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Paul Flemming: Panicked workers, poor choices
Paul Flemming · Capital Ideas · Published: June 03. 2011
Take a deep breath. Do the math.
More than 650,000 participants in the Florida Retirement System, along with more than 300,000 retired beneficiaries, are in a tizzy.
Public employees - teachers and principals, cops and judges, state and county workers, bus drivers and mosquito-control sprayers - are confused, anxious, angry and uncertain.
Those emotional states, in combination with poor math skills and sketchy information, could lead to tragic choices. Mark Davy, a Sarasota investment adviser and portfolio manager with just about nothing to gain, is trying to help.
On July 1, new rules hit:
Working FRS members must pay 3 percent of their salaries into their own retirement plan.
Deferred Retirement Option Program enrollees will earn 1.3-percent interest on accumulated pension benefits, down from the current 6.5 percent.
New cost-of-living allowance accrual goes away, chipping away for at least five years at the top-level 3 percent and instead pro-rating the COLA to years of service already earned.
All the other changes apply to new hires. Let's leave those alone for now.
Read more of this Tallahassee.com article here.
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Florida graduation rate increases, but still far behind nation
Florida Tribune Staff, 06/07/2011 
Despite a significant rise in the state's graduation rate, a new report shows that Florida still lags well behind the national average. Education Week's annual report titled "Diplomas Count" has Florida ranked 44th in the nation with a 63.9 percent graduation rate in 2008, which is far below the national average of 71.7 percent. While Florida continues to lag behind the rest of the nation, the state did have a 12.4 percent increase in the graduation rate from 1998 to 2008, which is higher than the 6.1 percent national increase during the same time period. The rise is the fourth largest graduation rate increase in the nation, ranking only behind Tennessee (20 percent increase), North Carolina (15.4 percent) and New York (14.1 percent). "Just as Americans have been following the stock market and employment reports for signs of an economic turnaround, education-watchers have been on the lookout for improving graduation rates for the better part of a decade," Christopher Swanson, vice-president of Editorial Projects in Education, said in a statement. "It looks like we are finally seeing strong signs of a broad-based educational recovery, which we hope will gain further momentum." Read more of this Florida Current article here.
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