Florida school districts got a welcome present from the state legislature this year. With little fanfare, legislators voted to keep overcrowded schools around a bit longer. The action came none too soon for the school districts. Under a law passed in 2005 they were under the gun to pay for more schools to handle growth. That law, called school concurrency, forces school districts to provide classroom space for students from new housing developments. What it doesn't do is provide the money to build the classrooms. Now a new law called HB 7203 gives school districts a little breathing room before they must raise money for those classrooms. Dubbed the Developers' Relief Act by its critics, HB 7203 mostly prevents overcrowded roads from stopping development. But a little noticed clause also helps prevent overcrowded schools from doing the same. School concurrency has two rules that threaten overcrowded schools. One says that schools can't take in more students than they have space for. The other says that school districts can't plan to build new schools unless they have the money to build them. HB 7203 softens these rules. Now school districts just have to demonstrate that they will build new schools to take care of new developments. It doesn't say how they will demonstrate that. But they don't necessarily need to prove they have the money up front anymore. It also lets schools take in more students than their capacity limit; so long as school districts can demonstrate there will be enough room for them later on. And later on doesn't have to be as soon as it used to be. In the old school concurrency law, school districts could only look ahead five years when drawing up plans for new schools. Now they can stretch that out to ten or even fifteen years just by showing that schools in a certain area have been overcrowded for a long time. Then they can set up what is called a long-term school concurrency management system to try and bring those schools up to concurrency code. That will give them an extra five or ten years for their school building plan, at least for that area. The real predicament with the old school concurrency law is that it could block new developments. This could happen if there isn't enough school space for the kids coming in from the developments. If the schools didn't have space already, the school district would have to have plans to build more schools for those kids. The school district would have to show where they would get the money for the new schools. And the schools would have to be ready, or almost ready, in three years from the date a new development starts. Otherwise, if the developer couldn't afford to build a new school, the development would be stopped in its tracks. With HB 7203, the school districts, and everyone concerned, have a little more space to cope with this problem. Perhaps they may hope that future legislative sessions will relax the rules even further. With the coming downturn in property taxes, that might be unavoidable. It looks like overcrowded schools might be here to stay. | 
