Budget Cuts Loom Over St. Johns County Schools

   As some students, staff, and parents may have heard, many school districts in Florida will be experiencing budget cuts for the 2024-25 fiscal year. St. Johns county is, obviously, not an exception to this. 

   Though no resolution has been decided or announced, Governor Ron DeSantis proposed a roughly $4 billion fiscal budget cut for the 2024-25 year. The cuts come from tax cuts, which are, on paper, amazing. What too many residents fail to understand, however, is that these cuts will actually affect departments, such as education, transportation, leisure, and others. The most important of these departments affected is education. With an already deteriorated education system, where the need for full time “substitute” teachers is rampant, a proposal to take more money from each county (and thus schools themselves) is only going to make the problem that all of the US is facing worse.  

   All counties in Florida will be affected by this change, and most have already begun drafting their new budgets for the 2024-25 years. Tim Forson of St. Johns County School District (SJCD) has increasingly delayed any information on how the budget cuts will look, and is only giving needed information to principals of each school. In an interview with Forson, he stated these delays are due to him wanting a “deliberate and [not rushed]” publishing and deciding of the budget. Requesting to stay anonymous, one source, who will be referred to as John Doe, has released a small part of these ideas. One of their points from Forson’s proposal is an equation of ~$60 cut per student. For Nease High School specifically, this comes to about $126K cut from the budget for the next year. Other points from Doe include ideas of cutting “non-educational staff.” Doe emphasized that this would include school nurses and tech support staff.  

   Another extremely important cut mentioned by Doe highlights the academy certification cuts. Supposedly, this would cut around 80% of the certification pass budget. The way this works sees every certification test passed matched with parts of the salary for the teachers of those classes. In Nease’s engineering program for example, if a student were to pass the Autodesk AutoCAD certification test, the teacher would be rewarded for it. This 80% cut would end with only 20% of the current payment to a teacher being granted, thus reducing the teacher’s already low salary even more. 

   As news about Forson’s plan for the district begins to come out more and more, we will keep updating on the issue. 

By: TJ Tickell