It is thanks to teachers like Adrianna that our 4th graders are first in the nation on their NAEP scores. Our teacher pay initiatives help us recruit and retain great teachers, including Teacher of the Year Adrianna Swearingen who is with us today. My budget proposal for this year includes another $1.25 billion for even more pay increases. Over the past four years, we have invested a record three billion dollars to raise teacher pay. Let kids be kids!Īs we deliver win after win for parents, we have also provided historic support for our teachers. We must always protect the innocence of our children. This includes parents like Tia Bess, a mom of three who has fought for her children to be educated without having an agenda imposed on them. We protected our children from indoctrination and sexualized curriculum, and we stood up for parents against the woke mob. We protected women’s sports – as the father of two daughters I think it is important that they have the opportunity to compete with fairness and integrity. We were one of the first states to enact a Parents’ Bill of Rights and curriculum transparency. School systems are important, but they exist to serve the students, parents and the community, not to supersede the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children. We also lead the nation in protecting the rights of parents. Today, she is a college graduate, her three older brothers are college graduates, two of her younger sisters are in college, and the rest are on track to follow in her footsteps.Īs she likes to say in her own words “When people say that school choice doesn’t work, I simply show them my family.” Hera has 11 brothers and sisters, making education hard to afford for their parents, but, because of our school choice scholarships, she and her siblings have been able to attend high-quality schools. Through these programs, we have delivered for people like Hera Varmah. Last session, under the leadership of Speaker Renner, we enacted the largest expansion of school choice in American history.įlorida has close to 1.5 million students enrolled full-time in various choice programs – from private scholarships to charter schools to choice options within school districts. Let’s continue to make Florida the envy of the nation.

The 2023 Legislative Session was monumental, and it is incumbent upon us to build upon those accomplishments as we continue to deliver results. We have set the standard for limited government: Florida has the fewest state employees per capita and the lowest state government cost per capita.įlorida’s crime rate is at a 50-year low.Īnd we have the lowest unemployment rate of all large states. #1 in GDP growth among large states, and better than most countries in the world.

#1 for net domestic in-migration for the third consecutive year. #1 for parental involvement in education. Our choices have produced results that are second to none: In this time for choosing, Florida has chosen well.įiscal responsibility over debt and profligacy. The failures are not a result of chance but of choices made by elected officials to put ideology over sound policy. It is not surprising that we have witnessed – and continue to witness – a great migration of Americans away from cities and states pursuing these failed policies, with Florida serving as a refuge for freedom and sanity. Florida now has more manufacturing jobs than New York, and added twice as many jobs as New York in the past year, and our unemployment rate is 1.4 percentage points lower. Violent crime is up, robberies are up, and a recent Stanford University study shows that businesses are leaving in droves.įlorida now has millions more residents than New York, yet New York’s budget is twice the size of Florida’s. Of course, soft-on-crime policies have devastated public safety in Chicago.Ĭalifornia’s per capita spending is triple our state’s, and they now face a $68 billion budget deficit. In Illinois, residents are saddled with high taxes, while spendthrift politicians continue to spend and borrow at some of the highest rates in the nation – with massive unfunded liabilities that will require even higher taxes in the future.

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