JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – With a few strokes of a pen, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave high school coaches across the state hope for a better financial future.
Senate Bill 538 was signed into law on Friday morning in the gym at Ribault High School, capping a years-long quest by coaches and extracurricular leaders for the right to earn better pay.
The bill also included a much tougher stance on rampant transfer issues that have made high school athletics feel like a year-round transfer portal. SB 178, known as the Teddy Bridgewater Act, was also signed by DeSantis. News4JAX has reported on the low pay for high school coaches for more than a decade.
“We want to make sure we are competitive with other states,” DeSantis said. “…We wanted to make sure Florida was keeping pace and these are things that would provide opportunities for folks.”
For far too long, Florida hasn’t even been close to other states in terms of compensation. And it will likely take some time for wages to catch up. Average teacher pay remains the second-lowest in the country. Supplemental pay is some of the worst around, too.
Since it is not a state mandate to boost pay for extracurricular leaders, the onus will be on individual coaches to ask districts for better compensation. The law will also allow districts to put positions like head coaches or band directors in an administrative role, with a salary that is commensurate with it.
The bill is targeted at all positions that are extracurricular. That could be a baseball coach, a debate club supervisor or a band director.
Andrew Ramjit, executive director of the Florida Coaches Coalition, the group formed in December 2021 to help fight for better pay, called it a “historic day,” and said the push for better pay takes on a new front now.
“For the school districts that don’t adopt in year 1 were going to be going to each of those districts were going to be going to board meetings with coaches, with parents, with student athletes and we’re going to bang the drum,” he said.
Watch the full news conference & signing below:
What are supplements?
Band directors, coaches, debate club leaders, all those positions currently receive union-negotiated supplements for their work outside of their teaching contract.
For a high school varsity head football coach in Florida, those range from a low of $3,038 (Broward) to a high of $8,317 (Charlotte).
Locally, the supplement for a head football coach in the area ranges from a low of $3,809 (Putnam County) to a high of $7,217 (Nassau County). The supplements are in addition to teaching pay.
In the News4JAX 11-county coverage region, four school districts (Columbia, Duval, Nassau, St. Johns) pay high school football head coaches on standard 10-month contracts. Three (Baker, Clay, Flagler) stretch those teaching contracts to 11 months.
The outliers (Bradford, Putnam, Suwannee, Union) have their high school football head coaches on 12-month contracts. Coaches who are not on 12-month contracts are not paid during the summer.
Head football coaches are often examples used because that job has become year-round. Coaches in Florida are largely 10-month contract employees and don’t receive pay for the two months of summer that they work.
With public school districts hemorrhaging money due to students leaving for private, home and charter school options, the most likely option for extracurricular leaders to earn more pay could come in the form of community help.
Think booster clubs and organizations.
“I think it’s good that communities now have an opportunity to try to show that appreciation and not just continue to have quality coaches plucked to other states, whether they’re assistants or head coaches or whatever,” said St. Augustine High head coach Brian Braddock.
“So, I think there’s a lot of good things about it, but I don’t think any coach here has some crazy idea of just unchecked, just making ungodly amounts of money. Like that’s not realistic, nor is that necessarily healthy, right? It’s high school sports. It’s scholastic athletics. We’re here to teach kids character and have an amazing, you know, be an amazing part of their high school experience. So, I think there’s a middle ground there.”
Braddock said that St. Johns County is positioned well from an athletics perspective, citing millage rate increases that are leading to new fields at both St. Augustine and Nease. Nassau County has also been the beneficiary of athletic enhancements due to millage rate increases.
Florida Education commissioner Stasi Kamoutsas touted the state’s robust school choice options but said that coaches absolutely need to be compensated better.
“For too long Florida coaches have been doing an extraordinary job while receiving modest stipends that are simply not making ends meet,” he said.
The transfer part of SB 538
The transfer part of the bill stands to move the needle significantly. It will cut down on non-traditional students
Students – identified in the bill as home education, charter school, private school, Florida Virtual School, alternative school, or traditional public school – would be limited to sports at one school per year unless unique circumstances.
Florida High School Athletic Association executive director Craig Damon thanked lawmakers and the Governor for listening to their pleas for help on the transfer issue that has run unchecked across the state. Damon has said during his trips to Tallahassee that athletes and their families had taken advantage of the state’s lenient policies about school choice and abused them for athletic gain.
The bill slaps restrictions on the ability to transfer freely and limits a student-athlete’s choice to school hop multiple times a year for sports purposes. When Damon spoke in front of a Senate committee earlier this year, he detailed a football player who changed teams in the playoffs after his original team was eliminated, and singled that out as the abuse the FHSAA needed help to curb.
“I want to thank Governor DeSantis for signing SB-538 and SB-178. Special thanks to Senator [Corey] Simon and Representative [Shane] Abbott for sponsoring these important bills. The great thing about living in the state of Florida is the ability to have school choice. Now stronger measures are in place to mitigate efforts to abuse the system,” Damon said in a statement.
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Sen. Corey Simon, a Republican who represents several Tallahassee-area counties, was the sponsor of the Senate version.
He’s a big-time sports proponent who played at Florida State and went on to become a first-round draft pick of the Eagles. So, it wasn’t surprising to see Simon lean on visible figures like Jimbo Fisher, Mike Alstott, Cris Carter and others during trips in Tallahassee.
Anderson said that lawmakers being able to talk to and hear from professional athletes and coaches about the topic left a significant impact.
“They provide a different type of guidance that a student is not going to get in the classroom and maybe a different type of guidance that they’re going to get at home too. So, they are truly some of the most valuable mentors to our students,” he said. “And I know no coach does it for the money, nor should they, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support them more fairly. And that’s what we’re seeking to do with this legislation.”
Where will the money come from?
This question comes up all the time, and it’s a very big one. Public schools are hemorrhaging money as students take advantage of vouchers to attend charter and private schools.
As students leave the public school system, roughly $9,000 in funding leaves with each one. That’s why public-school districts everywhere in Florida are facing record budget and funding shortfalls. St. Johns County, annually rated as the state’s top district, announced last month that it is facing a $23 million budget shortfall. The money for raises will not come on the backs of taxpayers, something that helped the bills sail through committee after committee.
The funding paths
The legislation creates two paths for extracurricular administrators to see an increase in pay. The first is a request through a superintendent to pay them above what their current union-negotiated supplement is, thus becoming an administrative-type role. Should districts do that with an extracurricular leader like a coach, that salary can’t exceed what the highest-paid administrator in the district earns.
The second and more likely avenue is pay through booster clubs. Smaller districts already use that option to pay coaches more, but larger ones in the News4JAX coverage region do not allow that. Coaches at districts in places like Duval and St. Johns counties have said that receiving extra pay through a booster club would be the easiest solution.
“If you have good programs and you’ve got boosters and parents that want to be involved in helping recruit someone good, why would we prevent that? Why would that be something that would be a problem?” DeSantis said. “I just never understood the hostility to doing that, and I’m glad we were able to get it across the finish line here.”
Brian Allen, Head Football Coach at Columbia High School, believes that some districts will be affected in different ways because of this bill. He said in his case, his principal doesn’t have the ability to hire another administrator.
“We’ve had the situation at our school that our principal wasn’t allowed to hire another administrator when the district is going through what they’re going through. So he’s having to get it done with a minimum amount of administrators on campus. So they’re definitely not going to go and say, okay, we’re going to give a head coach an administrative pay. So for me and probably many others that are across the state, that’s something that’s not gonna be the same for some school districts that will do it without the blink of an eye.”
Bridgewater bill signed
Also signed by DeSantis on Friday was SB 178, also known as the Teddy Bridgewater Act. That bill removes archaic punishment coaches were subjected to for helping out students. Bridgewater was the NFL quarterback who returned to his alma mater Miami Northwestern and revealed he was paying thousands of dollars for Uber rides and meals and recovery services for his players.
By letter of the FHSAA law, Bridgewater’s generosity was a major violation. That drew national scorn from every corner of the country, and led the FDOE’s Kamoutsas to very publicly call for change so that a person trying to help wouldn’t be punished.
Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-Miami-Dade County) sponsored the bill after Bridgewater was suspended for a year.
The Jones’ bill allows coaches to contribute up to $15,000 of their own money to help their players.
Ribault High School graduate and former NFL star Laveranues Coles, now an officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, said his mentors helped him more than he could put into words. Coles said he was thankful that the bill will allow coaches to continue to help students without the fear of breaking a rule.
“All these coaches give their time, their livelihoods, and parent us outside of our homes when we leave our homes on a daily basis,” Coles said. “And to think that my coaches could have got in trouble for helping me out, because Lord knows, they truly helped me out coming up. And I was invested in by the entire community, not only by coaches, teachers, and everybody.”