Educators and human service providers are struggling with cuts to their funding. In Florida, those cuts include afterschool programs managed by the public schools and by nonprofits like the Boys and Girls Clubs and the United Way. The state Department of Education just cut 30 percent of the funding in 40 percent of the state's school districts—with impacts coinciding on the first day of classes.
The school districts affected range in size—from tiny Jefferson County in the North Florida Panhandle, to places like Brevard, Hillsborough and Miami.
"These funds are really critical to families we serve, and without them, we cannot continue to offer these programs to kids," said Brooke Brunner, the director of early childhood programs for the Leon County schools.
The district has been scrambling to figure out how to serve the same number of kids with half-a-million dollars less.
"I don't know that the community or even the folks at the federal level understand the importance of what these funds bring," Brunner said.
Those funds bring tutoring and snacks for children after school, allowing their parents to stay on the job and the kids to continue to learn in a safe place.
"Our families rely on this," Brunner said. "We know that childcare is extremely expensive. Oftentimes it equates to a mortgage payment or more. And this is a program that allows our families to continue to work with a peace of mind, that they're getting academic assistance."
Brunner says the good news about the cuts is that the Children's Services Council of Leon has agreed to pick up the difference, allowing the afterschool program to continue to the end of the academic year.
But Leon's is the only one of the state's 11 CSCs that has agreed to spend its taxpayer dollars this way – so far.
Michele Watson, CEO of the Florida Alliance of Children's Councils and Trusts, says it's up to each council to evaluate its citizens' needs.
"I think we're seeing an unprecedented reduction in some key services, and so our children's services councils are responding to those reductions with their communities in a way that is meant to minimize any impact," Watson said.
Not all Florida counties are affected by the cuts, only those that started afterschool programs at the same time. The affected programs in those areas had already started when their leaders were notified of the reductions via email on the first day of school.
In some counties, schools and nonprofits share the oversight of afterschool programs. In Leon, the public schools manage 10 programs and the United Way four. In some counties, the Boys and Girls Clubs have managed the cuts by raising private donations.
But educators and providers like Michele Watson say more funding reductions could come.
"There's going to be different, varying levels of priority with all the funding cuts that are happening on what they're focusing on and what fires they're putting out that day, this month, that they have to get up and running," said Watson. "Whether it be transportation, whether it be teachers, whether it be facilities – all of those things that we know have received differentiated budgets from what they've had the year before."
Last month Darryl Jones, a member of both Leon's school board and its Children's Services Council, called for the CSC to raise its millage rate to be ready if and when more cuts come.
"I can't imagine how we can hear what we've heard today and then still say that we want to keep the same millage rate," Jones said. "Because there is a crisis afoot for our human service providers."
None of the other CSC members agreed to consider raising the millage rate. But the question is likely to come up again.
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