Lawmakers back off one bad plan and push another

Bright Futures scholarships no longer would be guaranteed to have 100% funding

You spoke up, and they backed off.

After facing a blistering backlash from parents and students, Florida legislators withdrew a bone-headed plan to deny Bright Futures scholarships to students who wanted to pursue degrees that Florida politicians didn’t find worthy.

Chalk one up to the power of the people.

Normally, Florida legislators don’t listen. But in this case, the Republican leaders who control the agenda in Tallahassee underestimated the popularity of Bright Futures, especially among their own base.

It’s one thing to run roughshod over Average Joes. But here, lawmakers were also ticking off donors and supporters who liked the scholarships — as well as anyone who thought it was a dumb idea to deny high school graduates of scholarships they earned just because the scholar wanted to major in sociology or anthropology.

So that bad idea is dead. Unfortunately in Tallahassee, bad ideas are like heads of Greek hydra monsters. If you cut one off, two more come back.

House Bill 86 still calls for potential cuts to the Bright Futures program — which awards Florida’s top students with scholarships to cover tuition and fees at the state’s public universities and colleges.

How big would the cuts be? Who knows? That’s the problem.

The bad bill — sponsored by bad-bill afficionado Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala — calls for stripping the current language in state law that guarantees top scholarships will cover “100 percent of tuition and fees” and instead says scholarships will be worth an “amount specified in the General Appropriations Act.”

Yes, an amount.

How the heck you’re supposed to know what that amount is — or financially plan for such a thing — is anybody’s guess.

After all, 50% is an amount . So is 1%.

Each year, you’d just have to trust Florida legislators … the same people who regularly raid the state’s affordable housing trust fund to make ends meet.

Try taking that to your financial planner.

State Sen. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa, had it right when she asked: “How can we expect lifelong decisions to be made when the state is essentially saying we won’t commit to fully funding the scholarship programs?

“Families rely on this program to access education, to climb out of generational poverty.”

I agree, senator. Unfortunately, some Florida politicians don’t seem to care much about higher education except when they can use it as a whipping boy — poli

ticians like Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay, who threatened to shut down UCF a couple of years back.

Fine went on another higher-ed rant this week that had nothing to do with providing affordable education. Instead, he launched a crusade to ensure universities weren’t unfairly enforcing mask mandates with conservative student groups. That topic so enraged Fine that he tweeted a warning that legislators aren’t required to fund higher education.

See, when you elect people like this, you get policy debates like these — tirades about mask policies in one corner and attempts to defund Bright Futures scholarships in the other.

Meanwhile, most families just want to know what’s going on. Their family budgets shouldn’t be subject to the annual whims of politicians.

Sen. Baxley, if you guys want to cut Bright Futures, at least be honest about it. Let families know in advance so they can plan.

Or, if you’re hell-bent on cutting education funding so you can provide more corporate tax breaks, you could consider making some of Bright Futures needbased, so that the families who need it the most will get it. Just tell the wealthy families losing their scholarships that trickle-down economics should ease their pain.

But better than all that: Just leave Bright Futures the hell alone.

The scholarship program is a popular for a reason. It was designed to motivate kids to do well in high school, encourage smart students to stay in Florida and help ensure that any student who works hard has an opportunity to further their educational pursuit.

You guys already muck around with so many funding programs. You raid the affordable housing trust fund, violate the voters’ will on Constitutional amendments for smaller class sizes and environmental spending and have undermined the entire funding goal of the our “Education Lottery.” Isn’t that enough?

To Gov. Ron DeSantis’ credit, he helped put a stop the first bad part of the plan — the part that would have denied Bright Futures money to students seeking certain degrees. DeSantis knew the idea was politically toxic. Hopefully he’ll step put a stop to the rest of this bad bill as well.

Education is important. And families deserve to know what it will cost.

If legislators are looking to fix something, pick something that’s actually broken — like this state’s sorry unemployment system. Not this.

You can find the contact info for your legislator at leg.state.fl.us