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| BOG Vice-Chair Sydney Kitson, House Majority Leader Ray Rodrigues, and Rep. Ramon Alexander |
The BOG currently denies PBF money to the three universities that finish in the “Bottom 3” of the performance metrics each year no matter how much they improve.
BOG Vice-Chair Sydney Kitson said that the BOG Budget and Finance Committee, which he chairs, will talk about recommending an end to that policy in October 2018. He made the announcement last week during a meeting of the committee.
“Last October we started a discussion about re-doing the scoring so that we don’t have three schools at the bottom every year,” Kitson said. “Governor Tom Kuntz, who was here at the beginning of the model, always said that there would be a point in time that we would need to revisit the Bottom 3. So with the improvements that we are seeing in the metrics and scores, we believe that now is the time. We’re going to have to be very, very thoughtful about this process and about what we do. But this committee will be prepared to have this discussion in October.”
None of the BOG members who were present at the committee meeting made any comments in support of continuing the “Bottom 3” policy after Kitson spoke.
State Rep. Ramon Alexander, D-Tallahassee, co-led a bipartisan effort to overhaul the PBF metrics during the last legislative session with House Majority Leader Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero. Their plan called for an end to the “Bottom 3.”
“This ‘Bottom 3’ concept within the Board of Governors is a flawed system,” Alexander said in December 2017. “It is a tiered system. And it is not in the best interests of all of our state universities.”
“So institutions like Florida A&M University, University of North Florida, University of West Florida, Florida Gulf Coast…they’re making the internal changes and the system is designed for them to lose,” he said. “And then when they make the adjustments and they improve their standing, and they get out of the ‘Bottom 3’ the policy changes and they have to hit the reset button in order to compete again. It makes no sense.”
Alexander is an alumnus of FAMU. FAMU has been denied PBF in three of the five years of the program. FAMU improved from a 65 score last year to a 72 this year but still did not receive any PBF money because it was in the “Bottom 3.”
Rodrigues tried to get the Florida Senate to agree to getting rid of the “Bottom 3” and other PBF changes last session, but in final negotiations he agreed to just tell the BOG to get moving on working out a plan to make the performance-based funding (PBF) system fair. The amendment by Rodrigues that the Senate accepted said that “by October 1, 2019, the Board of Governors, in consultation with the state universities, shall submit to the Legislature recommendations for future consideration on the most efficient process to achieve a complete performance-based continuous improvement model focused on outcomes that provides for the equitable distribution of performance funds.”
The News Service of Florida reported that Rodrigues wants the changes to include providing PBF money based on “‘continuous improvement’ by the schools regardless of how they are ranked against each other.”
“That is my vision,” Rodrigues told the News Service of Florida. “We will see what comes to us in the study.”
Rodrigues works at FGCU, which has also been denied PBF money before due to previously being in the “Bottom 3.”
View video of the BOG Budget and Finance Committee meeting from last week here. The comments Kitson made about the “Bottom 3” begin at 1:28:27.
