DeSantis proposes under funding education by a little less than 3 billion dollars.

In 17-18 funding per student was 7,307 dollars

DeSantis proposed 7,531 dollars per student.

He is saying this is a three percent hike and the most ever, but the reality is it’s just another example of how liars use numbers.

In the 06-07 school year the per pupil funding for students was 6,789 dollars. There was a significant bump the following year but I am trying to keep everything on the low end so you can see how bad Tallahassee has underfunded education over the years. I also rounded all numbers to the lowest dollar.

You put the number in an inflation calculator and you get $8,635

https://westegg.com/inflation/

8,635 – 7,531 = 1,104

Now let’s take that 1,104 and multiply it by Florida’s 2.7 million children, we get 2,980,000 dollars. That’s what the governor would need to add to get to 2006 levels.  

If we look at spending from our highest point it gets even worse

In 2007 Florida spent 7,126 per student, a number the legislature would have to fund education at 8,817 to match.

8,817 – 7503 = 1,314 x 2.7 million = 3,547,000

No matter what you hear Florida’s bell weather for funding came in 2007 and it has all been downhill since then but it gets even much (???) worse.

https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/1209/raise-pupil-education-spending-all-time-high/

In 2007 Florida hadn’t kicked into testing over drive and since then we have had over a decade of underfunded and unfunded mandates which tell district how they must spend their money. This means not only do we have way less but we have to spend it on way more things and one of the biggest victims of this have been teachers and their salaries, which for many have gone backwards.   

Then does everyone realize the great recession ended in 2009? Heck give it another 5 years for the recovery to really take hold and that means we should have been back to normal at least 5 years ago. Yet in Florida sadly like many other places we continue to under fund education to the sum of billions of dollars annually.

Friends we had money in 2006 but we don’t have it now? Rick Scott bragged how Florida was like the 17^th biggest economy in the world but we’re under funding education by billions. No friends we have the money to properly fund education, it is a choice that our leaders are making not to do so, a shameful choice that hurts us all.