By S.V. Date
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau

Monday, April 10, 2006

TALLAHASSEE — Since 2002, state Republican leaders have argued that complying with an amendment to shrink public-school classes would cost too much money.

Four years later, flush with extra billions of dollars in tax revenue, leaders have turned to a new reason: There is now not enough time to build the necessary schools by the required deadlines.

"In Duval, for example, we have to build over 20 schools in two years," said Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, who was Senate president immediately after the amendment passed in 2002.

During King's two years as Senate president, state economists had estimated that lawmakers would have had to set aside $4.7 billion to start building schools in time for full implementation of the amendment in 2010. Instead, King, House Speaker Johnnie Byrd and Gov. Jeb Bush spent a total of $700 million.

And even though GOP leaders now have on their hands $7 billion in new money — with another $500 million expected next week after a tax revenue estimate — it appears unlikely they will commit the needed money this year, either.

In his budget proposal in February, Bush recommended $1.9 billion for new schools, but neither the House nor the Senate is considering a figure that large. The House has set aside $1.1 billion, but only if implementation is delayed by a year. The Senate has not settled on a number.

"The governor put $1.9 billion, roughly, in his budget for class-size reduction," said Senate President Tom Lee. "You couldn't spend that kind of money for class-size reduction in this state over a five-year period, probably. There just isn't the construction capacity. There's not the planning system in place. There's not the school sites ready to receive that level of spending."

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami, the incoming House Democratic leader, said the excuses would be comical if they weren't so pathetic. "I don't think that you can use this excuse with parents. They just won't accept it," he said. "Your procrastination is not my problem. It's their (Republicans') problem. Their procrastination is their problem."

And of Lee's belief that schools simply cannot be built quickly: "That's sort of a silly argument. You wouldn't use it for prisons. We shouldn't use it for educating children."

King said he did not push for more construction money when he held the gavel because he believed Bush and others ultimately would succeed in repealing or watering down the amendment.

"That was a political decision that was made — thinking that would be the less expensive of the avenues available. The fact is we, the state, may not have a requirement to build bricks-and-sticks schools," King said, alluding to the latest effort to undo the class-size amendment.

Measures in both the House and the Senate would increase the classroom caps by five students at each grade level, as well as permit "co-teaching," in which two or more classes share a single room. Lawmakers will have to pass the proposal by a three-fifths majority in each chamber before it could be put on the November ballot so that voters could decide whether they want to weaken the limits they set four years earlier.

In this goal, Republican lawmakers this year have the support of most of the state's school boards, which complain that they don't have the money to build the necessary schools.

"We can't keep up. We're four and a half billion dollars short on the construction side," said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association. He said lawmakers may be willing to spend $2 billion more for school construction this year. "If that's what you have to trade for five more students, then that's maybe what it takes to trade."

Palm Beach County schools Superintendent Art Johnson said his district has managed so far because of the half-penny sales tax that voters approved, but it soon will need help.

Frank Till, schools superintendent in Broward County, said his district has been able to get by because its discretionary property tax has generated so much extra money from rising property values.

Martin County school board members have raised impact fees on new houses, blaming in part the class-size amendment. St. Lucie officials also argue that the state has not given them nearly enough to build enough schools.

Lawmakers, too, use that argument.

Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, last year urged his colleagues to repeal the amendment, saying: "Counties all over this state are having to borrow money to build schools to comply with the mandate. School districts are fighting a losing battle to keep up with enough construction funding to be able to keep with the requirement.... School boards and counties across Florida are having to hold referendums and do bonds to be able to keep up with it."

Class-size proponents say school boards should not have to spend their own money because the language of the amendment is unambiguous. The amendment states: "Payment of the costs associated with reducing class size to meet these requirements is the responsibility of the state and not of local school districts."

"It's crystal clear," said Damien Filer, who helped then-state Sen. Kendrick Meek, now a Miami congressman, get the question on the ballot. Filer said the amendment language gave lawmakers a full eight years to build the needed schools. "They're running out of time, and that's their own fault."

Rep. Marco Rubio, R-Miami, defended his and his colleagues' efforts to weaken the amendment this year by increasing the caps by five students at each grade level and by allowing co-teaching.

"We should reduce class size. We should just do it in a way that's more workable," said Rubio, who is slated to take over as House speaker this November. "The problem is about school districts that are going to be forced, with gun to head, to build classrooms with bricks, when that money may be better spent giving teachers a raise or doing something else with it."

Rubio is one of 11 Hispanic House members from Miami-Dade County, Bush's home county, who voted to repeal the amendment last year, even though voters in each of their districts had approved the 2002 amendment by at least 58 percent and as much as 65 percent. In the Senate, the three GOP senators from Miami-Dade, all Cuban-Americans, voted with the majority to leave the amendment intact.

"A representative's job is to fulfill the mandate of the constituents in his district. In this county, they are working against the best interests of the children in their district, and I can't understand it," said Karen Aronowitz, president of the United Teachers of Dade union. "Who are these people representing, and to what end?"

But even districts in South Florida, where voters overwhelmingly approved the amendment in 2002 by 2-to-1 margins, have not embraced the amendment's mandate.

For example, whereas Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties have spent about $1 million pursuing an unsuccessful lawsuit during the past two years over a re-jiggered cost-of-living formula that costs the districts tens of millions of dollars each year, they have not considered legal action over the inadequacy of legislative funding for class size, which represents hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Why the difference?

Johnson said a class-size lawsuit may be more a "question of timing."

Privately, education officials, lobbyists and legislators say suing and angering a group of Central and North Florida lawmakers is one thing. Suing and enraging the most popular political figure in Florida and the brother of the president of the United States is another.

"I think people are trying to get by through January of 2007," said Marshall Ogletree, a lobbyist for the Florida Education Association teachers union, one of the few groups that has not been reluctant to quarrel with Bush, who must leave office at the end of his second term, in January.

Ogletree said not only large counties with the worst crowding should be fighting for the class-size amendment.

He said even smaller counties that do not have a crowding problem should be among the amendment's biggest defenders because they have been able to use their share of the class-size money to pay their teachers more. He pointed to salary and benefits package increases during this school year of 13.5 percent in Hamilton County, 11.3 percent in Dixie County and a two-year increase of 15 percent in Gilchrist County. In contrast, increases in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties this year were 6, 6.5 and 3 percent, respectively.

Given the state's history, Ogletree said, school districts are mistaken if they believe they would receive enough state money if the class-size amendment were weakened.

"I don't know how anybody can think we would get that amount of money without this," he said.

Source: Palm Beach Post