Duval School Board to vote Jan. 6 on seeking Schools of Hope reform
Jacksonville Florida Times-Union | By Steve Patterson | December 30, 2025
Meeting a week before Florida’s 2026 legislative session starts, Duval County School Board members will vote Jan. 6 on asking lawmakers to change Florida’s Schools of Hope law letting select charter schools use school district buildings rent-free.
The law requiring school districts to allow “co-locating” schools ― putting new charters’ students, teachers and administrators inside taxpayer-funded schools at no charge ― has alarmed many school administrators statewide.
Introduced as a tool for children and families trapped in failing schools, critics have argued changes made to Schools of Hope in the Legislature’s 2025 session let good schools be lumped together with “persistently low-performing” ones and open to co-location rules.
The Jan. 6 vote will decide whether Duval County’s school district will update its legislative priorities to include Schools of Hope reforms sought by the Florida School Boards Association.
Those changes include asking the Legislature to “refine [Hope] eligibility criteria, so they accurately identify underperforming schools” and “preserve the authority of locally elected school boards to manage district property and resources in fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.”
Co-location has become a particular concern locally because the Duval district has been trying to consolidate underused schools to make them financially efficient, ideally costing less to run than the district receives in funding for each student enrolled. But putting a charter school inside an existing school won’t earn any funding, although it will increase costs for repairs and maintenance and might draw away some of the district’s current students.
Three charter school operators, only one approved so far to run Schools of Hope charters, filed paperwork in November seeking use of space in dozens of Duval schools. Statewide, said the center-left Florida Policy Institute, at least 690 colocation proposals for 450 schools were circulated by the state’s November deadline for operators to seek sites for the 2027-28 school year.
However, WJCT News reported Dec. 23 that only two Duval schools, Merrill Road Elementary and Fort Caroline Middle School remained under “active review” for colocation.
Adopting the new language in the Duval district’s legislative priorities would let school district lobbyists in Tallahassee publicly advocate for the changes during hearings that state House and Senate committees hold during the annual session, scheduled to run from Jan. 13 to March 13.
Whether the board will support that request is an open question, however.
“I think that all of us have been having very robust conversation with our legislators,” Vice-Chair April Carney told the board during a Dec. 16 meeting about the January agenda. “… And I feel like we’re making a lot of headway in those conversations. And it would be my preference to wait and see what is filed” by lawmakers.
But waiting isn’t required, said member Cindy Pearson, who is active in the state boards association and advanced the subject for a Jan. 6 vote.
“I feel like as elected officials we are capable of leading,” she told colleagues, adding that “I don’t see this language as controversial. … This is what we should be doing.”
In addition to refining Hope criteria and maintaining local school boards’ authority, the association asked the state to update metrics it uses to track enrollment and how buildings are being used and to clarify some definitions in state law so both school districts and charter operators understand fully how the law impacts them. The state’s Florida Inventory of School Houses (FISH) plays a key role in assessing how space is utilized in schools, but it’s often faulted as not reflecting current education practices.
