Why did some charters miss out on Florida school uniform funding?

Students in uniforms
Students model middle school uniforms, which are now required in Osceola County public schools and backed by a new state funding initiative.

Student uniforms are common at Florida’s more than 650 charter schools. Yet, when state lawmakers offered extra funding to school districts that required uniforms, most charters couldn’t participate.

The reason: Participation in the new program needed to be district-wide. If a school district chose not to set a uniform policy, the charters it oversaw weren’t able to apply for funding on their own.

The episode highlights the tensions that sometimes exist between charter schools, which can create their own policies on issues like uniforms, and districts, which oversee nearly all Florida charters and serve as gatekeepers for certain types of funding.

This year, state lawmakers created a Standard Student Attire Incentive Fund, which set aside $10 million for districts that created school uniform policies. The money would help offset the cost of student uniforms, which supporters saw as a way to improve student safety and morale. The budget fine print said charter schools would be eligible for the funding, but it also said the policies needed to be “district-wide.” The State Department of Education said charter schools would be eligible to participate “through their school district.”

Of the state’s 67 traditional school districts, 10 chose to take part. In those districts, many charters are participating. Bay County, for example, told the department that all of its charters planned to receive the funding.

Tim Kitts founded the Bay Haven charter school network of charter schools, which require uniforms. He said his network applied through the district. “I work really hard to go over there and build relationships,” he said. “The superintendent and I have known each other for 30 years.”

Some charter school leaders in the remaining 57 districts, however, say they feel excluded. Craig Butz, the president of Charter School Leaders-Florida and principal of Pepin Academies, wrote to the Tampa Bay Times’ Gradebook blog.

According to the Department of Education, only if a school district adopted a district-wide uniform policy could charter schools be eligible for the funds. Since Hillsborough County does not have a district-wide policy, we at Pepin Academies were unable to participate. We know this is an unfortunate situation the Legislature did not intend to create and will look to amend during next year’s Session.

There are other reasons charter schools did not participate. Charter Schools USA is a management company that operates schools that require uniforms in districts across the state. Spokeswoman Colleen Reynolds said in an email that only one of the schools it operates — Downtown Miami Charter School — opted into the program.

Charter Schools USA runs other schools that require uniforms, she said, but the boards that oversee those schools felt they could not participate because the policies adopted by local districts were “more lenient” than their own.

Some districts that took part in the uniform program, like Alachua and Miami-Dade, gave the department lists of charters that would not be participating (see here and here, respectively).

Charter schools are beginning to redefine what constitutes a school system. Twenty years ago, a district would have operated all the public schools in a county. Now, some public schools are independently run, and that can make it harder to create policies that apply evenly to all public-school students living in an area.

Resolving these tensions can sometimes be messy, and helps explain why some education policy types favor models in which school districts are focused on “portfolio management,” and why some recent charter school bills would have allowed more charter school networks to function as their own local education agencies for funding purposes.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.