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What makes you think that private schools are empty?

I don't think they are. I also think that, as private institutions, private schools will respond to demand as any business would. It's simply a question of allowing the consumers the freedom to participate in the market.

Gov. Bush is on the right track -- there needs to be more and better planning up front.

Government "planning" is a one-way track to disaster. It always has been, and it always will be. I went to high school in Pinellas County, and you could always tell which of the dozen-or-so municipalities in the county had interventionist governments -- they were run-down and shabby. It was the unincorporated or newly-incorporated areas that had vibrant growth and rapid development.

Bottom line: citizens and the markets shouldn't conform to government priorities. That's backwards. If government can't handle growth, then government needs to get its act together. To do otherwise implies that our communities exist by the leave of the state government. That's abhorrent and wrong.

It's simply a question of allowing the consumers the freedom to participate in the market.

As anyone who knows anything about the market place would tell you, first -- you have to know something about these "consumers" you plan to sell something to.

The reason more private schools are NOT popping up like mushrooms in this state is because the vast majority of FL's continuous population growth is coming from NON-English speaking immigrants moving to Florida. These people are not lining up to get into private schools -- but, they ARE flooding the public schools.

So, the real question is a bit more complex than you have framed it, because they are not consumers with the kind of money necessary to pay for private schools. Private school owners are not giving away education for free down here nor anywhere else.

It was the unincorporated or newly-incorporated areas that had vibrant growth and rapid development.

And, who paid for the new public schools? Santa Claus? Impact fees tacked on to the price of new homes built down here are an issue. Local governments can and should plan better for growth, and if the governor's plan encourages such planning, I am all for it. Overcrowded classrooms are no fun.

BTW, here's another article on this issue, from "Florida Trends" magazine, Sept. 2001:

Florida Trend Archives

TALLAHASSEE - SEPTEMBER 2001 ISSUE

Once More — With Feeling

As the governor [Gov. Jeb Bush] plans to tackle growth management again, the roadblock that paralyzed progress still remains.

By Mary Ellen Klas

Gov. Jeb Bush’s failure to win major growth management reforms last session may have been his biggest legislative embarrassment in his three years in office, but it wasn’t his last try. With one more session before seeking re-election, the governor is determined to take another shot at tackling one piece of the most complicated, and controversial, sections of state law: He will push legislation that links local zoning decisions to the availability of classrooms, his advisers say.

“It’s the black hole of the growth management law,” says Steve Seibert, secretary of the Department of Community Affairs. Although current laws allow local governments to work with school boards when planning new growth and allow the Department of Education to do some things — such as waive school siting rules to help school districts trying to increase their capacity for new students — the governor believes more is needed to ease classroom crowding in many parts of the state, Seibert says.

But the roadblock that paralyzed progress on growth reform last session still remains. Bush believes that cities and counties must do more to coordinate their growth plans, and he wants to prohibit development in areas where school capacity is inadequate, yet he has resisted virtually every attempt to talk about giving local governments new ways to raise money to pay for new schools.

At odds

That position so antagonizes the powerful Florida Association of Homebuilders that it is prepared to take a back seat in the governor’s race next year and not endorse Bush, a former developer. Home builders believe the governor’s position leaves local governments with a Hobson’s choice: They must either turn down development when there are not enough schools for new families or allow development and pay for school construction with existing revenue sources.

With those options, the home builders’ lobby believes the no-growth policy will win or, in order to pay for school construction, cities and counties will raise impact fees on new homes.

“Home builders hate impact fees because 60% to 70% of new students aren’t coming from new houses, and (the fees) are disproportionate on modest-size homes,” says Doug Buck, lobbyist for the home builders’ association. Instead, home builders argue, school boards should be given the ability to generate revenue from increases in broad-based bondable sources, such as the documentary stamp tax, sales tax or telecommunications taxes.

Although Bush believes those ideas are a perilous path toward new taxes and bigger government, at the end of the session he tacitly agreed to support a Senate bill that would have allowed 19 counties that face school capacity problems to approve a tax increase to build schools. If the counties could satisfy stringent criteria, they would be allowed to levy a half-cent sales tax increase without having to go to voters first.

But in the final hours of the last day, the governor’s staff and some House members began raising questions about the school provisions that had been inserted in the bill weeks before in the Senate. With such uncertainty looming, the House never took up the bill, and it died.

That wasn’t the first time policy leaders avoided the question of how to pay for growth. The governor’s own Growth Management Study Commission offered four suggestions for ways local governments could pay for growth but recommended none of them. Instead, it suggested handing the politically unpleasant task of endorsing a recommendation to the Legislature’s Tax Reform Task Force.

True cost

This year, Bush has asked for another study — this time to develop a uniform model of determining the true cost of growth. The idea, known as full-cost accounting, emerged from his task force last year, at his behest, and lawmakers gave him $500,000 to convene a study group and hire a company to develop the model.

Ideally, the technique would force local governments to compare the long-term costs and benefits of a proposed development to the tax revenue it would produce. Local government would be required to pay for the needed services or reject the development. At a meeting before his economic advisers in January, Bush hinted that the model, once implemented, could lead to “massive dislocations in the economy” if it forced a halt to development.

So what if the models require local governments to come up with more cash? “The governor has said consistently that funding has got to be addressed, but before we open the floodgates to dollars let’s really be honest about where the needs are,” Seibert explains.

He says he doubts that the study will be completed within the next eight months. That could mean the governor can avoid engaging in a discussion over new revenue for schools and other growth-related services before the November election.

BTW: This article is dated Sept. 2001 -- and, obviously, Gov. Bush is not delaying a discussion on this important matter, since in Dec. 2001, the "St. Petersburg Times" article I posted reports that he has decided to make growth management a major issue in his campaign.

I meant to type: tuition COSTS at many private schools are sky high