TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida's largest teachers union blasted lawmakers' proposed budget increase for public schools as inadequate, while negotiations at the Capitol about an overall state spending plan hit a lull Tuesday.
Lawmakers plan to increase per-student spending on schools by 1 percent, bumping it from $7,107.33 during the current year to $7,178.49 in the budget year that begins July 1. The plan would represent both the highest overall funding and the highest per-student funding in Florida history.
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But the Florida Education Association said Tuesday that the spending would not mark a historic high because it doesn't account for inflation since the 2007-08 budget year, the previous high-water mark.
"Today's dollar simply doesn't go as far as it did a decade ago," said FEA President Joanne McCall in a statement issued by the organization. "There's nothing 'historic' about this budget. It barely moves the needle."
Citing figures used by the federal government, FEA said lawmakers would have to spend $8,145 per student to match the 2007-08 number.
In an email blast, the advocacy group Fund Education Now also slammed the proposal.
"This is election year politics at the expense of our children," the email said. "Legislators are spinning this pitiful 1% increase as generous, when it is not."
Funding for education dropped when the state slashed its budget following the 2008 financial meltdown and resulting recession. In recent years, funding for public schools has risen, but it still hasn't caught up to the level before the economic downturn.
House Education Appropriations Chairman Erik Fresen, R-Miami, dismissed the FEA's criticism as old news.
"It's an expected argument," Fresen said. "We've heard it for the last three years that we've done increases, where regardless of what the increase is, their starting point is always going to be this theoretical and never-practical starting point of, 'if you used (inflation) or whatever, that's the number that it should be at.' Nothing in the budget really works that way."
The education increase that lawmakers negotiated is actually lower than original plans offered by the House and Senate. That stems in part from an agreement between the two chambers not to allow education property taxes to rise as property values increase. Those taxes, known as the required local effort, are a key portion of the main state formula for school funding.
"Part of it, frankly, is that in order to buy out the entire required local effort, we had to get the (formula) down to a place where we could afford to do so," Senate Appropriations Chairman Tom Lee, R-Brandon, said.
The tussle over education spending came as the public process of hashing out differences between the two chambers over the budget paused for a day. Lee and House Appropriations Chairman Richard Corcoran, R-Land O' Lakes, planned to communicate with each other behind the scenes, but didn't meet public on Tuesday.
Other parts of the education budget marked the biggest area of the spending plan that Lee and Corcoran will have to work through. Members of a joint committee assigned to hammer out an agreement on schools sent far more of their budget to Lee and Corcoran -- who handle the second phase of the negotiations -- than other House-Senate budget panels.