Vouchers are growing in Florida. How will the state pay for them?
The big story: As Florida's school voucher system expands, so, too does its cost.
It's anticipated to reach $4 billion as enrollment caps rise and income eligibility requirements remain a thing of the past.
Members of the House PreK-12 Budget subcommittee already have held two hearings this year to discuss how they might change the state's education funding model to accommodate the growth. Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, has proposed legislation with his budget plan to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools to voucher recipients.
Superintendents have urged state officials to keep district schools, which still educate the vast majority of Florida schoolchildren, top of mind as they make decisions. Read more here.
Block scheduling: Four Pinellas County high schools plan to do away with their block scheduling for the fall. Hundreds of students are petitioning in protest.
Book challenges: Volusia County schools will remove 'The Kite Runner' from their shelves after a school board member stopped a person from reading excerpts aloud during a public meeting, WOFL reports.
College leadership: Gov. Ron DeSantis has appointed another former Republican official to serve as a state college trustee, the Sun-Sentinel reports.
Early education: Two national child care chains are preparing to expand into Lee County, the Fort Myers News-Press reports.
High school graduation: Students at Orange County's Jones High school are upset that their graduation ceremony has been scheduled at a site miles away from their school and community, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Immigration enforcement: Gov. Ron DeSantis says Florida universities should not admit students lacking permanent legal status, Florida Phoenix reports. He also criticized a U.S. Supreme Court decision that guarantees access to K-12 education regardless of their immigration status.
Public comment: The Brevard County school board appears close to setting its new public comment rules after losing a lawsuit that challenged its efforts to limit input at meetings, Florida Today reports.
Security: The Miami-Dade County school district is exploring the possibility of having employees carry wearable panic buttons in case of crises, WLRN reports. • A firearm detection dog has been assigned to schools in Seminole County as an extra layer of security protection, WKMG reports.
Special education: Federal officials are investigating a parent's complaint that the Seminole County school district did not provide an appropriate education to her child with special needs, WMFE reports.
From the police blotter ... A Marion County high school teacher was arrested on allegations of engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a student, WCJB reports.
Don't miss a story. Here's a link to Friday's roundup.
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19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Crowds gather outside Florida Capitol to protest ICE raid in Tallahassee
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New York Post
37 minutes ago
- New York Post
Meet the ‘anti-Greta Thunberg' weather nerd debunking climate myths and skewering the extremist elder statesmen
CHARLES TOWN, West Virginia — Chris Martz was still in diapers when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 — but that moment, he says, kicked off the political indoctrination of 'extreme weather events.' Now the 22-year-old freshly minted college grad has decided to make it his life's mission to lower the temperature on climate hysteria. 'I'm the anti-Greta Thunberg. In fact, she's only 19 days older than me,' Martz tells The Post, barely a week out from receiving his undergraduate degree in meteorology from Pennsylvania's Millersville University. Unlike the Swedish climate poster child turned Gaza groupie, Martz tackles the incomprehensibly complex subject of Earth's ever-changing climate with reason and data, rather than alarmists' emotional outbursts and empty, disruptive antics — or the increasingly mystical theories of left-wing academics. 5 Chris Martz calls himself 'the anti-Greta Thunberg.: Samuel Corum / NY Post 'I've always been a science-based, fact-based person,' Martz says over lunch near his small-town Virginia home. 'My dad always said, 'If you're going to put something online, especially getting into a scientific or political topic, make sure what you're saying is accurate. That way you establish a good credibility and rapport with your followers.'' 5 Greta Thunberg, here at a 2024 Stockholm protest, made her name as a climate scold. He started tweeting about the weather in high school and has amassed more than 100,000 followers, including, increasingly, powerful people in government. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Reps. Chip Roy and Thomas Massie have shared Martz's posts examining weather patterns with fair-mindedness. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paraphrased a Martz tweet last year when he shot back at a hostile reporter who tried to link Hurricane Milton to global warming. DeSantis noted that since 1851 there had been 27 storms stronger than Milton (17 before 1950) when they made landfall in Florida, with the most deadly occurring in the 1930s. 'It was word-for-word my post,' Martz says. 'His team follows me.' 5 Gov. DeSantis used a Martz tweet to slap back at a reporter last year. Fox News Trump first-term Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler invited Martz to lunch two weeks ago in Washington, DC, where the two discussed Martz's future and his experience as a college contrarian. Hollywood celebrities have also taken a liking to the weather wunderkind. Martz brought his parents this year to dinner with Superman actor Dean Cain in Las Vegas. And in May, comic Larry the Cable Guy invited Martz backstage to meet after a show in Shippensburg, Penn. 'They didn't have to be as nice as they were. They just treated me like I was their next-of-kin,' Martz says of his new celebrity friends. 5 Dean Cain invited Martz to dinner in Las Vegas. Masters of Illusion, LLC The son of an auto-mechanic father and a mother who works in water science for the federal government, Martz grew up near Berryville, Va. (pop. 4,574), where he still lives. His interest in meteorology started in childhood but not for the usual reasons — say, a fascination with tornados or love of winter storms. But from a young age, Martz suspected his teachers and the media were lying to him, and that unleashed a storm of righteous indignation and a quest for truth. It started Christmas Eve 2015 when 12-year-old Martz was sweating in church. An outside thermometer read 75 degrees. It was a rare December heat wave, and the media were catastrophizing about global warming. Martz became stricken with paranoia over our boiling planet's future. 'Everyone seems to remember white Christmases when they were a kid, but the data doesn't back that up. It may be that we're remembering all the movies where it snows at Christmas,' he says. 'And I had science teachers telling me New York City was going to be under water in 20 years and that fossil fuels are destroying the environment.' But just a couple weeks after that December heat wave, a blizzard slammed the eastern United States, dumping record snowfall on his Virginia town. He wondered: What was really going on? Then Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017, and the media again blamed man-made climate change. Martz dug into the data and was shocked to learn there'd been a hurricane drought in America in the preceding 12 years, from 2005 to 2017, the longest period on record — dating back to George Washington's time — that a Category 3, 4 or 5 storm had failed to make landfall. In fact, many of the most powerful storms to hit the United States, he learned, occurred before the 1930s. 5 Martz's tweets have some powerful fans in government. Chris Martz / X Today, Martz calls himself a 'lukewarm skeptic.' While he does believe the Earth may be warming and human activity may contribute, natural variation remains the more likely culprit for changes in climate, and doomsday predictions are fueling unnecessary hysteria with a political motive. Martz instead looks at physical measurements to assess what's happening with Earth's climate. Catastrophic climate models that are so fashionable in academia can be manipulated to say whatever you want, he says. 'Models are not evidence.' 'You can make the case we've seen heavier rainfall in the eastern United States, but it all depends on where you start the graph,' Martz says. 'Since 1979, there's been an eastward shift in Tornado Alley. Okay, that's evidence of climate change. That's not evidence that humans caused it. 'A lot of the biggest tornado outbreaks during the 1920s and '30s occurred in the southeastern United States, where we see them today. Whereas in the 1950s and '60s they occurred more in the Great Plains,' he explains. 'So it's likely that it oscillates due to changes in ocean circulation patterns and how that affects the placement of pressure systems and where moisture convergence is and wind shear is and how those dynamics play out. It's much more likely an artifact of natural variability. 'There's no physical mechanism that makes sense to say, well, if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that it's going to cause an eastward shift of tornadoes in the United States.' As hurricanes have failed to become more frequent or powerful, the media has glommed on to wildfires as the climate emergency du jour. Even the Trump administration's states in the aftermath of this year's Los Angeles Palisades fire: 'Scientists widely agree that human-caused warming is generally making fires in California and the rest of the West larger and more severe.' Martz counters this. 'California has been getting drier in the last 100 years or so,' he says. 'However, in the geological past, it's been much drier in California. Between 900 and 1300 AD, there was a 400-year-long drought that was worse than today's in the southwestern United States.' Blaming Big Oil is much easier than blaming themselves, Martz says of California's politicians, insisting many of the state's fires could be avoided if powerlines were placed underground, instead of on dry hillsides where downsloping winds snap transmission lines (a likely cause of January's fires, he says), and if the state had better forest management. 'It's all a giant money-making scheme,' Martz tells The Post. 'Politicians and bureaucrats latch on to scientific issues, whether it was the pandemic, for example, or climate, to try and get certain policies implemented. In usual cases, it's a left-wing, authoritarian kind of control. 'We want to control what kind of energy you use, control the kind of appliances you can buy, how much you can travel, what you can drive, what you can eat, all that. But in order to do that, they need scientists telling a certain message. And the science is funded by government actors.' Martz himself gets accused of having nefarious backers, namely Big Oil, which he finds laughable as just a college kid with a Twitter account. He works part-time as a research assistant for the DC-based nonprofit Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which advocates for free-market energy solutions, and insists it hasn't taken money from the fossil-fuel industry for nearly two decades. That hasn't stopped angry climate cultists from trying to ruin his life. 'For my last three years of college, there were endless phone calls, emails sent to the provost, the president, trying to get me kicked out. They'd have department meetings about me. Thankfully, my professors had my back,' he says. For all his detractors, Martz remains in good company. The meteorologist founders of both The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have been known to push back against the left's climate-change voodoo, along with prominent climatologists like Judith Curry, Roy Spencer and John Christy. But Martz thinks his youth makes him particularly threatening to the established order. 'They don't seem to realize yet that cancel culture doesn't work anymore,' he says. 'They're getting angry because they're losing their grip on the narrative. They're getting desperate to try to stop anyone who is making a difference.'
Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Appeals court keeps block on Trump administration's downsizing of the federal workforce
SAN FRANCISCO — An appeals court on Friday refused to freeze a California-based judge's order halting the Trump administration from downsizing the federal workforce, which means that the Department of Government Efficiency-led cuts remain on pause for now. A split three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the downsizing could have significant ripple effects on everything from the nation's food-safety system to veteran health care, and should stay on hold while a lawsuit plays out. The judge who dissented, however, said President Donald Trump likely does have the legal authority to downsize the executive branch and there is a separate process for workers to appeal. The Republican administration had sought an emergency stay of an injunction issued by U.S. Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco in a lawsuit brought by labor unions and cities, including San Francisco and Chicago, and the group Democracy Forward. The Justice Department has also previously appealed her ruling to the Supreme Court, one of a string of emergency appeals arguing federal judges had overstepped their authority. The judge's order questioned whether Trump's administration was acting lawfully in trying to pare the federal workforce. Trump has repeatedly said voters gave him a mandate to remake the federal government, and he tapped billionaire Elon Musk to lead the charge through the Department of Government Efficiency. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs, or have been placed on leave. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation, and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go. Illston's order directs numerous federal agencies to halt acting on the president's workforce executive order signed in February and a subsequent memo issued by DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management. Illston, who was nominated to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, wrote in her ruling that presidents can make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, but only with the cooperation of Congress. Lawyers for the government say that the executive order and memo calling for large-scale personnel reductions and reorganization plans provided only general principles that agencies should follow in exercising their own decision-making process.
