Ignored mandate leads to problem
Maxwell: Lawmakers didn’t listen to voters about classroom size.
LOCAL & STATE
All over Florida, schools are struggling to find the safest way to resume — hoping to provide small class sizes to allow for social distancing between students and staff.
Unfortunately, in Florida, that’s a much bigger challenge than it should be.
Why? Because Florida lawmakers never shrunk class sizes down the way voters demanded nearly two decades ago.
While voters were crystal clear in 2002 — demanding no more than 18 students per class until third grade; no more than 22 students for grades 4 through 8; and no more than 25 students in high school — legislators basically ignored that mandate, leaving many classes packed with more kids.
We’re talking classes with 30, 35 and more.
So while other countries have provided road maps to re-opening with strict, small-class guidelines — no more than 10 or 12 students per class in Denmark, Germany and Belgium, for instance — Florida won’t be anywhere close.
In fact, most local school districts aren’t setting any kind of specific, smaller class-size goals. That’s for one simple reason: They don’t have enough teachers.
The state never helped hire as many as it should have after the class-size amendment passed. So now, we’re facing even bigger problems in the pandemic age.
This mess started the way so many Florida messes start — with the politicians. Left or right, they never put enough money into public education.
Floridians tried to fix things, first voting to create the state’s “Education Lottery.” But lawmakers played shell games with that mandate. In fact, 20 years after the lottery debuted, the state actually spent a lower percentage of its budget on public education.
So voters tried again — this time with a class-size amendment. Citizens thought: If we change the constitution to specif
ically say no more than 25 students in every class, the state will to comply, right?
Wrong. Lawmakers immediately began looking for loopholes.
First, they tried to repeal the class-size mandate … and failed.
Then they started playing wickedly creative word games, redefining basic words … like “core.”
See, voters had tried to be reasonable by approving amendment language that said the class-size caps would only apply to core classes, not extracurriculars. That made sense, since parents weren’t really worried about a band or chorus class with 30 or 40 students. They were worried about math, science and English.
But in 2011, Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature passed a new law reducing the number of classes that qualified as “core” from 849 all the way down to 304.
Suddenly everything from pre-calculus and trigonometry to American literature and marine science was considered “extracurricular” or exempt from class-size rules. That included every single AP class in the state.
Voters had attempted to allow for flexibility and common sense. Florida politicians made them pay for it.
And the politicians didn’t stop there. Lawmakers also decided to redefine what the word “each” meant.
The amendment clearly said that class-size caps should apply to “each teacher.” But lawmakers rewrote the rules to say that the caps could instead apply to school-wide averages at most districts.
A core English class that was supposed to have no more than 25 students could now have 35 students … as long as some other class in the school had 15.
Thanks to all these political word games, Florida’s class sizes remained large.
And now, most local school districts say that, while they will try to keep class sizes as small as possible, the only firm commitment they can make is to adhere to Florida’s existing, loosey-goosey prepandemic standards.
One saving grace — with regard to social-distancing and in-person learning, anyway — is that most families so far seem to be opting for online learning. In other words: We’ll have fewer bodies in schools because fewer families are comfortable being there.
But there will also be fewer teachers for those classrooms since many, if not most, teachers are switching to online teaching as well. Seminole County Superintendent Walt Griffin said staffing challenges will be “complex.”
The bottom line: There weren’t enough teachers when everyone was healthy. There certainly aren’t enough now.
Obviously, class size is just one aspect of safely reopening schools.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
says smaller class sizes “are generally associated with less transmission in schools,” the health organization stresses other safe practices — including sanitation, keeping sick people home and operating classes as “cohorts” where the same group of students stay together for most of the day and teachers swap out.
But Florida is starting from behind — with more students in classrooms than voters demanded nearly two decades ago.
All because lawmakers thought it’d be funny to play games with the state’s constitution.
I don’t know anyone who’s laughing now.