The Flagler County School Board on Tuesday adopted its budget and tentative tax rate for the coming year. But for one exception, the hearing drew little curiosity or questions from board members despite alarming changes and challenges in a shrinking budget. The budget reflects a lower tax rate, limited transparency about the dollars, stagnant enrollment and deception in how the district is now counting that enrollment to hide the number of students it is losing to private and home schooling.
A chart Patty Wormeck, the district’s finance chief, included in the budget presentation shows enrollment surging since the 2022-23 school year, crossing the 13,000-student threshold to reach almost 15,000 students this coming year. But those numbers include students attending school virtually. It includes almost 1,000 students attending a charter school, which is not run by the district. And it includes the sharply increasing number of students attending private school on public subsidies.
The chart denotes that last category as including those so-called “Family Empowerment Scholarship Students.” The district is essentially counting students who go to, say, the Baptist Christian Academy or the Catholic school as the district’s own, which is incorrect. The district ended the last school year with enrollment at its nine schools at 12,659, near the enrollment number of the 2008-09 school year
Three take-aways largely explain how the state is gradually emaciating traditional public education’s budget by lowering the tax rate, as it has almost every year since 1995, by diverting millions of dollars to subsidize families’ private, religious and homeschool education bills, and by causing an inevitable exodus of students from public school to privately subsidized education, but at public expense.
The local school board does not set the school tax rate. State lawmakers do. For the 10th straight year, as in most years since 1995, lawmakers lowered the school tax rate 7 percent, to $5.365 per $1,000 in taxable value. A $250,000 house with a $50,000 homestead exemption will pay $1,073 in school taxes next year, down from $1,080 this year. State, federal and local revenue will combine for a general fund total revenue of $155.3 million.
But the district will never see $10.8 million of that. That’s the amount the state will distribute this year to families to pay for the private or home school education of 1,250 students, a 56 percent increase over the 798 students privately enrolled at public expense last year, when the district lost $7.5 million to the program.
In her first budget presentation to the School Board last week, Wormeck had not included the number of students the district is losing to the program, nor the amount of money the state is including in the Flagler district’s budget to subsidize those students–only to withdraw the money later in the year. It took the repeated interventions of School Board member Colleen Conklin to ensure that those figures be clearly published. On Tuesday, Conklin again stressed at least four times the importance of transparency with those numbers, so the public understands what support the district is getting–and what it’s losing.
“I almost wish the state should just keep the darn money so that they are then accountable for it and transparency is on their shoulders,” Conklin said.
“We don’t have control over any of these funds. It is simply included in the revenue for the state in our first and second [budget calculation] and it is then removed,” Wormeck said. “We have no control over they handle all of the payments to the scholarship families.” The Flagler district is not responsible for distributing that money. The distribution is done by the state on a quarterly basis.
Nevertheless, the $10.8 million reflects the amount of money the state is siphoning out of what would have been in the district’s budget had it not adopted a voucher system, and vastly expanded it last year to make any student anywhere–regardless of income, abilities or disabilities–eligible for up to $8,000 to spend on private schooling. Rep. Paul Renner, the Palm Coast Republican, championed that change.
“This is what they’re estimating that this is going to cost for us,” Superintendent LaShakia Moore said. “If they don’t hit that, then we would see that some of those dollars would come to us. But this is what they’ve kind of put to the side as what it will cost for our scholarships.”
Families receiving the public money for private schooling may spend it on tuition and fees at eligible private and religious schools, which the state conveniently lists on its website for easy access and enrollment, transportation to an out-of-zone public school, instructional material, tutoring costs, and so on.
Here’s another startling revelation: when Conklin asked if the district had any means of staying in contact with families whose children have left the district, either to keep them informed about what may entice them back or to learn why they left, Moore told her there is no such system in place.
“As we see this population continue to grow, because it probably will continue to grow,” Conklin said, “that we figure out some way to continue to try to do outreach or communication with those families and get creative about how we can reintroduce them to our schools, or at least at a minimum, keep them abreast of some of the things that are happening within the school district.”
Obviously, not all 1,250 students slated to receive scholarships this coming year had once attended Flagler schools and now opted to go private. Rather, some of them would have been attending private school to start with, but with the expansion of the voucher program, are just now enrolling to grab their share of public dollars. Neither te district’s nor the state’s numbers are calibrated to make a distinction between the two categories. But the surge in the number of students shifting to public subsidies in private schooling underscores the challenge the district faces in coming years as the exodus is bound to continue.
In 2021, just 136 students were in that category, costing the district $880,000. In 2022, the number had jumped to 515, costing the district $4.1 million in lost funding, then 685 students in 2023, and 798 last year, when the district lost $7.5 million.
Moore said the district is developing a system to figure out how to draw back some private-schooled students in some courses or some programs in traditional public schools, and cash in on those portions.
The stagnant numbers have big implications for future budgets and school construction, especially in light of the board’s plea two years ago for more impact fee dollars on the assumption that enrollment would be booming, and that the district would need to build a middle school and a high school by decade’s end. None of those assumptions are so far proving true. (Impact fees are the one-time levy builders pay for new construction to defray the cost of development on roads, parks, schools and the like.)
Another challenge: in inflation-adjusted dollars, the school district is receiving several million dollars less this coming year than it did 10 years ago for its instructional programs. In 2014, the district budgeted $66.5 million for instruction. In current dollars, that would be $89.3 million. This year’s budget for instruction: $81.9 million. Board members seemed unaware, or uninterested, and Wormeck did not point out the fact that the district’s budget is literally shrinking before board members’ eyes.
For the entirety of the budget haring on Tuesday, and with a couple of exceptions from Board member Cheryl Massaro, the only board member to ask questions or probe for additional information was Conklin, who has been on the board since 2000 and has seen the state’s gradual undermining of public education in the name of “choice,” first through charters, then through the dismantling of zoning restrictions, and finally through vouchers.
Conklin is stepping down at the end of her term in November, as is Massaro. School Board member Sally Hunt, who no longer attends most meetings in person, when she attends them at all, said she is also resigning before November, just two years into her term. That seat will be filled by gubernatorial appointment. The board’s two senior members by then will be Will Furry and Christy Chong, who have each been serving just two years, and who have shown no interest in being inquisitive or questioning. It will be the least experienced school board in memory, with the least institutional history.
