- December 4, 2025
Bob Cerra, of Cerra Consulting Group, presented the Flagler County School Board with options for its state legislative platform that will represent its priorities for the 2026 legislative session.
At the board’s Aug. 12 workshop, Cerra said board members should discuss their priorities during their Aug. 26 workshop and then vote on a platform later that evening at its monthly business meeting.
The School Board’s priorities are slated to be included with Flagler County’s legislative platform and distributed at the local delegation hearing. The deadline for that document is early October, Cerra wrote in a memo to board members. Not adopting a platform on Aug. 26 could risk the School Board’s priorities to be excluded from the county’s document.
“It’s more important that you are in line with your own platform than we make that deadline, but we’d like to make that deadline,” Cerra told the board at the workshop.
The consulting group suggested the board support the complete education package from the Rural Renaissance proposal, which the Florida Senate passed but was not included in the 2025 state budget.
The package would include grants to Flagler Schools of between $1.5 million and $2.25 million while also strengthening the North East Florida Educational Consortium, of which Flagler is a member district. The grants could be used broadly to fund eight district priority areas, Cerra said, adding that strengthening NEFEC while bringing significant recurring revenues to the district “would be a clean win for the board.”
The consulting group’s second suggested local priority would be to have all students served by the school district to be counted for Public Education Capital Outlay purposes when determining sharing requirements ,including adult education students and voluntary prekindergarten students.
Charter schools get funded 100% from the PECO program for their students in sharing local funding for capital purposes. School districts do not get credit for VPK or adult career education students in those formulas.
Board members were asked in advance of the Aug. 26 workshop to pick from those or other local priorities and pick statewide priorities that they want to support.
