At the end of January, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis signed Executive Order 19-32 which will get rid of Common Core from Florida’s standards.  The new standards will not be put into place until the fall school year of 2020, but the new curriculum will start to be formed now. The Florida Department of Education is going around to the different school districts presenting the plan of the governor’s Executive Order.  

History teacher Amy Dimond believes that this change will be good for schools.

“I like the fact that [Gov. Ron DeSantis] has dropped Common Core, what I fear is that he may have a second agenda where he is going to replace it with his own ideas about how information is delivered in the classroom,” Dimond said.

English teacher Adrienne Gent hopes that the new standards will be more specific.

“I would say more depth rather than going more broad, with more topics going deeper and more specific in a grade level,” Gent said. “ It would probably be better for kids then giving us more content to cover, to say here are the things you need to cover and make it more content rich, than across the board.”

The Florida Department of Education wants the public and teachers to get involved with developing the new standards which are due Jan. 1, 2020.

“I honestly think that the new standards should be created by teachers who have more recently been in the classroom, covering all of the different classes across the board and all of the different disciplines across the board,” Dimond said. “ I don’t think that some corporate manager should be in there deciding on what it is the standards should look like. I think that it should be teachers more recently in the classroom so that they have more experience in the discipline of the content area of what they are writing the standards for.”

West Shore teachers will have to adapt to the new state standards in the fall of 2020.

“I don’t think it will really impact us here as much as maybe other schools because we are so college ready,” Gent said.  “[Principal Rick] Fleming has always been really good at letting us implement the curriculum as long as we’re on track for AP or college bound, we have been meeting those standards regardless of how they are dictated.”

The Florida Department of Education will have less than a year to come up the new Florida Standards and assessments.

“I actually feel pretty confident in this governor and his plan,” Dimond said. “ I think that [Gov. Ron DeSantis] will put education back into the hands of educators but there is a lot of undoing that needs to be done in order for that to happen.  Change is always slow especially in the field of education so I think that I will eventually be impacted but at this point not directly. I think that it will take time to actually feel the changes that will affect us.”

As of now, the Florida Department of Education has put on hold all other changes including the adoption of new math instructional materials for the upcoming 2019-2020 school year.

“Well, whatever happens in Tallahassee is going to be trickled down into the classroom,” Dimond said.  “It really is a wait and see situation, it is no different when they change the governor of a state or when they change the superintendent of the schools. We just have to wait and see what the results are going to be.”

By Olivia Blackwell