Tonya Whitlock and her son Tres, 17, say they have not been able to get Tres into Pivot Charter School near Tampa. Tres has cerebral palsy, and the family said the charter school is concerned they cannot provide all the services Tres needs.
This month, an investigation by StateImpact Florida revealed that more than 86% of Florida charter schools don’t serve a single student with a severe disability, compared to half of traditional public schools.
State education officials say no school is required to take every student with every disability. But lawyers are divided on whether charter schools can legally turn kids away.
Tres Whitlock types on the DynaVox tablet that serves as his voice. Whitlock, 17, has cerebral palsy and can’t speak on his own. Whitlock is trying to enroll in a Hillsborough County charter school, but has yet to enroll because of concerns about the therapy and services he needs.
Tres Whitlock is stuck in a public school where he feels ignored. He wants out.
The 17-year-old would-be video game designer researched his options online and found his perfect match – Pivot Charter School.
“It’s computer-based and I think I will do better,” he says.
But when Whitlock tried to enroll in the school he found a series of barriers in his way.
The reason? He has cerebral palsy, and the Whitlocks say school officials told them they don’t have anyone to take Whitlock to the bathroom.
Jeremy Rosende participates in his first-grade art class at the Renaissance Charter School in Coral Springs.
Florida charter schools are a $400 million business operating with little oversight whose business interests occasionally conflict with their educational mission, according to the first story in a Miami Herald three-part investigation published Sunday.
Supporters of independence for USF Polytechnic in Florida have won a crucial vote by the university system Board of Governors. But they didn’t get everything they wanted.
University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft unsuccessfully argued to keep USF Polytechnic in the fold.
Board members voted 12 – 3 in favor of splitting Polytechnic from the University of South Florida…but not right away. USF Polytechnic has to jump over some hurdles before it becomes Florida’s 12th university.
It was as much drama as you can get at a Board of Governors meeting. In one corner was USF President Judy Genshaft. Up until then, she’d been pretty quiet about the proposed loss of one of USF’s branch campuses.
But Thursday in front of the Board of Governors, she came out swinging.
“This is not the right time, either economically, educationally, or practically for a drastic change to the USF system,” Genshaft said.
Bangladesh native, Shamir Ali, now 25, was picked up in a workplace raid in Miami last week and now faces deportation. Ali arrived to Florida when he was seven years old and is DREAM Act eligible.
College student Shamir Ali has been released from a Florida detention center after being told he would be deported to Bangladesh.
The decision comes after Nestor Yglesias, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Miami told StateImpact Florida Ali was a “fugitive alien” because he ignored a previous deportation order.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are letting Ali, 25, stay in the U.S. for one year with supervision, according to DREAM Act activist Felipe Matos with Students Working for Equal Rights.
A cat statue found on Key Marco in Southwest Florida.
It’s been a rough week for anthropologists with Gov. Rick Scott singling out the field as an inefficient use of higher education budgets.
Why should taxpayers foot the education bill for an anthropologist who can’t find a job? Scott asked a business group last week. Colleges should “drive” students into science, technology, engineering or math — known as STEM — programs, he said.
“I got accused of not liking anthropology,” Scott said. “But just think about it: How many more jobs do you think there is for anthropology in this state? Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs? I want to make sure that we spend our money where people can get jobs when they get out.”
But don’t expect to see anthropologists on street corners holding signs reading “will study social interactions for food” anytime soon.
The Academy of Arts and Minds in Coconut Grove used to be a shopping mall. But no one was buying space. That's when the owner of the property started up a charter school and now rents the property to his school. The campus still looks like a shopping mall with wrap-around balconies. Classrooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, much like a store front.
This story is a collaborative investigation between The Miami Herald and StateImpact Florida. Read the Herald’s story.
People who want to start up their own charter school must go through a rigorous application process. But after that initial hurdle, the school founders get a lot of freedom over how to run their publicly-funded schools and who to hire. And because of loopholes in Florida statues, a lot of taxpayer dollars can end up in the hands of one person.
Progress reports in Miami-Dade county schools have already been issued. But students at the Academy of Arts and Minds in Coconut Grove didn’t get a grade in biology, because they haven’t had a biology teacher for the first six weeks of school.
Sarah Gonzalez / StateImpact Florida
Academy of Arts & Minds students Darcy Morenza (10th), Toni Robotham (11th) with her little brother Brandon, and Darlene Valejjo (10th) on Open House night.
And on Open House night, parents want answers.
Parents introduce themselves as Janeysi’s mom and Hannah’s mom.
But Sharon Blate, the new biology teacher, doesn’t know who Janeysi and Hannah are.
“I have no idea who is in my class. I have not even seen the list yet. At a quarter to six was the first time I walked in here,” said Blate.
Hillsborough school district chef Ben Guggenmos shows Broward Elementary students how to build a dessert fruit pizza.
Part of the reason I moved to StateImpact Florida from a newspaper was the chance to learn some skills and try new things.
It turns out that producing radio news stories is much harder and a lot more work than I expected. You don’t show up sounding like NPR on your first day no matter how easy it sounds on the radio.
Between the equipment, techniques, editing and mixing, I’ve learned first-hand there are a lot of ways to ruin a story.
So I jumped when I saw a Hillsborough County schools press release about a new nutrition program. It’s fun and fluffy and not the world’s most important education story.
But I knew it would be a great chance to gather ambient sound, interview “characters” for the story and practice, practice practice for more important stories down the road.
Florida schools spent money intended for low-income student programs on teachers and other operating costs.
Florida’s largest school districts spent just half the federal stimulus money intended to improve low-income student performance on those programs, according to an investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Instead, districts spent more than $200 million of the $400 million of the money — known as Title I — on employee salaries and other operational costs.
The result is that money intended for summer school or teacher training was never spent on those programs.
So far, the site of the proposed USF Polytechnic campus is little more than a cow pasture. But USF Poly Chancellor Marshall Goodman compares his proposed new school to its neighbor a ways down Interstate 4.
“Now think for a minute about a visionary decades ago,” Goodman told the state Board of Governors. “He came to Florida from another state and what he saw was swampland, mosquitoes and gators. And he bought all of it that it could. And he dreamed of something better in that space: a mouse…Obviously, as a distinctive university, we would be able to develop and grow programs with greater flexibility that we can as a complex organization that has a number of competing interests,” he said.”
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Sarah Gonzalez / StateImpact Florida
