Florida Teacher License Lookup

I was trying to find out when my Florida teaching license expires when I realized that the public license lookup for teachers no longer seemed to exist, at least not until I found an obscure link from a county school website. I'm not sure if the teachers union pushed to have their members' info obscured or if the FDOE wants to make it harder to prove that charter schools (and probably public schools) are using unlicensed teachers. Or it was maybe an oversight in a web redesign. 

If you want to look a teacher up, here's a link that works in 2024, even if it's not really officially on the main Florida Department of Education website anymore. You'll probably have to click around the website, like the main logo or something. It's clunky. 

You do have the right to know if your kids' teachers are licensed, even if your charter school overlords don't want to tell you. https://flcertify.fldoe.org

That said, my license expires in June of 2024, and I don't have the silly credits / special Ed / reading certs required to renew, so whatever. I imagine with low pay, high stress, hoops to jump through to renew, and the worry of jail time for using the wrong books, plenty of Florida teachers are letting their licenses lapse.

Will Anyone With Sense Please Step in and Stop the Autonomous Vehicle Fiasco Downtown?

The Jacksonville skyway thingy is pretty stupid. It's good for photos, like the Landing was (years ago), but no one uses it except a few tourists, and most locals barely know it exists. Kind of like the Mayport river ferry. But to add millions of dollars on top of stupid in order to get a fake autonomous system that's basically just a van (with a driver) is borderline criminal. Actually, it's over the borderline. Sometimes, cool innovations just don't work, and then it's time to move on. Please, someone in the mayor's office or city council or Shad Khan or whoever really runs Jacksonville, for the love of God, shut down the autonomous vehicle ride fiasco before we owe more money for a few tourists to ride a few miles in a van. 

Can we just admit that Jacksonville is not a city built for public transit? It's super spread out, and there isn't enough going on downtown. Maybe a decent investment is more of the JTA vans, or just throwing money at Uber/Lyft to take over for empty buses. Or an actual fast-moving, long-distance street rail system that ties downtown to the Beaches and maybe a stop on San Marco and the Town Center. But fast and long-distance, not short and slow, whether autonomous or not.

Or nothing. It's just a kind of welfare, anyhow, especially in such a car-centric city as Jax. I took a lot of Urban Planning classes, and I wish I was wrong, but I'm not. Rethinking transit options in Jacksonville might be possible, but it's not going to come via pretending to have an autonomous vehicle system intended to carry almost no one to nowhere in particular. Please, someone with a say, kill the autonomous skyway Ultimate Urban Circulator (U2C) Bay Street Innovation Corridor (BSIC) money pit before we all get sucked in.

Maybe it's Time to Unconsolidate

Duval County tried consolidation as a way to equalize education, but the broader results haven't been positive. Right now, when DCPS is short on funds, would be a perfect time to look into unconsolidation. 

The plan was for all children to have equal opportunities at all schools, but it's silly to think anyone wants to send their kids from one end of Duval County to the other. I have to admit that I thought a similar fix might work for Milwaukee Public Schools at one point, where in-county suburbs like Glendale, Wauwatosa, and Franklin have excellent schools. But it didn't work in Jacksonville, ending permanently with a Supreme Court decision that forced integration couldn't happen because of the insane amount of time and money spent on busing. So now we're left with one of the largest school districts in the country covering by far the largest area, and it's competing with total school choice, while being forced to consolidate buildings in order to survive. However, at least two new school districts could be formed that could survive the apocalypse, as long as they are released from DCPS, leaving Duval Schools to figure it out with a much smaller footprint. And also keeping the families we want in Duval rather than forcing them to move to St. Johns County.

The way I see it, you've got nothing but typical big-city school issues anywhere west or north of the St. Johns River, so I'd keep that all DCPS. I know, it's not fair. Whatever, that district could have the most federal money and human resources to work with. Stanton could still be there as a beacon to people who want to do that Stanton thing. 

The second district would be Mandarin up to San Marco, or everything between the river and E295. I would delete Terry Parker because nobody wants to go to Terry Parker. 

The third district would be anything east of E295, so basically the Atlantic Coast, Sandalwood, and Fletcher areas. It would get the least amount of state aid and may need to rework how money is spent, but it's also the area where a lot of people who could easily move to St. Johns County have decided to make their homes. Actually, the same could be said for the Mandarin to San Marco areas. 

The point is that before consolidation, the suburban districts would have been successful on their own. The point of consolidation was to bring the lower-performing schools up to the level of the other schools in the county. However, it was never allowed to fully happen because of the logistics, and now the large district is dragging those annexed suburban areas down so far that the district as a whole is in real trouble. 

Personally, I would vote for a property tax increase if it was for the three high schools in my own area, but I think I'm done voting for DCPS referendums that lead to delayed construction projects, closed schools, teacher lay-offs, and generally missing money. 

Years ago, Jacksonville tried something new and progressive in order to equalize education for all students. Now, it might have to loosen its grip in order to save public education in the city.