Commissioner — instead of sugar coating hostile corporate takeover, how about supporting Florida public schools?

For 25 years, Florida has passed policies that undercut funding for public schools, increased requirements for public-school teachers, staff, and administration, and limited support and learning opportunities for Florida’s students, all while finding ways to divert your public-school tax dollars to unaccountable corporate-run voucher and charter schools.

The truth is that Florida’s public schools are under-resourced by design. Florida continues to rank 50th in the nation in average teacher salary and more than 60% of Florida’s educational staff professionals (front office staff, custodians, bus drivers, paraprofessionals, and others working in our schools) are paid less than $35,000 a year.

This means that most of Florida’s public school teachers and staff make far less than the $61,002 minimum living wage needed for a single parent with one child to maintain a modest standard of living. As a result, many dedicated and passionate educators are faced with the prospect of leaving the profession or working two or three jobs just to support their own families.

These choices worsen a critical shortage of teachers and staff, leaving many classrooms without enough trained, qualified professionals.

The strain on the public school system is reflected in students’ performance, as SAT scores and national reading and math scores continue to decline year over year. At the heart of these issues is a politically driven administration that seems determined to attack and dismantle public education.

We agree with the Commissioner of Education when he says that great schools serve children. But making it harder for public schools to succeed will not ensure the education that every child deserves.

As I travel the state, I meet amazing public school educators who pour their hearts and souls into their professions and advocate for students and their families. These educators work hard to ensure students are welcomed, safe and loved. They work with parents and students to prepare students for the next chapter of their lives, and they ensure that every student, including those with disabilities, graduates from high school prepared for high-wage, high-skilled jobs or continues their education at the collegiate level.

These amazing programs abound in our public schools and are often the only place they exist. Every day, we hear success stories of students graduating from public high school and securing high-wage jobs paying more than $100,000 a year, or being the first in their family to attend college, even an Ivy League school. But the best thing I notice about our public schools is that, despite all the obstacles they face, they are the only schools in Florida that welcome and educate every child!

When we read the Commissioner’s recent plea to taxpayers defending the heinous co-location bill — a measure lawmakers quietly approved behind closed doors and at the eleventh hour last Session because a billionaire offered them money — it provides clear evidence of this administration’s intent to sell off Florida’s public education system to the highest bidder. It flies in the face of everyone working in a public school in Florida who is trying to make a difference.

Co-location essentially works like this:

Imagine if you had a room in your home that wasn’t used all the time, think like an office or a guest room. Now imagine that one day, lawmakers come to your home and tell you that they want “The Corporation Charter” to be able to use that room because there is space in that room that you aren’t using every day.

Now imagine further that when the Corporation Charter moves into your home, you learn that you still have to keep the fridge full. You still have to take care of the utilities, and you still have to provide maintenance for the room being used by someone else, with no help from the new folks staying in your room.

Then you learn that the Corporation Charter receives funding for every person they recruit to your home to use that room, and you are not entitled to a single dime of that money.

The Corporation Charter gets to keep all the profits while you spend your money on all the work and maintenance. That is the deal our lawmakers made when they approved a co-location bill that would allow unaccountable, for-profit charter school companies to come take over your neighborhood public schools, displacing students and programs and forcing out families they don’t feel fit their image.

Lawmakers let one billionaire decide for every one of us that our public schools aren’t worth investing in and should be abandoned. The Commissioner of Education and Gov. Ron DeSantis claim that this hostile corporate takeover is of good value to taxpayers and that it’s good fiscal sense to allow corporations to take over your public schools.

But would you agree to a deal like that in your home?

The Commissioner of Education and Gov. DeSantis often talk about how public schools are failing and use that as an evergreen excuse for why they remain anti-public education, without ever once taking accountability for the overburdening and underfunding of Florida’s public schools that has made it harder and harder for them to carry out the Constitutional requirement of providing a free, high-quality education to every child. And yet, teachers, staff, and administrators in Florida’s public schools somehow continue to do all they can to meet that requirement.

Let us be clear: Public schools are not failing. They are being failed by those in power who choose to bend the knee to corporate interests focused on profits rather than doing what’s best for Florida’s students.

To the Commissioner and Governor directly: Don’t abandon public schools, support them. If you really want to deliver “educational excellence,” invest in our students and our public schools and end the co-location farce that will only drain even more resources away from the children who represent Florida’s future.

___

Andrew Spar is president of The Florida Education Association, the state’s largest association of professional employees, with over 123,000 members. Learn more at feaweb.org.