Repair of the Neighborhood Schools

Above is a photo from this article: https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/duval-county-public-schools-needs-108b-to-revamp-repair-all-158-school-buildings/891619289
Quote from that article:

$1.08 billion. That’s how much the Duval County School District needs to get all of its school buildings back in tip-top shape. The Jacobs Engineering group, hired by the district, worked on a study to help figure out how to solve this problem.

These are a few quotes from this article from December of 2018:

A decade ago, Duval had about $103 million a year to spend on capital needs, Soares said, but over the years state budgets and changes in how districts are allowed to raise money for schools shrunk that pool. Now the district needs about $80 million a year to keep up with major and minor school repairs, but it only got $22 million, he said.

The state Legislature is likely to make some additional capital dollars available this year, Greene said, but it likely will earmark that to be used only for certain school safety items. [Unfortunately they did not.  They earmarked $158 million for charter schools but none for the neighborhood schools.]

Board member Warren Jones noted that Duval is one of the few major urban districts that doesn’t have a secondary source of revenue for building costs. Many districts in the state, including some in the First Coast, have raised sales taxes or imposed impact fees on development to raise money for schools, he said.

These are a few quotes from this article:

But the underlying issue is sound: Local schools don’t have enough money. Curry just can’t seem to bring himself to directly address it. As always, it’s a political game. Because if he were against it — which he is — then he’d need to come up with some other plan to help pay for the school system’s decrepit buildings.

Quote from this article:

The payments are known as “impact fees.” Developers of new residential neighborhoods pay these fees to the school district to offset the impacts that new students are expected to create. But state law has been unclear as to whether those funds can be used only for future construction or to help pay off schools already built.

A Republican speaks out about the GOP legislators continually funding charter schools and money for vouchers without funding the neighborhood schools. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

The charter management companies signed these contracts with our local school districts and they said that they could educate our children for 95% of the FTE or whatever that number is over time. And every year since, they’ve come to THIS legislature to ask for more money. They wanted PECO, and we gave them PECO. They wanted $158 million, we gave them that. And now they want a part of the local option millage and we’re gonna give them that. Well I’ll tell you what… I don’t know about you all but, to me, that is just intellectually dishonest. And I’m wondering when this Senate will stand up and say “enough is enough.”

The GOP dominated Florida legislature just screwed us by passing HB 5. Quote from HB 5: ” … must be approved in a referendum held at a general election”

(16) “General election” means an election held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in the even-numbered years,

I hope the school board will bring this up when they try to figure out how they are going to pay for the repair of the neighborhood schools. The GOP dominated legislators gave $158 million to the repair of charter schools and nothing to the repair of the neighborhood schools.

I hope that charter schools aren’t going to get any of the money from the sales tax increase.  They are getting plenty of money from the GOP state legislators.  We need to fix the neighborhood schools.

Quote from this article:

In that piece, Strauss includes a lengthy analysis by Burris asking whether charter schools can be rehabilitated and reconnected to their original mission. Her conclusion—after weighing the frequency and seriousness of scandals, the persistent evidence of discrimination and segregation, and the depletion of public school funding—is “a resounding no.”

Quote from this article http://folioweekly.com/stories/roadblock,21440:

This year, the Jacksonville Public Education Fund conducted a poll showing 78.5 percent of respondents favored a small surtax to support our schools.