From Tallahassee.com
The Florida Legislature is in session through May 1. Here are the key issues in the fifth week of session and what’s coming up. Get updates at floridacapitalnews.com:
Tobacco tax
What happened: A buck-a-pack increase in the state’s tobacco tax (and a dollar-per-ounce on other forms of tobacco) is moving fast through the Senate. It’s estimated to raise close to $900 million a year.
What’s next: Figuring out how to spend the proceeds.
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By Stephen Sawchuk and Erik W. Robelen
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today started rolling out $44 billion in economic-stimulus aid for education that comes with new teacher-quality reporting requirements for states and districts, and also with significantly more spending flexibility on school construction than many administrators had expected.
New guidance from the Department of Education spells out in more detail how states, districts, and institutions of higher education will receive money under the $39.8 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the $8.8 billion Government Services Fund, as well as how they may use it. Unveiling the first payments at a school in Capitol Heights, Md., Mr. Duncan emphasized that the funding could be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
“We have this magical opportunity to invest significantly in these best practices and scale up what works,” he said of aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
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It appears that Congress wants Florida to tap into the federal stimulus money, too,
according to a story in the Miami Herald.
Democrats in the Florida delegation criticized some House Republicans in Tallahassee
who have been reluctant to spend about $444 million to extend unemployment
benefits because the state may have to boost unemployment spending at
Florida businesses to qualify for the money.
The Democrats argued that the money should be used to help jump-start the economy.
''I don't know what part of missing out on $440 million the Florida Legislature doesn't
understand,'' the story quoted Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar.
Click here to read the entire story.
To Those of You Born 1930 - 1979 and survived the 1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and 70s!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads. Read the rest of this entry »
By Debra Viadero
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.
Online classes may be a relatively young instructional practice for K-12 schools, but experts already generally agree on one point: Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools.
But that broad conclusion, which comes mainly from a couple of research syntheses published in 2001 and 2004, masks a lot of variation in the designs of online classes and in who takes them. A middle school student in a remote area of West Virginia, for example, might take his online Spanish class during 3rd period every day, in a classroom alongside his classmates, while in Detroit, a gifted high school student logs in to her forensic-science class at home and works alone and at her own pace.
“We know it’s ‘as good as, if not better,’ in terms of student achievement,” says Rick E. Ferdig, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, who runs the Virtual School Clearinghouse research project. The project enables states to analyze their own statistics and pool data, making it publicly available for researchers to conduct studies.
Click here for the rest of the story.
This was reported by the Miami Herald April 1:
BY STEVE BOUSQUET
TIMES/HERALD TALLAHASSEE BUREAU
TALLAHASSEE – The chief of the Florida Lottery waited eight months to follow legislative orders to seek new offers for the agency’s lucrative advertising work, then skirted a legislative order to seek competitive proposals.
All that time, Lottery Secretary Leo DiBenigno kept the existing advertising agency on the payroll on a month-to-month basis and paid the company more money for extra work.
A legislative committee grilled DiBenigno over his decisions for 90 minutes Tuesday. It was by far the most critical interrogation of any of Gov. Charlie Crist’s agency heads since he took office in 2007.
”This time, we did not get the results we wanted,” said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, chairman of the House Government Operations Appropriations Committee.
Last year, the Legislature made clear it wanted the Lottery to find a new vendor for the $3.5 million set aside for advertising in place of Cooper DDB, a Miami firm hired in 2002 that employs former lottery secretary David Griffin as a lobbyist.
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posted
Apr 5, 2009 by Lamar Thames
