Suzanne Legg had a problem.
She had co-founded her county’s first charter school. Classes had barely begun, and already student behavior was causing serious issues.
As a first-time charter school leader, Legg was unsure of the best solution. Swallowing her pride and bracing for a dressing down, she called the only place she knew had experts: the Pasco County School District. A staffer soon showed up. His positive attitude surprised her.
“He didn’t talk down to me, even though he could have,” Legg said about that day 23 years ago. “He didn’t tell me everything I was doing wrong, even though he could have. He helped me solve the issue.”
That staff member was Ray Gadd, then assistant superintendent for the school district, which now serves more than 80,000 students just north of Tampa.
Now deputy superintendent, Gadd has been the driving force behind partnerships with three local charters to help the district to absorb rapid growth caused by a housing boom. U.S. Census figures show that Pasco’s population, 464,697 in 2010, grew to 561,891 in 2020. The county administrator compared the growth to the equivalent of “a good-sized city.”
Depending on the project, the deals have included donations of land and impact fees for construction, in addition to the state-required sharing of capital project dollars.
The charter schools, all locally owned and managed, benefit because they are established in the region and eager to expand. The community benefits because the schools offer specialty programs that range from the arts, to specialized programs for students with unique needs, to the advanced high school Cambridge Program. The school district benefits because the state places fewer regulations on charter school buildings, which often lowers construction costs.
“It’s an experiment in innovation.” Gadd said, adding that working with locally run charters allows for “eyeball to eyeball” communication, which still goes a long way in a rapidly growing suburban community that still shows its small-town roots.
“We want to have positive relationships with charters, especially those we know and like,” he said. That includes Dayspring Academy, the same school co-founded by Legg and her husband, former state Sen. John Legg, where Gadd showed up to share his guidance after the first campus opened in 2000.
The district recently gave Dayspring $25 million in impact fees to build a 50,000-square-foot PreK-5 school near the district’s innovation school, which opened this year for students in grades six through 12. School districts charge impact fees to developers to accommodate growth. Dayspring’s new school is set to open next year. The campus will include athletic fields to be shared with the district innovation school. It will be Dayspring’s sixth campus in Pasco County and the first in its center, joining five other campuses on the county’s west side.
Under Pasco’s agreements with charter schools, the charter builds and manages the school, though a “step in” clause allows the district to operate the facility as a public school should the charter school close.
Pasco also has used impact fees to aid Pepin Academies, a school that serves students with unique abilities, to build a $15 million charter school on the campus of Kirkland Ranch Academy of Innovation high school which opened in 2022 in the county’s also fast-growing east-central region. Pepin, which serves students in kindergarten through 12th grade, already has a campus on the county’s west side and two more in neighboring Hillsborough County. The Pepin campus is set to open in August 2025.
In its latest deal with a charter school, Pasco school board members agreed to sell 20 of its 76 acres to Patel Foundation for Global Understanding for $10 to build a 1,000-student charter high school to open by 2025. The vote wasn’t unanimous, but the majority said the move made good business sense and aligned with its commitment to partner with successful local charters.
Where other districts are battling charters or limiting their growth, Pasco is actively courting them and handing over money from a funding source that state law doesn't require it to share. Battles over buildings and funding for them can be especially contentious.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is drafting new policies that limit charter schools from co-locating on campuses that serve “vulnerable” students after parents and teachers at district-run schools complained that sharing space with charters resulted in the loss of valuable space for music, food pantries, counseling and therapies. California law requires districts to share space with charter schools but leaves the details to the districts.
In the Hoosier State, Indianapolis Public Schools leaders are asking a court to affirm their claim of exemption from a state law that requires districts to sell or lease underused or closed buildings to charter schools for $1.
And in Florida, Palm Beach County school board members last week approved a $1.1 million settlement that ended a years-long dispute about whether the county’s 49 charter schools should receive more than $40 million collected from a 2018 referendum that voters approved for school safety initiatives and higher teacher salaries. In the settlement, the school board agreed to make two years’ worth of retroactive payments to charter schools.
Contrast these disputes with Pasco, where leaders support school choice and offer a variety of magnet schools in addition to collaborating with local charter schools. The county school board chairwoman, Megan Harding, is a former Dayspring student who returned to teach. School district leaders, including Gadd and Superintendent Browning, have endorsed Legg in his bid to succeed Browning, who plans to retire from his elected post in 2024. (Legg serves on the governance board for Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)
Longtime Pasco politician Mike Fasano, a former state House member and senator who now serves as county tax collector, credits the district’s comfort level with local charters as a part of its political culture, which, despite the county’s rapid development, has remained more like that of a small community. Mom-and-pop charter schools, he said, have local boards as opposed to those with corporate boards that make decisions from afar.
“If you have an issue, you get to deal with people you might know from your church or your local Rotary Club,” he said. “It might even be your neighbor.”
Florida law considers charters part of the state’s program of public education and also uses their counts their performance in districts’ accountability ratings on key metrics such as graduation rates. Under new legislation passed last year, the state is phasing in a new formula that requires charters to receive an equal share of districts’ per pupil property tax funding.
Still, local charter school leaders say that when it comes to translating the principles enshrined in Florida policy into practice, Gadd is ahead of the curve.
“He sees this like, ‘They’re all our kids,’” Suzanne Legg said.
Tax initiatives: About a third of Florida residents face increased taxes if voters in seven counties approve initiatives Tuesday to raise money for their school districts. Officials in those districts say the state put them in the position of asking for voter help by underfunding mandates for school security. "The legislative mandates were substantially unfunded," says Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade County School District. "It has put significant fiscal pressure on the district." Bloomberg. In Miami-Dade, a four-year property tax hike would generate an extra $232 million a year, and 88 percent of the money generated would go for teacher raises. In Palm Beach County, a four-year increase in property taxes would bring in about $150 million more a year, and the district has pledged 50 percent of it to improve teacher pay. Miami Herald. Palm Beach Post.
Post-hurricane schedule: The Bay County School District's plan to make up the three-plus weeks of class time students lost to Hurricane Michael is approved by the Florida Department of Education. The district's schools will be 10 to 14 minutes longer every day and schools will be in session on four days that had been set aside as holidays or teacher work days. Already scheduled time off over Thanksgiving, Christmas and spring break will not change. Half the district's schools reopen today, and the district's goal is to have the rest open by Nov. 13. Panama City News Herald. New bus stop schedules are issued for Bay County students, many of whom may be attending a different school starting today. The district is also handing out reflective items for students who will now be going home in the dark. WMBB. Panama City News Herald. School officials in Calhoun and Jackson counties had to get creative to reopen schools last week. WFSU. Eighty Florida students displaced by the hurricane are attending southeastern Alabama schools. Associated Press. Gov. Rick Scott is asking the Florida Department of Education to send additional funds to districts so schools damaged by the hurricane can be rebuilt to withstand storms. Gradebook. (more…)
Panel's recommendations: The state commission investigating the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings rejects a move to require a sworn police officer at every school in the state, saying such a mandate would cost about $400 million a year. Instead, the panel approves a recommendation to require at least one police officer at every high school and middle school in the state, with elementary schools being covered by armed security guards or school employees. Associated Press. TCPalm. WLRN. A video combining surveillance footage, animation of the school shooter's action and recordings of police calls is shown to the panel. It depicts Broward deputy Scot Peterson hiding during the massacre. Peterson will testify at the commission's October meeting. Sun-Sentinel. Miami Herald. Chairman Bob Gualtieri says he wants to make the commission's final report open to the public. Sun-Sentinel. Criminal law experts say the addiction and propensity for violence of accused shooter Nikolas Cruz's birth mother could be used as an argument against his execution. Miami Herald. Sun-Sentinel.
Amendment 8: Florida Supreme Court justices hear arguments for and against proposed constitutional Amendment 8. The amendment, put forward by the Constitution Revision Commission, would set term limits for school board members, require civics education in schools and create an entity other than local school boards that can approve charter and public schools. The League of Women Voters is asking the amendment be removed from the ballot because it's "misleading." Attorneys for the state dispute that. A decision is expected soon. Meanwhile, Amendment 8 was removed from another court challenge to six bundled amendments. "It didn't make a lot of sense for us to spend a lot of time here on issues that are being heard across town," says Leon County Judge Karen Gievers. News Service of Florida. Orlando Sentinel. Florida Politics. Miami Herald. Gradebook. Florida Phoenix. (more…)
Shootings review halted: Broward County school officials are suspending a retired FBI agent's investigation into the actions of school employees during the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14. The reason given is to avoid duplication with the investigation by the state-appointed safety commission. “We recognize that the staff is continuing to recover from this tragedy,” the district’s statement said. “To avoid asking them to participate in duplicate interviews and to streamline the process, the district has decided to suspend its internal review, and give priority to the (state commission's) investigation.” Sun-Sentinel. WPLG.
Private school enrollment: Private school preK-12 enrollment is up in Florida for the seventh straight year, according to a report from the Florida Department of Education. The 370,116 students at 2,650 schools was an increase of 0.5 percent, which is the slowest rate of growth since the 2010-2011 school year. Florida Tax Credit Scholarships and McKay Scholarships for special-needs students account for 42.5 percent of private-school enrollment. Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, helps administer the state's tax credit, Gardiner, Hope and reading scholarships. redefinED.
Water contamination: Cancer-causing chemicals have been found in groundwater in three wells tested in Satellite Beach. The low-level contamination is thought to stem from the use of fire-extinguishing foams from nearby Patrick Air Force Base. Wells near Satellite High School, Sea Park Elementary School and city hall were tested after concerns were raised about cancer clusters in alumni and staff from Satellite High. A community meeting will be held Sunday to discuss the results. Florida Today. Several members of the Hillsborough County School Board are unhappy that they weren't notified earlier about the district's testing of water in 50 schools over the past year. Lead was found at 21 of those schools. Deputy superintendent Chris Farkas apologized, saying, "We always want to get better, and one thing I don't think we did very well was notify staff." Gradebook. (more…)
School security: A St. Petersburg Police Department spokeswoman says officers are being pulled off the street to comply with the new state law requiring a resource officer in every school. "I have no choice," says chief Tony Holloway. "Kids’ safety is first." Tampa Bay Times. WTSP. Lake County School Board member Bill Mathias suggests that a temporary increase of a half-cent in the sales tax should be considered to help pay for security upgrades at the county's public schools. He estimates the tax, which would have to be approved by voters, would raise about $15 million a year. Daily Commercial. The Sarasota and North Port police departments agree with the sheriff's office that the Sarasota County School District should pay the full cost for school resource officers. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Hendry County School Board says it wants further study and input from the community before deciding whether to go ahead with the Legislature's school security plan to arm school personnel. WBBH. Legislators and Brevard County residents clash at a town forum over the issue of arming school employees. Florida Today. A panel of students, teachers and activists discusses school shootings and security at a town meeting in Sarasota. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Forty-three percent of all U.S. schools now have armed guards, up from 31 percent from 10 years ago, according to a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Associated Press.
Community schools: The Leon County School District is moving ahead with a plan to turn Sable Palm Elementary into a community school, which combines academic, health and social services in an effort to boost student performance. Partners in the project are the school district, Florida State University, the Children’s Home Society and Florida A&M University’s College of Education. WFSU. Wilkinson Junior High School will become Clay County's first community school. The school district is collaborating with the Children's Home Society, St. Johns River State College and Baptist Health and Wolfson Children's Hospital. WOKV.
