In The News

The Argus Foundation over the last two months has taken Florida Department of Education data from the end of year assessment scores to compare Sarasota County Schools, and schools within the district, in English and in math. This month we are going to cover science and social studies.

The Argus Foundation last month began to publish scores from the Florida Department of Education comparing the Sarasota School District to the state average and other districts and also comparing our schools within the district. We began with English Language Arts and from there, we compared the data sets for math.

The newest scores for the state, school districts and individual schools have been published by the Florida Department of Education for the 2022-2023 school year. This year marks the beginning of new standards and assessments across the state

The City of Sarasota is in the middle of some very important and very difficult zoning text amendments to encourage the building of attainable housing within the city, especially in downtown. It is not an easy piece of legislation and has been years in the making as it started with some very difficult comprehensive plan amendments that required a supermajority vote.

Growth is a hot topic in Sarasota social media these days. If you explore social media community groups, it is very common to find complaints about growth within the same or successive social media posts about infrastructure, traffic, affordable housing and other concerns. Many times posts will ask for the stoppage of growth until affordable housing, infrastructure, and traffic are fixed. In reality, growth is the answer to these problems.

Last month we wrote a column on the importance of considering government fees and how they impact affordable housing. Those fees do not magically get absorbed by a developer; they get passed along to the homeowner in the cost of housing. We asked governments to consider how fees impact affordable housing when they are looking at raising them.