush tried to bring some solution to the issue. He proposed that class sizes be calculated on a district average. In that way, the 19th student in one classroom could be "absorbed" if another classroom - perhaps where there was a less experienced instructor or a more difficult group of students - had 17 children. Bush even threw in a new floor of $35,000 under teachers' salaries.

At least there would have been some slight nod to common sense, some wink at local control of local schools, some modicum of acknowledgement that teacher quality has something to do with educational effectiveness..

And, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of tax dollars would have been saved over time.

But the Senate went squishy, wimped out again. The National Education Association is giddy. The taxpayers got hosed. And school children got used.

So now Okaloosa Schools must build $30 million worth of classrooms we don't need and hire 200 more teachers we can't afford in order to spread out the same number of students. Our experience is reflected or magnified in all other Northwest Florida counties.

Tallahassee has retained its reputation as a city surrounded on all sides by reality..

Don Gaetz 

Don Gaetz is Superintendent of Schools in Okaloosa County and a regular Gulf 1
columnist. His co-author for this column is Dr. John Cavanaugh, President of
the University of West Florida.

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