The Florida Legislature is once again attempting to
subvert the legislative process by jamming into two bill, Senate Bills 524 and
1166, nearly thirty nominally related topics. It’s become typical in
Tallahassee to add bills that are going nowhere to bills that have a real
chance at passing. The reason behind this is the hope that some legislators
will hold their nose and ignore the things they don’t like in order to support
the things they do.
Originally SB 524 and SB 1166 were very small bills that only dealt with public
universities’ performance funding and education funding.
Now the 59-page SB 524 includes the “Best and Brightest” teacher
bonus plan that most teachers have rejected, forcing school districts to share their
tax revenue with for profit charter schools and at least a dozen more topics.
Then the new, 85-page version of SB
1166 now includes open enrollment that would allow students to cross district
lines, high school athletics proposals that many believe
would create a type of free agency and a proposal to give high impact charter
schools fifteen years contracts. I want to remind you that currently high
impact teachers hired after 2010 only get one year contracts.
Most of these proposals were
unlikely to pass on their own but now they have been give new life.
These are called train bills but the truth is they are
more like train wrecks. I think they should be called Frankenstein bills
because they are cobbled together from different bills and in the end all they
create is a monster.
One proposal, almost universally supported by parents
and teachers, mandatory recess, however didn’t make these train bills, which
should tell you all you need to know about who are legislators in Tallahassee are
truly representing.
This is not how the legislative process is supposed to
work.
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