Students can pay hundreds of dollars a year in overdraft fees from banks. Often those banks have special partnerships with colleges or universities, but students can likely find as good or better deals on their own.
Those overdraft fees can cost students hundreds of dollars a year — more than books — on accounts often set up to handle financial aid payments.
The review included two schools in Florida with bank partnerships: the University of Central Florida and Miami Dade College. UCF partners with Fairwinds Credit Union, which charges $35 per overdraft while Miami Dade College partners with Higher One. Some Higher One accounts charge a monthly fee but have no overdraft fees, while other accounts charge up to $38 per overdraft.
About 40 percent of young adults said they overdrew their account at least twice per year. The heaviest offenders, 11 percent of young adults surveyed, said they overdrew their account 19 times per year — or $665 in overdraft fees under the terms of a UCF Fairwinds Credit Union account.
Students could avoid those charges if banks declined the debit charges rather than charging overdraft fees, sometimes several in a day before students know their account is overdrawn.
Despite problems with Florida's new exam, testing experts say the state's emphasis on digital lessons mean schools should use computerized testing.
Testing experts say the problems Florida’s has had with its new statewide exam so far are likely not serious enough for the state to consider throwing out this year’s test scores on the Florida Standards Assessments.
Those glitches have led some lawmakers and parents to ask for a return to paper and pencil exams. But those same testing experts say Florida shouldn’t abandon computer-based tests at the same time classroom lessons are becoming more high tech.
“The startup problems that Florida had do not seem to reach a place where you would have to throw out the results,” said Doug McRae, who retired as an executive with curriculum and testing company McGraw-Hill. “I would recommend that you would really need to have upwards of 10 percent of the population affected by problems before you have to seriously consider not using the results.”
Yesterday, a Senate committee appeared to suspend for one year Florida’s requirement that the lowest-performing 3rd graders be held back while the state validates results from its new test.
But Senate Education committee chairman John Legg says it’s not that simple.
What the committee actually did, Legg says, is put the responsibility on school districts whether students stay in 3rd grade or move to 4th grade. So some students with the lowest scores on the state language arts exam could still be retained this year.
“They asked us to trust them,” Legg says of the request from school district leaders.
Florida law requires 3rd grade students earning the lowest score on the state reading test spend another year in 3rd grade to improve their reading. Students can get an exemption from the requirement by submitting a portfolio of their work, through alternative test scores or other methods.
Florida law requires 3rd graders with the lowest scores on state tests to be held back. But a Senate committee wants to suspend that penalty this year.
But this year the state might not hold back any 3rd graders. That’s because a Senate committee voted to suspend those penalties this year.
The bill requires an outside group to make sure the state test results are statistically valid.
Sen. David Simmons says he wants to make sure schools and the state can depend on Florida Standards Assessments results before making big decisions using those results.
“Common sense says that we need to ensure that this test that is being administered is, in fact, psychometrically valid,” Simmons says. “This amendment does that.”
Quan Jones of Project 10 Stingray works at the marina behind USFSP
A college education is generally considered a student’s best shot at getting a good job these days, and it’s often assumed most high schoolers are prepared to attend college.
But there’s one group that has been quietly excluded from that process — students with intellectual disabilities.
A program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg is giving these students college experience that while it’s not a traditional degree, it’s giving them a head start on their career goals.
It’s a very windy afternoon at the small marina behind the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and Quan Jones is trying to keep busy.
“I work at the waterfront and we help people check out canoes, kayaks and paddle boards. This is something that I want to work at in my future,” said Jones.
This week, PBS is launching a new documentary series “180 Days.”
One of the films focuses on Hartsville, South Carolina, a rural and poor district which has managed to become one of the highest rating school districts according to South Carolina’s ranking.
Tampa public media station WUSF hosted a town hall meeting at Artz 4 Life Academy in Clearwater last week to screen a portion of the movie and to discuss education issues. Artz 4 Life is an after-school arts and life coaching program.
Big on the mind of those who attended was Florida’s new test, the Florida Standards Assessments. The test is linked to Florida’s new Common Core-based math and language arts standards, which outline what students should know by the end of each grade.
But parents were worried the new test is expected to be tougher, and must be taken on a computer.
“We went from FCAT to FSA and that’s worse than what we were already at,” said mom of three Lisa Hewitt. “We set our students up to fail…If they weren’t doing so well in FCAT why would we develop another test that’s worse?
Sen. Don Gaetz has filed an amendment which would force school districts to share local construction money with charter schools.
School districts would have to share local school construction and maintenance money with charter schools, according to an amendment filed by an influential state senator.
Sen. Don Gaetz, a former Senate president, filed the amendment Tuesday. The amendment would require half of the money raised by an optional local property tax to be split between charter and traditional schools on a per-student basis.
Studies have found publicly-funded, but privately-run charter schools typically receive less money per student than traditional public schools. A good piece of the difference in Florida is the local construction money — which few school districts share with charter schools.
Earmarking a source of construction funding has been a top priority of charter schools for years. Charter schools argue their parents are taxpayers too, so public money should pay for charter school construction and maintenance.
Florida students had trouble connecting to the state's new online writing test on Monday and Tuesday. The problems seemed to be fixed by Wednesday afternoon.
Last week, dozens of Florida school districts had to postpone state testing because of problems with the new Florida Standards Assessments.
Students couldn’t log in to the online writing exam — and some who did were booted out and temporarily lost their answers.
The problems seem to have been resolved Thursday. By Friday, more than half of students scheduled to take the online writing exam had finished.
Here’s five questions about what happened and what’s next.
Lawmakers asked Education Commissioner Pam Stewart that question in November.
“Are we actually testing their writing,” Stewart said, “or are we then testing their computer skills? I would suggest to you the answer to that really is we need to be doing both.”
Typing was a big enough question about the FSA that the Florida Department of Education decided to let students through 7th grade take a paper and pencil version of the writing test.
But should it be? Florida has used online exams for several years. The state is requiring schools deliver half of classroom instruction digitally, starting this fall. And kids can be pretty adept with computers, tablets and other devices.
Miami-Dade superintendent Alberto Carvalho says he won’t resume testing until the state can prove everything is working. Palm Beach school also will not test students on Wednesday.
“Improving the system alone isn’t sufficient for me, for my teachers, or my students,” Carvalho said at a morning press conference. “I respect them too much. Either they have it right, or they don’t. And improvement of something that broke down is not sufficient.”
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