SCF officials keep fingers crossed as funding looks better than anticipated

State College of Florida’s leaders are pleasantly surprised at the proposed funding they will receive from the state based on the budget passed by state lawmakers this month.

While the school will see an increase in state funding of roughly $1.1 million, officials are mostly happy they avoided massive cuts to their funding.

“The important part of all this is what didn’t happen,” said Brian Thomas, special assistant to the SCF president Carol Probstfeld.

At the beginning of the state legislative session, Probstfeld said she couldn’t sleep because of two bills making their way through the House and Senate that could have dramatically reduced SCF funding.

Both were considering higher-education bills containing major cuts to the state college system. The House bill could have cost SCF $4.4 million, and the Senate bill would have reduced funding for SCF by $1.5 million annually, Thomas said.

But legislators ended up adopting the Senate bill with reduced cuts, and Sen. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, and State Rep. Jim Boyd, R-Bradenton, helped shepherd an additional $1.65 in operational support funds for SCF.

“Thank God for our local delegation,” Probstfeld said. “It would be a very different moment in time right now had they not been able to help us.”

Gov. Rick Scott has still not signed the budget, and while there are calls for him to veto the House’s K-12 bill, the higher-education bill has not been met with similar protests.

Less remediation, less funding

The proposed budget contains a $30 million reduction in funding for the 28 colleges in the state college system. The cuts are the consequence of a 2013 law that made remediation classes, which do not count toward a degree, optional for Florida high school graduates who score poorly on state tests. This means far fewer students are taking remediation classes, and by that logic, less funding is needed.

Ever since the law was passed, the number of students in remediation has dropped significantly.

Statewide, enrollment in remediation classes reduced by 44 percent from 2008-16, according to the Florida College System’s Developmental Education Accountability Report in 2016. At SCF, the dropoff has been even more dramatic, with the combined enrollment for all remediation classes going from 2,555 before the law was passed to 888 in 2016, a reduction of 65 percent.

Thomas said even though enrollment in remediation classes is lower, that doesn’t mean schools like SCF aren’t spending money to help students who previously would have been forced into remediation.

“Those students still come to us. We provide more support with the academic resource center, with tutoring to make sure they get through,” Thomas said.

Probstfeld said the school is spending more money on diagnostic tests, tutors and the academic resource center.

“Tutoring services are far more expensive than teaching several students in a class,” Probstfeld said. “I would speculate that, per student, it costs more than being in developmental-ed (remediation) classes.”

The percentage of students who earn an A, B or C in English 1101 at SCF has remained the same since the law was passed, but the success rate for students who had to take remediation classes was 18 percent higher than those who did not. And in math classes, the overall success rate has dropped since the law was passed, and the success rate of students taking remediation is roughly 19 percent higher than students who do not.

For SCF, the $30 million reduction system-wide means a cut of roughly $700,000. But it is made up by the additional recurring and nonrecurring operational support funding, so the school’s state funding will increase by roughly $1.1 million.

For now, Probstfeld is glad the roller-coaster ride of a legislative session is over.

“There were some very unnerving moments,” she said. “But we lived to die another day.”

This story was originally published May 16, 2017 at 5:06 PM with the headline "SCF officials keep fingers crossed as funding looks better than anticipated."