Governor Scott will get the $480 million he wanted for teacher pay raises, but he won't get the across the board $2,500 raise he's been championing for months.
Instead, raises will be given to teachers based on performance and merit. The fine print of how that will work still has to be written out but it sounds like the raises will also include instructional personnel and support staff, which will likely decrease the amount of money each teacher gets.
A spokeswoman from Governor Scott's office said in a statement "The governor has priorities. The Legislature has priorities. There's still enough time left to determine how successful this session will be for all of us.
Teachers in St. Johns County say they're not thrilled with the way things went in Tallahassee yesterday.
"We're extremely disappointed in what happened," says St. Johns Education Association president Dawn Chapman. "We're not happy with the fact that they didn't follow the governor's request and give the raises across the board."
Chapman says the merit-pay system is flawed in part because teachers are evaluated on students they've never even met. In addition, Chapman says she's curious why the state is basing these raises off the merit-pay system when it's not even supposed to go into effect until the 2014-2015.
"It's just a completely absurd way to evaluate our teachers."
Chapman says it's hard for teachers when they're seeing others like police and firefighters getting raises across the state.
"And it's not to say they don't deserve it, they do. But they don't have to have it as merit pay or based on performance," says Chapman.
State Senator John Thrahser says he's heard concerns from teachers around the state about the flaws in the merit-pay system and adds that the legislature and Commissioner of Education Tony Bennett are working on a solution. He says he understands their concerns and doesn't want any teacher to be evaluated for something they can't control.
"I think the way that we will ultimately end up in this session is really allowing the school districts themselves to come up with the basic fundamentals of what merit pay ought to be about."
Thrasher says the manner in which the state deploys the raise money still has to be discussed between the Florida House and Senate, adding that the school districts will ultimately neogtiate how much money each teacher gets through collective bargaining
He says that $480 million into the education budget is big by itself, let alone that it's money carved out only for teacher raises.
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