ST. LUCIE COUNTY — St. Lucie Public Schools is pursuing new ways to generate revenue as state education funding shifts, including expanding services for homeschool families, leasing district facilities and developing adult workforce training programs.
Speaking during a district workshop, Superintendent John R. Prince said Florida's education funding landscape has changed significantly as more state dollars are directed toward scholarship programs for students outside the traditional public school system.
"As funding sources have changed, Florida Empowerment Scholarships right now, the state is funding about four and a half to five billion dollars of students that they've never funded before — homeschool students, private school students — and none of these students that are taking advantage of these scholarships have any accountability," Prince said.
Rather than viewing the growth of homeschooling solely as a challenge, Prince said the district sees an opportunity to offer specialized classes and services that families could purchase while continuing to educate their children at home.
"We have a market there for homeschool families. There are homeschool families that want to take advantage, and they want to pay us so that their kid can go to one of those ACE classes or an AP class or an industry certification. Those are markets," Prince said.
"We're now a provider for Florida Empowerment Scholarships, and we're going to provide opportunities for us to market à la carte classes that maybe the student is only on your campus for a few hours participating in these activities," he said. "But we can monetize that to the advantage of the district and provide a service to families that are homeschooling their children."
The district is also looking beyond classroom instruction by making greater use of school facilities when they are not being used for educational purposes.
"We are beginning to lease out and heavily push leasing our facilities to different organizations," Prince said. "We've got beautiful auditoriums, we've got cafeterias, we've got large meeting places, but these are opportunities to rent or lease our facilities and provide additional revenue streams for the district."
Prince also said the district is exploring new educational offerings aimed at adults seeking new job skills, particularly as automation changes workforce demands and some employers reduce operations.
"That is another market that we have not yet explored, and that is creating evening opportunities for adult education," Prince said. "You saw that Amazon is shutting their doors for a few years. Those employees have to be repurposed, provided different employability skills."
He said those classes could help prepare workers for changing industries while benefiting the local economy.
"Maybe as more of our industries go to robotics and AI, we can provide a service with our local community to bring in those displaced employees, provide them different skills for different markets," Prince said. "And then put them out to where they can have some different employability skills that keep them in our community."
Prince said the initiatives are in various stages of implementation as the district works to adapt to evolving financial pressures.