$200M for teacher pay hikes

Included in the budget is a $200 million increase for teacher salaries over last year, bringing the total to $1 billion.

The Florida Education Association, the statewide teacher lobbying organization, said it doesn’t go far enough to address the state’s critical teacher shortage, which it says has grown worse under DeSantis.

The pay increase adds less than $20 per week for each teacher in our public schools, FEA President Andrew Spar said in a news release.

That amount doesn’t move the needle much in a state ranked 48th in overall teacher pay, he said. It will do little to help many teachers who are struggling with rent, homeowners insurance and health care costs, which have shot up under DeSantis, Spar said.

Education spending in the governor’s budget comes out to $26 billion, or about $8,550 per student, DeSantis said.

State universities, which have come under attack by DeSantis for spending millions of dollars on diversity, equity and inclusivity programs he considers wasteful, would receive $100 million to recruit faculty.

The governor’s budget staff sent out surveys to the universities to identify how much they spent on DEI programs, classes and administrators, which came out to about $35 million or less than 1% of their overall budgets.

DeSantis said it would be up to the Legislature to pass a law abolishing those offices.

“That needs to be done, it’s really about furthering ideology,” DeSantis said. “We don’t want to micromanage every little thing, but we can draw a red line and say you can’t go past that.”

Under his first budget, DeSantis pledged to spend $2.5 billion on Everglades and water resource protection, and said he exceeded that this year by $800,000.

He announced $3.5 billion to be spent on the environment over the next four years, including $614 million for Everglades restoration and $370 million for water quality improvement projects in the coming year.

His budget also calls for investing $4 billion to leverage a total of $7 billion for a laundry list of road projects that have been sitting on the Department of Transportation’s planning books for years.