FORT MYERS, Fla. – Gov. Ron DeSantis signed two education bills Thursday, targeting the power of teacher unions in Florida and expanding flexibility for school districts.
The centerpiece was Senate Bill 1296, which establishes a process for decertifying teacher unions that lack sufficient membership support and creates a fast-track process to deliver state teacher pay funds directly to educators.
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“You should not have these entities operating if they do not have support from the people they purport to represent,” DeSantis said.
The bill addresses what DeSantis described as unions deliberately slowing the distribution of state pay funds. He said the state has grown the average minimum teacher salary from $38,000 to nearly $50,000 through a dedicated funding program, which reached $1.38 billion in the most recent budget year.
“We’d be talking about, hey, we did a billion in teacher categorical. Then we hear from teachers in August, September — I haven’t gotten anything,” DeSantis said. “It’s because the school unions were slow walking pay increases for the teachers.”
DeSantis also signed HB 1279, which gives school districts more flexibility to reward high-performing teachers who transfer to lower-performing schools outside the collective bargaining process.
The bill ensures that teachers delivering Florida Advanced Courses are eligible for the same bonuses as those teaching Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs.
DeSantis pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic as evidence that unions prioritized politics over students, noting that Florida kept schools open while national union leaders pushed for closures.
“They sued me to try to close the schools,” he said. “I think we lost in the trial court on that one, which we normally do. And then of course, we won on appeal, which we normally do.”
The Florida Education Association pushed back sharply. FEA President Andrew Spar called the signing of SB 1296 “yet another entry in a long line of betrayals of working Floridians by Gov. DeSantis in favor of out-of-state, billionaire-backed, special interest groups.”
The FEA also noted the timing of the signing, on May Day.
“It’s not lost on us that the Governor has signed an anti-worker bill on May Day, a day grounded in the labor movement and the belief that working people deserve power and dignity,” Spar’s statement read.
The union disputed the governor’s characterization of teacher pay progress, stating Florida ranks 50th in the nation in average teacher pay for the third consecutive year and 41st in per-student funding.
The FEA added that the average teacher salary in Florida fell 12.4% in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2014-15 to 2024-25, and that nearly 60% of education staff professionals in the state earn less than $35,000 per year.
The Florida AFL-CIO also condemned the signing, pushing back on the governor’s characterization of teacher unions as partisan actors. The organization noted that more than 30% of Florida’s union members are registered Republicans, with nearly another third identifying as independent or unaffiliated.
Florida AFL-CIO President Kimberly Holdridge called the signing “another win for billionaire-funded, out-of-state think tanks at the expense of Florida’s working people,” but vowed labor would respond.
“Florida’s public sector workers have the power and support in our communities statewide to show them otherwise. We will organize and come back stronger than ever,” she said.
Florida AFL-CIO Director of Politics and Public Policy Rich Templin questioned the governor’s motivations altogether. “This legislation has nothing to do with our state but everything to do with his continued focus on his own national political ambitions,” Templin said.