by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
The discussion of ways to improve the operation of City government occurring during the Charter Revision process recently included talks about the size of the Duval County Public School System.
Members of the School Board met with the Charter Revision Commission July 30 at the request of the Commission as part of a series of meetings with stakeholders in City government.
During a previous meeting, former City General Counsel Jim Rinaman was asked to give the Commission background on consolidated government and he also offered some suggestions on how to improve the local government with his presentation. One of those suggestions was to divide the school system into separate districts.
“We’ve had good superintendents and we’ve got a really great superintendent now who is fantastic, but we can’t get out of the ditch. The problem is that it’s too big,” said Rinaman. “I think about 120,000 students and however many teachers and however many schools is just too much. My recommendation is to break up our School Board into 2, 3 or 4 school districts and have separate appointed School Board members for those districts. We can still have an umbrella administrative school superintendent, appointed, over all of them to divide up the budget and set policy. We can make it more manageable than it is.”
The Duval County Public School System has more than 160 schools which are divided into four clusters: two elementary, one middle school and one high school. The total number of students in these four clusters is about 123,200. The total number of employees in the school system is 14,520, and 8,715 of those employees are teachers.
Tommy Hazouri, chair of the School Board, responded to Rinaman’s suggestions during his time in front of the Commission.
“To divide the district into smaller districts as Mr. Rinaman and others have said, I can ensure you would lead down the road to educational disaster,” said Hazouri, a former mayor of Jacksonville. “Our role is not to geographically divide the city in to haves and have-nots, as it surely will do. But to exercise our constitutional responsibility and obligation by having educational equity in all of our schools.”
Commission member and former School Board member Martha Barrett, now vice president of market development at Bank of America, supported Hazouri’s opinion.
“I was elected to the Duval County School Board in 2000 and again in 2004. I served proudly with the three folks here today and I’ll tell you that no group has ever worked harder, I know I never worked harder, than I did on the School Board,” said Barrett. “I believe that we should never split up this district. It is absolutely wrong. They are doing a fabulous job.”
Like Rinaman, Hazouri’s presentation also included some suggestions on how the Commission could help the school system.
“What I believe you can do as a Commission is to review how the City and the school district, on common ground, can help make consolidation work to the benefit of the taxpayers and our children,” said Hazouri. “A review of the relationship, or lack there of, between the school district and the JEA is but one important area to look at. It’s clear that the school district gets no contributions from the JEA, yet we receive half of the property taxes. There are ways we can get funds from the JEA without the threat of raising rates if there is language written in the charter to allow any additional revenue contributions from the JEA to the City to be shared equally and continued indefinitely.”
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