Published on May 5, 2024 at 5:01 pm
It’s a rough time to be a partisan in favor of public schools in Duval County.
Where do we begin?
For starters, the district is about to shed 700 employees, as indicated by reporting you saw previously in Jacksonville Today.
The staff cuts are coming, in part, because so many students are leaving district-run schools.
As Action News Jax notes, traditional school enrollment is down nearly 10% year over year.
And as we’ve discussed many times, some of your favorite neighborhood schools may close soon. But don’t worry — they can be replaced with luxury apartment complexes or cemeteries or whatever the private buyer of the unneeded land wants to do with the space.
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That’s the bad news.
The good news?
Public charters (technically public schools that are run by private operators) are booming, along with private school options and homeschooling. The removal of income caps on the state’s so-called Family Empowerment Scholarships creates a mechanism by which anyone can escape public schools and give their share of public money to private operators.
It’s easy to grouse about Gov. Ron DeSantis and his generation of Republicans challenging unions in public schools and giving charter operators parity and then some. But the horse has long since been out of the barn on this issue. And there’s no mechanism to return it.
As the school district has faced challenges, the board and leadership seem uniquely unable to meet them, as is illustrated by the succession of embarrassing situations at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts.
From the algebra teacher who got freaky in a public facing window at a Central Florida resort only to return to the classroom after his indictment to the vocal teacher who got handsy and mouthy with a student during a private lesson, these issues at DASOTA have been flagrant and out of step with contemporary understandings of boundaries and protection of children.
The School Board may be majority conservative, with a Moms for Liberty component, but it has been much less than effective when it comes to dealing with this issue.
And acting Superintendent Diana Kriznar seems insufficiently empowered to do much about it either. Meanwhile, Mayor Deegan’s General Counsel’s office dithers, saying that while a third-party legal investigation has been conducted at Douglas Anderson, its result won’t be released to the public due to ongoing litigation.
Even the most sordid and sensitive investigations, when paid for by public money, should be open for public scrutiny. Consider the case of Kent Stermon. The investigation of the circumstances of that one-time DeSantis associate’s suicide amid scandal and alleged health problems wasn’t in anyone’s political interest to release. Yet State Attorney Melissa Nelson released the material as soon as it was ready. And her office offered timely updates along the way in the interest of transparency.
We certainly need transparency now. But we don’t seem positioned to get it from the funhouse mirror of school board politics. And what’s clear based on the superintendent search thus far is that any candidate who comes in will do so with slight experience, possibly none, in a major district like Duval, with competing forces that include a very activist state commissioner of education.
Appointees don’t have the political capital to deal with that and the politics of the school board. At least not for very long.
It’s time for Jacksonville to consider a strong, elected superintendent model such as most counties in the state have.
A single voice who people can empower and can serve as a counterweight to a board whose members often are elected without voters knowing who they are. Someone with a mandate to speak for the district – and not just part of it – and who can make decisions and recommendations without worry about being pushed out by the board.
Will that save public schools in Duval County? We can say what’s going on right now isn’t working.
There’s likely not a Nikolai Vitti or a Diana Greene in the latest crop of hopefuls under consideration, and there’s likely little public confidence that this board can find that kind of visionary. A big, growing city needs a single voice atop the school district, just as is the case with other constitutional offices.
Do it now, Duval.
Wait much longer and there may not be much left to save.
