As we have discussed the budget landscape over the last few weeks, we mainly focused on the operational budget. This week, I’d like to discuss the school district capital plan and the changes that have occurred there this year. 

The school district’s budget has two very distinct buckets of money, as defined by law: operational and capital. Our operational budget is what keeps our schools running by funding salaries, materials and energy costs. The capital budget pays for our buildings and the maintenance of those buildings.  

Those two budgets are funded from different sources and cannot be intermingled. The capital budget is funded primarily from local sources like property taxes, impact fees and sales taxes. The state does not provide funding for capital needs.  

Orange County has historically been a high-growth area with hundreds of families moving into the area every week. Today, much of the growth in Orange County is in our area.  

To determine new schools, the district looks at development plans in each municipality and makes projections of future school enrollment based on that development.  

There is an advanced planning group that reviews this data each year and adjusts or makes changes to the 10-year capital plan accordingly. This is why, two years ago, four new schools were placed in the plan for the Apopka area. 

Since then, the Legislature expanded school choice laws that allow any parent to apply for and be granted funding to use for an education choice outside of public schools. With that change, combined with lower birth rates and stricter immigration enforcement, our local schools have seen a dramatic decrease in enrollment.  

The effect that it has on future capital planning cannot be understated. We can no longer look at a future development and assume that it will produce a certain number of public school children, since we can no longer project where those parents will send their children to school — or whether they will have children at all. (The U.S. birth rate has fallen to 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 level required to maintain population.) 

The result of declining enrollment has resulted in the district making a big shift in future building needs. The 10-year capital plan this year changed, and almost all new schools were moved outside the 10-year window, except for two new schools, both locatedin Apopka.  

Those two schools will relieve a couple of elementary schools and Wolf Lake Middle as they are the only ones currently needing relief. The biggest change is that the relief high school is no longer in the 10-year plan. 

Apopka High School has not met its projected growth, despite significant new residential development in the area. The school has not grown in six years and currently has 120 fewer students than it did in 2021–22, including a decline of 45 students just this past year. 

Again, we assumed that new residential development would mean more students, as it always has in the past. This is no longer true. For whatever reason — more private schools in the area, more homeschooling, more virtual options, more charter schools— the new growth is not producing more students at Apopka High School.  

Plus, with a new K-12 charter school coming to the Wyld Oaks area, we’ll experience fewer students — not more — in most Apopka public schools, even as houses continue to be built. 

Besides building fewer new schools, the district has to look at current schools and make adjustments to use available space more efficiently because another new law allows charter schools to be given access to open space in traditional public schools. That, combined with the financial burden that underenrolled schools put on the district, resulted in the district consolidating seven schools this year. 

In Apopka, there were a couple of small, targeted shifts recently in which neighborhoods split between different schools were rezoned to the same school. This moved 16 middle school students and 92 elementary students into schools that had extra room.  

It was not a major rezoning, as was incorrectly stated on social media.  

We will probably begin to see other changes like this to maximize available space in all of our current traditional public schools in the future. It’s a challenging time for planning and maximizing resources, but all these decisions are made thoughtfully.