School Board votes down year-round schooling at Rawlings Elementary before first year is complete, Plavac sworn in, teachers to vote on 1.3% raise

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their April 15 meeting, the School Board of Alachua County welcomed new Member Janine Plavac and voted to discontinue the year-round pilot program at Rawlings Elementary. During public input, they heard from members of the public who want the district to change their guidance on interactions with ICE; a music teacher whose position has been cut to half-time; and the teachers’ union president, who said teachers will vote next week on a contract with a 1.3% raise, lower than the 1.6% they previously rejected.

Janine Plavac joins the board

The meeting began with the introduction of new Member Janine Plavac. Chair Sarah Rockwell said she was “thrilled to welcome” Plavac because of her “many years of experience and a wealth of knowledge.”

Plavac said she will continue teaching at St. Francis Catholic Academy, where she is the Director of the Health Sciences Institute, and added, “I tell my students all the time: education is a gift that we give our children, and so it’s our obligation to make sure they get the best education, and I’m here to help that.”

Member Thomas Vu, who worked with Plavac at Gainesville High School, said, “One thing I always admired about Ms. Plavac was how she always had really high standards for students, high standards for the people around her, her co-workers, but also for herself… It’s just something that I found a lot of affinity with. And so I’m just really happy to be sitting here on this dais and to see the fifth member now who’s joined us.”

Public input

During the public input period, 15 people asked the board to change their guidance on interactions with ICE, which can be found here.  

Reassignment of art, music, and PE teachers

Stefie Pishock, the music teacher at Shell Elementary, said she had just been told that she could either stay at Shell with a half-time position or take a full-time position somewhere else. She asked, “The One Mill… is supposed to fund… music, art, and media, and yet this is not happening now at our schools. Where is it going if not funding my job??

Alachua Chronicle reached out to Alachua County Public Schools PIO Jackie Johnson, who said that as of today, ten teachers across the district will have changes in their assignments for the next school year. All have been offered full-time positions. Nine have accepted, and one is still deciding.

Four music teachers have been reassigned: the Shell music teacher will move to full-time at Irby, the Wiles teacher will become full-time at Lanier, and the Lake Forest teacher will be half-time at Lake Forest and half-time at Shell. The music teacher who was half-time at Meadowbrook and half-time at Chiles will still be half-time at Meadowbrook, but the other half will be at Wiles.

Three art teachers have been reassigned: the teacher at Shell will move to full-time at Williams, and the Lake Forest teacher will teach art half-time at Lake Forest and be a media specialist at Lake Forest in her remaining time. (The media position at Lake Forest will still be full-time, with another teacher currently at the school filling the other hours.) The art teacher who was half-time at Meadowbrook and half-time at Chiles will still be half-time at Meadowbrook, with the other half at Shell.

Three PE teachers have been reassigned: the teacher who was half-time at Meadowbrook and half-time at Chiles will now be full-time at Meadowbrook, the Shell teacher will move to full-time at Williams, and the Lake Forest teacher will move to full-time at Norton. 

Johnson added, “Every year, the district reviews projected enrollment at each school. Positions are then allocated at each school based on those figures. It is certainly not unusual for teachers or other employees to be moved to another site based on changes in the student population. One Mill funds can ONLY be used on items specified in the ballot language. Any reductions in One Mill expenditures must be reallocated to other items in the ballot language, which include ‘school nurses; music, art and drama programs; school library programs; school counseling programs; band and chorus programs; academic magnets; career technical programs; and to update classroom technology.'”

Stadiums and a proposed contract for teachers

Jenn Garrett asked the board to consider a public-private partnership to build stadiums at Buchholz and Eastside High Schools, with the district providing some funding and the rest coming from private donations. She said several donors had already approached her about making large donations. 

Alachua County Education Association President Carmen Ward said the union and the district were “finally done with the most excruciating bargaining season we’ve ever had, with the worst offer,” and teachers will be voting on April 23 to ratify a raise of 1.3%, lower than the 1.6% that was previously rejected. 

A junior in the Academy of Future Teachers at Gainesville High School said Alachua County Public Schools has “little respect for teachers… They’re short of supplies, have too many students per classroom, deal with extreme out of line behavior, or can work all weekend because their planning time is taken up with meetings – and so many more issues that you can think of, and yet you pay teachers so low… You must start paying more to the instructional staff, like other counties do in Florida. You must also keep ICE out of schools.”

Year-round calendar at Rawlings

An agenda item to approve the proposed 2025-26 Rawlings Elementary year-round calendar led to a robust discussion. Rawlings is finishing the first year of a four-year, state-approved pilot for a year-round program, with the goal of providing more consistent year-round academic support for the students. The students still attend school for 180 days a year, but the calendar is spread over an 11-month period with intersessions to provide short breaks. Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum Jacquatte Rolle told the board that although it is a four-year pilot, the district is not obligated to continue implementing the year-round model. 

School Improvement Principal Jim Kuhn gave a lengthy data presentation (click here to see the full presentation) that showed enrollment decreasing about 20% since the 2023-24 school year. The attendance rate has improved slightly over the previous year, but attendance drops noticeably on days when Rawlings is in session but the traditional schools have holidays or teacher workdays. 

A survey of families and staff this spring resulted in mixed responses to the question of whether respondents would recommend the year-round model.

Notably, 75% of teachers supported the year-round model; Kuhn said 44% of the teachers are new, and “this is all they know.” 50% of families said the year-round schedule has made it more difficult to schedule their family’s routine, and 39% said the year-round calendar has impacted childcare arrangements negatively. 

Motion

After the presentation, Member Tina Certain made a motion to discontinue the year-round calendar, and Vu seconded it.

“You’re misinterpreting what you’re hearing”

During public comment on the motion, Taylor Gilfillan said it would have been nice to have the presentation available before the meeting so he could have come prepared with questions, and a woman said, “I know the research on the year-round calendar, and I know you know it, too. This is good for, especially, low-income kids. It reduces achievement gaps. It helps people. The stats that were just presented showed that it’s overall helping the school. It’s helping the achievement of the school. The parents don’t all love it, no, and a lot of that is because of the inconvenience of the fact that the whole district doesn’t do it. So I’m frankly really shocked that, following the presentation that we just had, we had a motion to discontinue this and a second from the school board. The stats are positive… You’re misinterpreting what you’re hearing.”

Vu said if Certain hadn’t made the motion to discontinue the calendar, he would have. He cited the drop in enrollment and the need for daycare on days when some kids in a family are in school and some kids are not. He said students who need year-round academic support can attend summer school. He concluded, “I honestly don’t see the value in it.”

Plavac: “We set these kids up for failure because 44% of the teachers at that school are new, brand new.”

Plavac said, “I don’t know why we did this or why it happened, but in a way, we set these kids up for failure because 44% of the teachers at that school are new, brand new.” She said the family survey showed that fewer families want year-round schools than the families who either don’t want them or don’t care either way, “and you’ve got to have a parent engaged to be able to get a child to go to school.” She concluded, “I think we have to take teachers that are high-performing teachers and put them in low-performing schools, and that’s really a bugaboo, especially in high school, because the high-performing teachers get a financial consideration when they pass their AP testing, and that doesn’t happen in elementary schools.” She said the students might see better gains in a year-round school with “more seasoned” teachers.

McNealy: “We couldn’t even give a full year”

Member Leanetta McNealy thought the board had not given the schedule enough time: “We embarked upon this this year, and now it is April, and we are already deciding… that we need to discontinue the program, based on this survey… We couldn’t even give a full year… Yes, we lost a lot of students at this school, but we’ve lost them all over the county… We have not given enough time to make a decision at this point.”

Certain: “I don’t think enough planning and preparation was done to enter into this particular model.”

Certain said she didn’t vote for it when it was proposed because she felt the district was “rushing into it… I don’t think enough planning and preparation was done to enter into this particular model.” She pointed out that the pilot was implemented at the urging of former School Board Member Kay Abbitt. She agreed with Pavlac that “we have too many new teachers in our hardest environments, and we have too much change in administrative staff in our hardest environments.” 

Rockwell: “What I’m seeing is – we’re scrambling to try to fit a mold from the state of Florida that is not having a huge benefit but is taking a huge amount of staff work.”

Rockwell said the biggest issue to her is that “we don’t actually have a year-round school here.” She said a true year-round calendar would have breaks of two to three weeks to prevent learning loss, but the schedule set up by the state has a six-week summer break. She continued, “What I’m seeing is – we’re scrambling to try to fit a mold from the state of Florida that is not having a huge benefit but is taking a huge amount of staff work.” She said she kind of wanted to give it another year and look at the data, “but at the same time, I know that we don’t have an actual year-round model here.”

McNealy said, “This isn’t the first year that Rawlings has had [so many] new teachers.” She said high-performing teachers won’t go to “a school like Rawlings… because we have a strong ACEA (teachers’ union), it seems, and people know – before coming into Alachua County, they’ve already done their research into what schools they want to [work at]… I will end this, Madam Chair, by saying we didn’t give it enough time.”

Certain: “I think if we could get all on one schedule, [we would] have a little bit more consistency.”

Certain said Superintendent Kamela Patton has a mantra about being in alignment, and “I think if we could get all on one schedule, [we would] have a little bit more consistency.” She said schools with a lot of new teachers should get “more focused support… I don’t think that is happening right now at our neediest schools… We’ve got to do better. We’re in a competitive environment where people can walk with their kids, take them someplace else… I feel sometimes the students that are neediest, and their families have the least means, they get whatever we give them, and sometimes that’s not our best. And I think that has to change.” She said that going back to a traditional calendar would be the best use of the district’s limited resources.

Patton said with the new Instructional Empowerment program, “we already have seen that difference in a short period of time.” However, she said, although the district has “a ton of coaches at Rawlings and a lot of these SI (School Improvement) schools, there is no commonality among these coaches.” She said that all the coaches will need to come to a Coaching Academy this summer “so we can get our coaches’ arrows lined up.”

Patton said the district can’t run the schools; they can only support the schools. She added that it is “shocking” to her how many schools in the district do not have common planning. 

Plavac: “Is it fair to the students to keep them another year in an environment that is not successful for them now, and then they’re another two years behind when we make a change?”

Plavac referred to the 0% of fourth graders at Rawlings that are projected to be at grade level in English Language Arts and Math and said that as a high school teacher, she has students who cannot read a clock: “In nursing, you use a watch… They can’t subtract military time. Why? Because they can’t subtract… Is it fair to the students to keep them another year in an environment that is not successful for them now, and then they’re another two years behind when we make a change?” She asked Patton for her recommendation.

Patton: “It’s a tough call, either way”

Patton said the survey didn’t “say something one way or the other, definitively,” but she was concerned that Rawlings is the only school on this calendar, so “it’s a lot of energy that I think is very difficult for parents… It’s a tough call, either way… If there was something more that showed me that this has made a tremendous difference, then I think I’d be a little more supportive.” She said that providing five weeks of summer school with a traditional school year calendar is another option that provides year-round schooling. 

Vote

The motion to discontinue the year-round calendar at Rawlings passed 3-2, with Plavac and McNealy in dissent. Plavac asked if she could abstain because it was her first meeting, but Rockwell said that would only be allowed for conflicts of interest, so Plavac voted no because “I’m not 100% committed to yes… I think that there’s good and bad.”

Breaking even on driver’s education

During a discussion on performance indicators for summer programs, Vu asked about driver’s education: “I know it’s not something we have to offer, and it’s something we offer at a loss.” He asked how many students are served, and Patton said 160. She reminded the board that the district increased the lab fee for that course from $100 to $200. 

Vu said the district would need to charge $300 or $350 to provide the program at cost, “and so if we’re talking about what we need to cut and what’s a luxury… I’d love to hear what my colleagues have to say.”

Patton said she wasn’t sure how much it costs, but her staff is looking at it, “because it’s a luxury; it’s not our mission.”

Rockwell agreed that the district “should be looking to break even on providing something that isn’t required and isn’t academic. I mean, yes, we don’t want our students out on the road causing car accidents, but ultimately, that is not the job of the school district. It’s the job of the terrified parents.”

Summer food program and free and reduced lunch programs will not change

In response to a question from Plavac, Chief of Operations Maria Eunice said the summer food program will still be offered this year, despite changes to the U.S. Department of Education. Eunice also said the free and reduced lunch programs will continue next fall: “That’s not going to change.”