FEA Frontline Report
2013 Legislative Session -
Week 2
March 15, 2013
We made it through another week with most of our limbs and
digits still intact. Murmurs ricocheted around the Capitol about who
might be the next Lt. Governor after the abrupt resignation of Lt. Governor
Jennifer Carroll. Political intrigue flourishes as usual, but for the
most part the work of the Legislature chugged along without even a pause for
reflection.
Bill Tracking
RETIREMENT
Both the House and Senate moved their respective retirement
bills through committees this week – but not without continued controversy and
heated debate. A study by a Virginia actuarial firm, Milliman, was supposed to
provide answers, but has only made the case for reform even more suspect.
The House bill HB
7011 would close the defined benefit plan (also known as the pension plan
or ‘DB’ plan) to all new employees starting after January 1, 2014 The
Senate plan SB 1392 preserves the employees’ ability to choose between the DB
plan or the 401(k) type investment plan.
HB 7011 passed this week by the House State Affairs Committee
by a vote of 12 to 6, once again along Party lines. Voting NO on the bill
were Representatives Rangel, Rouson, Stewart, Taylor, Waldman, and C.
Watson. The bill now goes to the House floor for a full vote.
The Florida Senate is going in a different direction. SB
1392, sponsored by Sen. Wilton Simpson (R-New Port Richey) would allow most
new employees the choice between a 401(k) type plan and the defined benefit
retirement plan. SB 1392 was passed unanimously by the Senate Government
Oversight & Accountability Committee. The bill would:
- Require only the highest
paid employees such as senior managers and department heads would be
forced to enroll in the 401(k) type investment plan. Other employees, from
teachers to bus drivers to police and secretaries, could remain in the
system as long as they choose to stay
- Include a new default to
the 401(k) type investment plan. Currently the default is to enroll new
employees that do not make a choice in the DB plan.
- Offers an incentive to
enroll in the investment plan by requiring employees in the investment
plan to contribute 2 percent of their salary towards retirement. Employees
participating in the DB plan will continue to pay 3 percent.
SB 1392 will next be heard in the Senate Community Affairs
Committee. The bill requires an actuarial study before it can move
ahead. We’ve been told to expect a study mid-April. With that in
mind, no hearing date has been set as of yet.
It is important to note that HB 7011 is Speaker Weatherford’s
bill and he has told the media that if no changes are made eventually the DB
plan will require a major taxpayer bailout. But the Senate is not
convinced of those dire predictions. At this time as you can see, the
House and the Senate are far apart – and someone will have to compromise before
a final bill can pass BOTH chambers.
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION
PCB KTS 13-03 now filed HB
7091 passed the House K-12 Education Subcommittee unanimously with the
support of all education stakeholders except the Foundation for Florida’s
Future. Freshman Rep. Karen Castor Dentel (D-Maitland) (who is a teacher
and FEA member) and Lake CTA President B Grassell were key to convincing
committee members to eliminate language from the bill which would have
completely removed from statute of the Dale Hickam Excellent Teaching
Program. Rep. Castor Dentel was also successful in amending the bill by
passing three amendments: 1) allow districts to publish school district annual
performance reports on their website rather than the newspaper 2) allowing the
district flexibility with the 90 minute reading block in letting it be divided
into smaller increments of instructional time of not less than 20-minute time
blocks 3) Remove redundant language regarding individual professional
development plans.
Foundation for Florida Future’s lobbyist Patricia Levesque
spoke against the reading block amendment saying students must have the
uninterrupted 90 minute block citing early 2000 research data. Castor
Dentel asked for committee support and said “Research now shows that reading
instruction is most effective when in segments of not less than 20 minutes;
what’s important is we retain the 90 minutes. With my Masters in Literacy
Studies and teaching reading and writing, I would not propose something that
was detrimental. In fact this will help.” The amendment passed. You may
watch the committee meeting by clicking here.
The 101 page bill has many moving parts, but for the most part
it is a good bill. The bill creates three new standard high school diploma
designations: the College and Career, Industry, and Scholar designations. The
course and testing requirements vary for each designation, thereby enabling
students to tailor their course of study to their post-high school graduation
goals.
It conforms the Florida statutes to the recent replacement of
the Sunshine State Standards with the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards
and Florida’s transition to Common Core State Standards in mathematics and
English Language Arts. The bill also makes changes to statewide assessments,
and changes the weighting of the middle school Civics EOC assessment from “must
pass” to 30 percent of the course grade. And much more.
The next stop for this bill has not yet been released.
SCHOOL SAFTEY
A little background on Florida’s School Safety budget
allocation: The Legislature appropriates Safe Schools funds as a part of the
Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) in the annual Appropriations
Act. The funds are used for after school programs for middle schools,
programs for correction of specific discipline problems, conflict resolution
strategies, behavior driven intervention programs, alternative school programs
for adjudicated youth, suicide prevention, bullying prevention, and school
resource officers. In the 2012-13 budget year $64.5 million was allocated
to schools (incidentally this amount is 15% lower than it was 5 years ago).
School districts spend 65% of their safety funding on school resource officers.
The rest is spent on items such as security cameras and fences. Many systems
also spend local dollars to keep officers in their schools and most split the
total 50/50 with law enforcement agencies. A report to the Senate
education committee estimated it would cost more than $100 million to place
resource officers in every school.
This week several school safety issues began their journey
through the committee process:
HB
609 Bullying in Public Schools by Rep. Reggie Fullwood (D-Jacksonville)
and SB
626 By Sen. Dwight Bullard (D-Miami) were both passed in
committees this week. These bills are aimed at preventing cyberbullying,
spelling out what that entails and requiring investigation of certain computer
harassment claims.
SB 284
Student Safety by Sen. Joe Negron (R-Palm City) passed the Senate Education
Committee unanimously. That same day, HB
369 by Rep. Mike LaRosa (R-Saint Cloud) also passed the Choice and
Innovation Committee unanimously. These identical bills address require
emergency response agencies to notify private schools in the school district of
occurrences that threaten student safety if the private school requests opts
into the district school board’s emergency notification procedures.
Private school emergency policies are not regulated by the state. Private
schools typically make arrangements to receive notification of emergencies from
the appropriate emergency response agency. Florida law does not expressly
authorize private schools to opt into school district emergency notification
procedures for the purpose of receiving emergency notifications.
RESEARCH ENGINE
SB 878
Education Accountability by Sen. Bill Galvano (R-Bradenton) passed the
Senate Appropriation committee unanimously – but we still have concerns about
the possibility of student identifiable data being available to vendors. The
bill, among other things, requires the Commissioner of Education to improve and
streamline access to data maintained in the K-20 data warehouse by creating a
web-based interface designed to serve as a single location for public to access
aggregated data from the K-20 data warehouse and create a self-service,
restricted access component of the K-20 data warehouse called the “Research
Engine” that is capable of providing student-level data to organizations and
authorized representatives under FERPA.
The problem seems to reside in FERPA (Federal Education Rights
and Privacy Act) because of changes made to the federal code a couple years
ago. FERPA contains exceptions for the non-consensual disclosure of student
information and perhaps the hole one could drive a bus through is this:
A school may non-consensually disclose personally identifiable
information from education records “to organizations conducting studies for or
on behalf of the school making the disclosure for the purposes of administering
predictive tests, administering student aid programs, or improving
instruction”.
We continue to wrestle with this issue and parents across the
nation are beginning to question who will be able to get their hands on their
children’s school data.
Next Week
Full week agenda calendars are not being released on Friday
as they had been in the past – the Legislature is sticking to the 2 day notice
rule which makes warning you about the next week’s happenings far more
difficult. We do know that Monday is a BIG day for education in the
Florida Senate. The Senate Education committee will be hearing 9
education bills and work shopping 12 charter school bills from 3:30 p.m. until
6 pm. This just off the wire Parent Trigger will be heard in the House
Education Appropriations Subcommittee on Tuesday.
Member
Lobbyists
Thank you to members from Broward, Orange, Pinellas, St.
Johns, and Volusia Counties for joining us this week in chilly
Tallahassee. Remember: Tuesdays at 8 a.m. FEA will be holding legislative
briefings on the third floor of the FEA Headquarters for our visiting member
lobbyists. Please let Debi.McDaniel@floridaea.org
is you will be joining us.
Thanks to Kevin
Watson and Lynda Russell for their contributions to this report.
Questions?
Call us at 850-224-2078.
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