John Dick, Monroe County School Board member, joined Good Morning Keys this morning on KeysTalk 96.9/102.7FM to talk about our schools.
There has been a smooth transition to the new superintendent and Monroe County received an A rating from the state.
Dick said, “That’s very good and it’ll go very well with the new superintendent. Because, first of all, it was very good to see Theresa actually leave with an A rating. That was one of our goals, and she made it.”
What kind of criteria is used to select the grade?
Dick said, “Well, of course, it’s the school grades is what goes into making up the district grades. Of course, a lot of that is based upon your test scores, but not just, oh, everybody gets a certain score. When you divide up your test scores and you pick the lowest quartile, they want to see you moving those people up. When you move those people up, that really helps give your grade, and gives you the numbers to get a higher grade. The way they’ll determine why we’re an A rated district, there are numbers that go into that, and so you can see by the numbers which district has the highest number and of course, for the last few years, it’s always been, I think it’s St John’s district up in the northern part of Florida, seems to always be one of the number one, either number one or number two every year. So we are going to challenge for that. But it is mostly test scores, also on the percentage of students taking advanced courses, how is your high school graduation rate and dropout rate all goes into it, and attendance, meaning that when you do the test, they’d love to see everybody have 100% attendance on the test, but sometimes it goes down because people are sick and whatnot.”
How are we doing as far as vacancies going into the new school year?
Dick said, “That report is fantastic. Last week I was told there was five vacancies. When have you heard us say there’s only five teacher vacancies to start a school year? They told me they were working on a couple of them that they had some good bites. So it may not be five by Wednesday. I mean, that’s just fantastic. That is the best news I’ve heard in any beginning school year in a long, long time. So we’re very satisfied with that. That’s due to we’ve been trying to get the salaries up as we’ve been trying to be very careful with our budget so we can get money to the salaries and we’ve been doing that very well. Because we made the A rating, the atmosphere going in to start the school year is, well, it’s always been a good beginning of the year, but I could see people are looking and saying the schools that didn’t quite make an A rating, they’re all looking to be A’s. I can see where we’re well on our way to becoming the number one district in the state of Florida. Wednesday, the students start, and that’s going to be the start of our road to A rated number one. So we’re looking forward to this.”
Will there be any cutbacks?
Dick said, “We’re going to have another meeting, not tomorrow, but the following Tuesday in Coral Shores at five o’clock. We always have three budget meetings up and down the Keys, because we have the meetings in three places, but only two of them are considered required budget hearings, where we vote on the budget. We had the first one the other day and at the last meeting, that was voted on. This one that we’re going to do in Coral Shores is just a workshop, we will not vote. Then the final one at the following meeting would be voted on. We’re still a little bit unsure of the federal funds, because they were held back, and then they were told it’s coming forward now, the federal funds from the different grants. How much is coming forward? We don’t have that answer yet. At least we hadn’t had it at the end of last week, but I would expect we should know very shortly, so that we can really finalize all our final numbers, because we really want to have it by the final budget hearing, because that one we vote on, and then we can’t change anything after that.”
What federal programs could be affected?
Dick said, “The 21st Century after school grant is the biggest one that provided a lot of after school tutoring for all of our students. That was an important one. I don’t believe we would be able to fulfill it ourselves without the federal funds coming forward, and we got the latest thing on the food prices. We have to raise the food prices up. For the parents listening, they can go on to the school district website and then go to the individual schools and the websites provide a wealth of information. They redid all the websites for the school district, and they really are much more informative right now and easier to get through. You could see right on first page, the new prices for the meals and all sorts of things that are happening in the individual schools will be listed on the pages. So I would strongly recommend everybody get to look at those websites for each individual school and or the district. Anybody who wants to speak, come to the meeting, speak on the budget. They can do that at Coral Shores at five o’clock. Public input would usually probably be within about 20 minutes or so from then.”
Could there be a tax increase?
Dick said, “The capital funding, we have control over that, and we can go up to a mill and a half, and we’ve been keeping that at a half a mill for almost as long as I’ve been around on the board. Although we did lower it a couple of times, we actually lowered it a couple of years ago. We’re going to raise it from the .5 to .6 this year, because we want to finish a couple of projects, and we determined that the way the prices were increasing faster, that it would be fiscally better for us to get a little extra money now and pay the projects now, instead of waiting because the prices go up, so we’re just going to do that for a year, maybe two years, and get the projects finished.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysschools.com/