An education advocate explains the district’s strategy and its struggles.
By Rhatia Murphy
Original Air Date: July 8, 2026
Host: The Sarasota school district just earned another “A” in this year’s state rating. But academic success is being eclipsed by declining student enrollment in public schools, and that produces budget pressures. Rhatia Murphy lays out the challenge.
[School bell rings]
Rhatia Murphy: Sarasota County keeps growing—new housing, new apartments, new families moving into the region.
Wilkinson Elementary was among several schools subject to a potential takeover by for-profit charter schools. The district responded by expanding the neighborhood school to become a combined elementary and middle school. | Photo courtesy Sarasota School District
But inside many traditional public schools, district leaders are facing a different reality: fewer students, empty seats and shrinking budgets.
This spring, Sarasota County Schools moved forward with plans to cut 180 instructional staff positions and 79 classified staff jobs, including custodial, food service and technology positions.
The district says the pressure is coming from several directions at once: declining enrollment, the end of pandemic-era funding, inflation and Florida’s rapidly expanding school voucher system.
Carol Lerner, a longtime public education advocate in Sarasota, says the issue is not just that fewer children live here.
Carol Lerner: The way I see it, it’s what you might call a conjunctional crisis. It’s all different things moving in.
RM: Lerner says students are being spread across more educational models than ever before—traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschool programs, virtual schools and now microschools.
That matters because school funding follows students. But students do not usually leave one classroom all at once.
Students at Wilkinson Elementary. | Courtesy Sarasota Schools
CL: Two from one classroom, perhaps, or only one from one classroom—maybe ten from one school and twenty from another school and so on, and different grades within that—and then the school has, also, fixed expenses. They still have to pay the same custodial staff.
RM: In Sarasota County, about 4,800 students used state vouchers this school year. According to district budget figures reported by Suncoast Searchlight, that redirected nearly $45 million from Sarasota County Schools into the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program.
More than 60% of those voucher students were already enrolled in private school or homeschool.
Lerner says that has changed the financial picture for districts like Sarasota.
CL: The funding for the vouchers comes out of the districts’ budget. It’s costing Sarasota $45 million now to pay for the vouchers a year, and that’s why we had to have all these layoffs.
RM: At the same time, publicly funded charter schools remain part of the public system—but privately managed, for-profit charter schools are now being added to the mix. Lerner says that distinction can be confusing for parents.
CL: There’s the traditional public schools; there’s the charter schools that are viewed as part of our school district, but as I said, they’re privately managed.
Wilkinson Elementary students leave school on a warm October afternoon | Photo: Emily Le Coz via Suncoast Searchlight
RM: The result is a fragmented education landscape. Sarasota County’s overall student population has not collapsed, but traditional campuses are seeing uneven enrollment—with some schools full or growing and others with large numbers of open seats.
District data updated in May shows available seats at several campuses, including Wilkinson Elementary, Booker Middle, Heron Creek Middle, McIntosh Middle, Woodland Middle and others.
That imbalance became urgent after Florida’s Schools of Hope law opened the door for some for-profit charter operators to co-locate inside underused public school campuses.
Rather than close schools, Sarasota County Schools developed what it calls its Future Focused plan.
The plan includes converting Alta Vista, Gulf Gate, Wilkinson and Brentwood elementary schools into K-8 campuses, transforming Brookside Middle into a technology-focused magnet and creating Junior Achievement hubs at Emma E. Booker Elementary and Booker Middle.
District leaders say the goal is to make public schools more attractive to families who now have more options.
Slide from a presentation to the school board.
Rather than closing campuses experiencing declining enrollment, Sarasota County Schools chose a different approach through its Future Focused initiative. The district redesigned several elementary schools with specialized academic themes intended to attract families and expand school choice options.
Publicly available enrollment data currently extend through the district’s Month 2 report for the 2025–26 school year. While those figures provide an early snapshot of enrollment, they do not yet offer enough information to determine the long-term impact of the initiative.
To increase enrollment, the school district is adding programs and specialties to underused schools. Slide from a presentation to the school board.
District officials say the redesign effort is intended to respond to multiple factors affecting enrollment including declining birth rates, rising housing costs, increased competition from private schools and the continued expansion of state school choice programs. Whether the redesigned schools ultimately reverse enrollment trends will likely become clearer as additional enrollment reports are released throughout the school year.
CL: The PTA has a lot of resources. They do a lot of lobbying around strong public schools and such. So that’s one of the goals of this parent group, but that’s only one of many. So some good things happened out of adversity.
RM: But Lerner says the long-term challenge is bigger than one budget year.
Another strategy: Locating childcare and other services at public schools. Slide from a staff presentation to the school board.
Birth rates are declining nationwide. Housing costs are pushing some younger families away. Some parents are leaving public schools because of politics, curriculum concerns, religious preferences, specialized education needs or fear over immigration enforcement.
That leaves Sarasota County Schools trying to do two things at once: compete for families while also protecting a public system built to serve everyone.
Sarasota County Schools remains one of Florida’s highest-rated districts. But academic success alone may no longer be enough.
As more families spread across charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, vouchers and other options, the financial foundation of traditional public education is being tested.
The question facing Sarasota is no longer simply how to educate its kids.
It’s whether the public school system can continue to serve every child. Because every student who leaves takes funding with them.
And the competition for students becomes a little more intense.
For WSLR News, I’m Rhatia Murphy.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.