After repeatedly urging the Legislature to hold the line on K-12 spending, Gov. Rick Scott, as he prepares for his re-election run in 2014 said, he wants lawmakers to increase spending in the K-12 education budget.
“We’re still working on the number, but my focus is on increasing funding for K-through-12,” Scott said during a brief interview with the News Service of Florida on Friday.
If lawmakers were to increase spending on public school education it would come on top of a more than $1 billion increase last year, but critics have noted that that increase only replaced money that was cut during Scott’s first year in office.
Scott, who is planning to seek re-election in 2014, has talked extensively about education in recent months, and made a tour of schools seeking input from teachers and parents on what they’d like to see happen in the public school system.
Scott also repeated on Friday an earlier proposal, to create a program where teachers would get debit cards tied to the school system with which they could purchase supplies. He said one of the biggest problems teachers have told him about is that they often spend their own money on school supplies.
