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Recent Articles:

Principal Changes Announced By Superintendant Delbrugge - 1-20-10

Lawmakers Hunting For Money For Public Schools - 12/10/09

Imagine Schools Rejected in Hillsborough;
Facing Trouble Statewide- 12/9/09

Property Tax Values Continue To Fall Across Florida - 12/7/09

"Perfect Storm" Hitting Florida Education Funding - 12/7/09
Top Stories:
December 11, 2009
Inaugural "Feed Flagler" A Success!
The inaugural "Feed Flagler", a community wide effort launched by Flagler County, was a big success! Although the crowd that attended the food service at Buddy Taylor Middle School was smaller than expected, the volunteers boxed up enough "to go" meals to meet the original goal of feeding 2,000 hungry folks in Flagler County.
A total 100 turkeys, 50 hams and cases of vegetables were cooked. Additionally, more than $6,000 in additional funds went to two local food banks.
Congratulations to all the sponsors and volunteers for their generosity!
Read more about this event from the Flagler County Chamber of Commerce: LINK
September 22, 2009
Flagler Designated as "Academically High-Performing District"
The Florida Board of Education granted academically high-performing status to 21 of the state's 67 school districts. The Flagler County School District made the list for the first time. Read more about this in "Latest District News".

September 4, 2009

Gr8FlaglerSchools.com Outage

Gr8FlaglerSchools.com experienced technical errors from our website host, 1and1.com that prohibited us from updating or adding any new content over the past 5 weeks. We apologize for the lack of news and updates, and we thank you for your patience as we worked through this issue with our website provider. This was a very frustrating experience. Our recommendation is to thoroughly research your potential website host through the BBB or even via a Google search before investing in a website host and provider.

August 4, 2009

Flagler County Schools Start August 24th!

Summer recess is nearing its end, and many parents are getting ready for a new year of school! In order to help parents have a smooth "start of school" transition, gr8flaglerschools.com created a new webpage to help get the important information out to the parents. Just click on the link in the upper-right corner called "2009-10 School Year". If you have any news to share, please email us at info@gr8flaglerschools.com.

July 5, 2009

Happy 4th of July!

It was another great 4th of July in Flagler Beach! As always, the parade was fantastic! I was happy to participate in the dunk tank to help raise money for the Flagler Beach Chamber and the Flagler Beach Historical Museum.

If this is your first visit to the website, thanks for stopping by! Please browse the different pages (District News, Call to Action, Community News, etc.) and let me know what you think.

Andy

info@gr8flaglerschools.com

June 16, 2009

Welcome WNZF radio listeners!

Thanks for taking the time to visit gr8flaglerschools.com! Please take some time to review all the different pages. I would like to hear from you, so please send me an email and tell me what you think about the website and what you would like me to add to the site. Send your comments to me at info@gr8flaglerschools.com. Thanks for visiting!

Andy

Fabulous 4th at the Beach!

It is time to plan for the Fabulous 4th activites at Flagler Beach. Click here for more details.

May 10, 2009

SENATE & HOUSE PASS BUDGET:

The state budget has been passed, and again the legislators are touting a 1.5% increase in per student funding. However, problems with the budget persist. The federal stimulus funds only last two years, after which they go away. If the state's economy has not bounced back in two years, the school district will have to go into its reserves to make up the money that the federal stimulus funds had been covering.

In support of this scenario Florida Tax Watch, an independent watchdog organization, has said that while "technically" the budget slightly increased per pupil spending for K-12 grades, in fact funding is down. Because of various cuts the state made during the school year, the new per student spending statewide is lower than the amount originally adopted in the last budget.

Finally, the odds are great that the budget estimate is once again off, and that the district will face mid-year budget reductions. Falling property values and drops in sales tax revenue could mean the state wouldn't get as much as expected. If the estimates are wrong, the Legislature will have to return to Tallahassee to ensure a balanced budget, as they did last year. The district must continue to build reserves and stretch every dollar. Latest Education Budget News:

April 22 2009

STATE FINALLY APPLIES FOR EDUCATION STIMULUS FUNDS: Gov. Crist and Education Commissioner Eric Smith have applied for the 2 billion in education stimulus funds for Florida. This is good news for the school districts around Florida, as the legislature's education budgets rely heavily on these funds.

For Flagler County schools, the early estimate is that stimulus funds will make up approximately 16% of our revenue for 2009-10. Even with this funding, Flagler's budget will be +/- 6% less than the current 2008-09 budget. Read More...

April 22 2009

LEGISLATIVE UPDATE: Curently, no Conference Committee meetings have been held, and it is unclear when those meetings may begin. These meeting cannot begin until the House and Senate come to agreement on the total funding available for appropriations. This creates a hurdle because the total Senate budget provides about $65.6 billion in total appropriations while the House budget provides about $65.1 billion.

At the opening of today’ s House Session, Speaker Crutel announced that the House would be willing to consider supporting nearly all of the proposals for additional revenues contained in the Senate budget if the Senate would agree to support nearly all spending reductions proposed by the House.

April 9, 2009

Legislators are taking a short break for Easter and will return on Monday, April 13th.

When lawmakers return Monday, they will finish a few budget-related bills and steer the conflicting House and Senate versions of the package into a joint committee for negotiations in the final three weeks of the 60-day session. More on Florida's education budget news.

Locally, Flagler County hosted a town hall meeting with United States Senator Bill Nelson on Thursday in the Flagler County Board of County Commissioners Chambers. Senator Nelson heard from various members of our local government and school board and answered questions from the audience. MORE

April 2, 2009

After back-to-back years of cuts to schools, lawmakers have figured out a way to hold per-student funding steady.

But it comes at the expense of other programs that historically have been funded outside the per-student funding allocation. Programs outside the formula for student spending, such as mentoring and teacher development, would take cuts up to 20 percent.

But what has drawn some of the loudest opposition from Democrats is the way Republicans in the House have proposed rewriting the formula. Per-student funding actually increases slightly over last year, from $6,860.36 to $6,890.46, but it would include money that wasn't previously wasn't part of the formula.

Putting money for transportation and instructional materials into the per-student formula is meant to give districts more flexibility, Republican leaders say, which they requested.

The numbers just don’t add up, and in the end, the net reduction could be between 3% – 4%. There's a lot of work to be done in the coming weeks to get House and Senate proposals together, on the funding and the policy ideas. But the bottom line is not as scary as everyone expected.

April 1, 2009

The news from Tallahassee is moving quickly, and a lot of the news sources are publishing catchy headlines without investigating the details. The devil is always in the details. Last week the news was glowing for the Senate budget that minimized education cuts and included revenue from new sources. However, the proposal was heavy in revenue that the House was opposed to. All in all, last week was full of optimism!

This week, the House released its preliminary budget, and again the headlines are touting the stable "per student" funding in the budget. As expected, this budget does not include money from gambling, something the Senat budget DID include. However, it DOES include stimulus funding, which was a big step for the House! The House budget retains "per-student" funding by moving money from other categories into the "per-student" category, so in reality the per-student dollars are overly inflated, and can not be compared to prior year allocations. The main way House lawmakers show per-student gains is by shifting things that the state traditionally pays 100 percent of the costs for – instructional materials, transportation for students and teacher training – into the state’s school-finance program, which means the state and local districts would split the costs. The state would also "transfer" a sliver of the local property tax revenues school districts devote to construction into direct classroom aid.

More information about how these budgets affect Flagler County schools will be revealed as we dig into this some more. Please stay tuned to gr8flagler.com for the latest. Below are some headlines that expose more light into the current Senate and House budgets.