John Dick, Monroe County School Board Member, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in our schools.
This will be Dick’s last term on the school board.
He said, “There’s a lot of things happening for me now. Recently we had the employee banquet and for 20 years I’ve been going to them, two years, we did them online with COVID and it was the last one that I went to. And of course, I’m the chairman right now. So when the chairman goes, they ask him to say a few words, and I said a few words to the district and the staff, and not about me leaving. I didn’t bring that up, but it was nice, so it was a good way to end with that one. It’s always good during the school year. You hear things and something’s good, something’s not good. But then when you get to see all the employees that were the teachers of the year for each school and all that, it’s really a nice thing. And of course now we’re heading into the graduations.”
Graduation rates continue to rise in the district.
Dick said, “We’ve been an A plus district before in the past. It’s gone up and down. I don’t think we’ve ever been below a B. We’ve either been A or B, I think since they started that, I don’t think that we’ve ever been a C district. It’s nice now to be back up anA. That’s where we belong. And Mr. Tierney has said we’re going to become the number one district. In other words, there is also a numerical figure that determines whether you’re A’s and B’s and all that. And so we’re going to be moving on up in that and he wants us to be the number one with the highest score. So that’s a great goal. And my last few months, I will help to do what I can to make sure that goal gets there.”
The Key West Fire Academy is having their graduation in Key West and some of them are Monroe County students.
Dick said, “These are jobs that they can stay here and do, and they’re good paying jobs. I mean, I want to say they can jump out and buy a house right away. They’ll have to do some good investing also, and maybe when they get married and you have a companion, two incomes, you can start to buy houses down here. But it’s tough. No matter what, it’s tough.”
This Saturday will be the Take Stock in Children graduation.
Dick said, “That’s always a great thing. That takes place in Marathon High School at the auditorium. It’s for all three high schools and if they’re graduating from Take Stock, they come to that graduation. That’s at 11 o’clock. And it’s always great to see that. It just seems every year, there’s more and more of them and when they come back, students come back and talk about it. Then, of course, on the 27th, 28th, 29th that’s the three in a row graduations. Coral Shores, Marathon and Key West. Coral Shores, of course on Wednesday; Marathon on Thursday; Key West on Friday, both Coral Shores and Marathon’s at seven o’clock, and Key West is at eight o’clock.”
The school district recently received funding to restore the Reynolds School, which will enable the district to rehabilitate Trumbo into affordable housing.
Dick said, “It’s happening. They’re gathering up funding as much as we can get from grants and from different sources to rehabilitate the building that we have to go into. It’s definitely going to happen, and I think within a couple of years, you’ll see us out of Trumbo Point and into the new building. Of course, I won’t be on the board then, but it’s been going on for years and years and years from the day I got on the board, 20 years ago, they were talking about affordable housing. It’s a little tough thing for us on the housing part, because the tax money we collect is for our job of teaching students. Now, of course, if we have to require building housing to get teachers here, I understand that too. But the problem with that is, what if you don’t fill the housing, they’re not going to let it go empty, and the next thing you know you have other people coming into the houses. Now they say you want to go with police, firemen and all other government entities, but no matter what, they’re going to fill that housing. And the last thing I would ever want to see is us subsidizing the local businesses with our taxpayer money to put local people, business people, into the housing. We’re not going to run housing. That’s not our position, our job. So you have to give it to another private entity to run it, and they’re going to fill it no matter what. From the day one that I got on the school board, I said this district was the highest funded district in the state of Florida. They still are. They get more money per student than any other district in the state of Florida. And when I first got on the board, we were paying our teachers probably in the middle of the average of what the Florida State was. And I kept pushing on that, pushing on that and every superintendent I went through, they reacted to it, and we’ve been for a couple of years now, as we should be the highest paid, I still think we need to get more, because I do believe we still have way too many positions and not only in the administration, but even in the schools, I think they kept some of these positions that were created in COVID. The money has run out. And people have to understand, we have X amount of dollars, we can’t find more. And every time you have a position, it takes away from everybody else. And so when we got all that, the feds were throwing money all over the place during COVID, and they said, you had to create these jobs. We created them, but some of them are still here, and the money is no longer coming. So that means it’s coming from everybody’s salary. I keep hammering that home to everybody.”
How are we doing with numbers and funding?
Dick said, “The funding from the state has gone up a bit. It’s not finalized all yet, I think, but we know we’re going to get more money per student. The question, of course, is, how many students will we have? And at this point we were working on a number that’s almost a little bit lower. By July 1 we will determine the amount of positions we have, and then what happens after that is, if some of these students that we think are coming don’t come, that puts us in a bind, because we’ve already created the position and hired a teacher. We have X amount of teachers in every school for X amount of students. Then when you come to August, the middle of August, if X amount of students don’t show up, it can be a problem for us. We can’t tell the teacher now you don’t have a job at that point.”
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