School Board Members Stand Up for Teachers in Tallahassee

Last week three Sarasota County School Board members, Jane Goodwin, Caroline Zucker and Shirley Brown, headed to Tallahassee to speak with state legislators about pending education cuts and to attend a Florida School Board Association gathering.

Zucker said the trip was critical because legislators need to know the local effects of their statewide decisions at the capital.

“We needed to explain to them what was happening locally,” Zucker said in an interview with Sarasota Patch. “You need be careful when you cut [any part of] education. You do not take an ax and cut strait through without looking.”

The group attended a legislative session when the senate was debating the education cuts. Rick Scott originally proposed cutting education funding by 10 percent and since then, the house and the senate have come up with variations of those cuts.

Brown, a former state legislature, testified to a committee there and on April 5 she gave a brief update to the district at the school board meeting.

She said that while no matter what happens, there will be a drop in the base student allocation but that penalties for not meeting the class-size amendment may be halted.

The class-size amendment sets a limit to the number of students in each class. For every student, in every class, that class-size is not met there is a financial penalty for the district.  

Because of a pending lawsuit against the state, “It looks like we may not have to pay the penalties for this current year,” Brown said. She added that there are two bills that may limit or alter the class-size penalties as well.

“One bill reduces the penalty totally and another bill reduces it to a thousand dollars entirely,” She added.

Zucker said with the almost unimaginable cuts it is hard to be positive about the situation. But this year, however, communication with the state legislators has improved. She hopes this means last week’s trip would be more meaningful than year’s past.

“Unlike what happened the year before where you couldn’t talk to anyone, [legislators] were looking for input,” Zucker said. “Last year it was just closed off.”

During the trip Goodwin and Co. met with local legislators, which Zucker said was weird because it was their “home-turf”.

Those legislators included Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton), Nancy Detert (R- Venice), Doug Holder (R-Sarasota) and Ray Pilon (R-Sarasota).

Regardless of what cuts take place Brown and Zucker said Sarasota is in better shape than most school districts across the state.

“[The school board] has been on that movement to streamline everything,” Zucker said. “We’ve been looking at healthcare. There isn’t anything we haven’t been looking at.”

Since 2007, the Sarasota County School District has cut more than $104 million from its budget and instituted a hiring freeze.

The looming budget cuts, Zucker said, will certainly negatively affect the classroom and students, but maybe even a teacher’s psyche.

Normally, teachers know if they will be coming back for another year before summer break, but this year, Zucker said that is not possible.

“Everything is in flux,” she said. “The teachers, they don’t know. We like to tell them before they leave [for the summer] that they have a job in September, and we can’t do that this year.”