Duval School Board members watch to see if a motion to add Schools of Hope to the board's 2026 legislative platform will pass. | Megan Mallicoat, Jacksonville Today
Published on January 7, 2026 at 10:02 pm
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By a narrow margin and over the objection of board Chair Charlotte Joyce, the Duval County School Board voted Tuesday to add a controversial charter school law to its list of legislative priorities for the state’s upcoming session.
The addendum asks state lawmakers to “protect school district resources” and clarify what the district says is ambiguous language around “Schools of Hope” that were added during the last hours of last year’s legislative session. As of now, the Schools of Hope law gives a handful of charter school operators wide latitude to move into public school buildings without paying operational costs.
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The 4-3 school board vote came after a spirited discussion. Vice Chair April Carney, who represents Mayport and the Beaches, and Tony Ricardo, whose Arlington-area district includes both of the Duval schools still under consideration to host co-located Schools of Hope, joined Joyce in voting against the district’s opposition to the Schools of Hope expansion.
Carney and Ricardo questioned the need to add the item to the board’s platform — saying they were free to talk to legislators about Schools of Hope whether or not an official position is documented.
“We’ve already been making the phone calls and talking to our legislators and our delegation,” Ricardo said. “So I don’t know that we really need to have it as far as on paper.”
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Superintendent Chris Bernier told the board it would be “inappropriate” for him to direct the district’s lobbyists to push for changes “on behalf of the board” without the vote.
“I think it’s important that a platform be approved so that our liaisons and our lobbyists in Tallahassee have clear direction from the board as to what their positions are on particular items,” Bernier said during Tuesday’s meeting.
With “yes” votes from Cindy Pearson, Reggie Blount, Melody Bolduc and Darryl Willie, the board added Schools of Hope to the list of legislative priorities it approved back in October — before the district received dozens of letters of intent from charter school operators who wanted to claim space in DCPS buildings.
Duval officials rejected notices that came from unapproved charter school operators, and the remaining operator — Mater Academy — recently withdrew 23 of its 25 requests.
A spokesperson for Mater Academy’s parent company, Academica, called the letters of intent the starting point of conversations with districts.
“The refinement and narrowing of potential locations — including in Duval — reflects this joint review process, not a shift in intent,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Jacksonville Today.
Other Florida counties have not received similar withdrawals; spokespeople for the Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, Orange, Polk and St. Johns school districts all tell Jacksonville Today their notices of intent from Mater Academy remain active — though some districts are trying to tell the charter operator “no.”
On Thursday afternoon, after this article’s original publication, a spokesperson for Duval Schools announced they, too, had officially denied Mater’s requests for space in the two remaining schools: “Duval County Public Schools has issued a formal response to Mater Academy denying co-location requests for the remaining two Schools of Hope sites: Merrill Road Elementary School and Fort Caroline Middle School. DCPS determined that co-location at both campuses is materially impracticable. The district made this determination within all applicable laws. DCPS remains focused on supporting its public schools and the students they serve.”
Platforming Schools of Hope
Several districts around the state have already added opposition to the Schools of Hope expansion to their legislative platforms, and Duval’s Schools of Hope addendum is taken word-for-word from the legislative platform of the Florida School Boards Association, which advocates for all 67 counties’ districts.
State Sen. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, has filed a bill for the upcoming session that would undo some of the most controversial provisions added to the Schools of Hope statute last year, including forced co-location. Rep. Ashley Gantt, D-Miami, has filed a House companion bill. Whether the bills get a hearing in the Republican-controlled Legislature remains to be seen.
Joe McGehee, FSBA’s advocacy director, says the organization isn’t asking to repeal the law completely.
“What we’re trying to do is ensure the co-location doesn’t jeopardize the school safety and security, nor does it create unfunded operational or administrative burdens,” McGehee tells Jacksonville Today.
McGehee says there’s no “cap” when it comes to the number of items that can appear on a district’s legislative platform, and they vary widely. FSBA’s own platform has eight items this year, he says.
“It’s an embodiment of the things they feel like they need to accomplish during this legislative session,” he said, noting that some districts might choose to limit their items to ensure they don’t “over promise and under deliver.”
In making her case against adding Schools of Hope to the board’s legislative platform, though, Chair Joyce said, “Seven is too many. That’s why I’ll be voting no. And I encourage my board members — encourage my board members — to focus on this legislative platform that we’ve already approved.”
Joyce called Schools of Hope a “work in progress” and said it would be “premature” to add it to the board’s legislative agenda. She said conversations with legislators and other state officials made her “very hopeful” that problems with the law would be fixed before its implementation in 2027. And she said she didn’t want to “jeopardize” the board’s existing list of legislative priorities by adding the Schools of Hope item.
“The cake is still being baked, and we still have an opportunity to see how it comes out at the end,” Joyce said. “And if we are not happy with that, then we have an opportunity next legislative session to advocate for some more changes or some different changes in that.”
Other board members said their constituents wanted them to support the addendum.
“I really don’t see that there should be a major problem with having seven items on our legislative platform,” Blount said. “It seems like a lot, but I think under these circumstances, I would support putting it on.”
Willie said the proposed addition didn’t go far enough.
“I think this is really, really important,” Willie said. “I don’t want us to look back on this moment 10 years from now and say, ‘Man, remember that Schools of Hope? And now look at where we are as a community and as a state.'”
District 3 representative Pearson also encouraged her colleagues to be “proactive rather than reactive” with Schools of Hope and reminded them that it recently took three legislative sessions to undo changes to the law on school start times.
“I really believe it is easier to speak to it as they’re baking the cake rather than waiting to pull things out after the cake is baked,” she said, returning to Joyce’s metaphor.
Pearson also told the rest of the board that she’d voted to approve the legislative platform even though she disagrees with an item asking lawmakers to support changing the city’s charter to allow Duval Schools to hire its own legal counsel — something city leaders initially didn’t support but later agreed to. It’s filed as what’s called a “J-bill,” a piece of Jacksonville-specific state legislation.
“If you want to spend your time talking about the J-bill, have at it,” she said. “I’m going to spend my time talking about other things that were approved on our platform.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to include statements from Mater Academy’s parent company and from DCPS.
