Senate President Jeff Atwater said Friday at a speech to the Capital Tiger Bay Club that lawmakers are unlikely to approve a tweak to the popular class size requirement in the Florida Constitution that voters approved in 2002.
Lawmakers have been drafting measures to adjust the constitutional requirements so they are not so stringent. School administrators have said the current language offers no flexibility and mandates that classroom maintain hard caps on the number of students for the entire year. They said it was possible that they would have to break up classes in the middle of the year to meet the requirements if any new students moved into the district. The Senate has been floating a plan that would tie the class size tweak to a penny increase in the sales tax for education. Democrats have been largely resistant to changes in the class size, but have also been pushing the sales tax increase to fund schools. The combination could bring in more votes in the Senate, but the House has been adamantly against any new taxes.
“I think at this point it’s more than likely that it will not be on the ballot based on this year’s session,” Atwater said in his speech, noting that lawmakers will continue to discuss the issue to determine whether voters would be willing to change the law.
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