This week the public got a stark affirmation that the needs of average families and children don't count with legislatators. One of their first acts was to pass a law to protect the trust that funds handguns and other weapon purchases. Now that's amazing. They are the ones who authorized in law all these State Trust Funds: the Lawton Chiles Endowment for Children and Elders, the Sadowski Fund for affordable housing, environmental trust funds, etc. They don't even pause when it comes to invading these important safety net funds rather than make tough budget decisions. But the gun fund. That's a whole different matter. Why? Because the gun lobby has bought the votes of the legislature with the coin of the realm. Too bad the kids couldn't afford to pay to play.

Miami has a rich tradition of powerful community leadership. Over the years, advocates have successfully tackled homelessness, education, health care and community safety. Additionally, the magic city has led the way in establishing a Children’s Trust, a special district supported by local taxes and entirely dedicated to children.

During our time in South Florida, the Worst To First team toured a world class facility, the United Way Center For Excellence in Early Education. This center is a phenomenal laboratory for cutting edge early learning and has partnerships with fourteen universities including Harvard. On top of running their own exemplary early learning school, the staff trains, certifies and provides resources to early learning schools throughout the region as well.

Visiting the center helped me understand the challenges and opportunities for early learning in South Florida and also underlined the need, statewide, to leverage this marvelous resource and all that they have learned about how to prepare our kids for success in school and life.

"Walking across the state can be tiring," said Bud Chiles, as he continued putting one foot in front of the other on his walk through Miami today. When asked about what keeps him marching on, he states, "Florida's kids." At the teams first stop, the Miami Children's Museum, he had ample opportunity to spend time with that motivation; about 50 young children. He bumped into someone special as well, The Cat in the Hat. As one of Dr. Seuss's most beloved storybook characters, The Cat in the Hat stopped by the museum to celebrate his creator's birthday and interact with the children present.

Geoff Chiles, Bud's son and a Worst To First team member, said, "The museum was an inspiration to me. To see the incredible exhibits for kids and spend time celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday, a man who has inspired so many young minds, was fantastic. Dave Berry, a famous author, was also in attendance and he read to all the kids gathered there."

In addition to the Dr. Seuss celebration, the Worst To First team got a tour of the museum and learned that the museum is also a charter school to about 270 children. All in all, the day was special and the company purrr-fect!

During my statewide walk, everyday on the road seems like a great day when inspired by the work being done by wonderful children's advocates in the cities and counties I visit. For example, on a trip to Fort Lauderdale last week, I met with The Children's Services Council of Broward County, United Way, and a number of other community organizations and leaders. Learning about the work these groups are doing, in addition to others around the state, often leads me to conclude that local community problems can be solved locally. If this is true, it would seem that control over education and social services be retained at a community level.

Do you agree? Should local control over education and social services be retained at the community level?

Five years ago, Akin came to the Boys and Girls Club of Central Florida, the Osceola branch. He was, by his own admission, a troubled kid; failing classes, in trouble at school, acting out at home, angry and mistrusting. After half a decade, however, Akin has changed. He is now an A student, model citizen, and recognized as a national teen representative at international Boys and Girls Club conferences! He is also living proof of how effective local community-based after school programs can be in terms of turning lives around.

Stories like these teach us some powerful lessons, ones that must be heeded. From them, we learn that young people need encouragement, a wholesome place to interact with peers, play sports and participate in character enrichment activities. Given Akin’s story, is it not foolish for the state of Florida to be so shortsighted when allocating resources to programs like Boys and Girls Clubs? The investment up front in programs like these, ones that yield such great return, need to be funded. Doesn’t Florida want to produce youth, like Akin, who dream about going to Ivy League schools, instead of teens pondering time behind bars?

Akin's hope is to attend Harvard University one day. After spending time with him and people like Andrew Kirkland, service director at the Osceola branch and a fantastic role model, my bet is on Akin.

After a few years of progress in developing better quality preschool classes in Florida, the state's pre-kindergarten program is being looked at for cuts by the Florida Legislature. The state's lawmakers meet for 60 days every year, beginning in March, to decide how much they'll spend on education. Next month they will be looking at a $29 million budget shortfall in statewide pre-K programs, according to a story this week in the Orlando Sentinel.

Those cuts would hurt quality in a pre-K program that is already among the poorest in the nation, according to national rankings. In a report from the National Institute for Early Education Research, Florida ranked 34th out of 38 states that fund pre-K programs, spending about $2,500 per child in 2008 compared with an average of more than $4,000.

As reported by the Tampa Tribune last year, the NIEER also graded Florida poorly for quality programming, because Florida's pre-K teachers don't need bachelor's degrees unless they work in the summer voluntary program, and during the school year, Florida requires only one teacher in each pre-K class to have a child development associate credential. The state also gets low marks for not providing teachers with more training or offering children at least one meal a day, and no vision, hearing and health screenings.

Part of Florida's problem has been growing enrollment in preschool, which is popular with parents and helping improve school readiness among kindergarteners. The statewide deficit is projected to balloon to at least $42 million next year if enrollment continues on track and with no more cuts, according to the Agency for Workforce Innovation. Last year, lawmakers cut the pre-K budget in mid-year, cutting money to run the classes and supervise pre-K sites.

"What you will see is an erosion of quality," said Karen Willis, executive director of the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County, which expects to be out of pre-K money in May.

More than 141,000 children are enrolled in pre-K programs in Florida, which include private schools and child-care centers and public schools.

Our partners at the Children's Forum linked to the big news this week, via their Facebook page, about the Obama administration's overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law. There's a good summary of what President Obama is proposing from the New York Times and Business Week, or you can just go to www.WhiteHouse.gov to get the information straight from the source.

The administration's overhaul of Child Left Behind will include changes in how schools are evaluated, as well as the elimination of a 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency, which would be replaced by a requirement for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.”

The White House is also revising federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded on academic progress, rather than by according to the numbers of students, especially poor students. That probably means big changes for the annual budgeting process in Florida school districts.

Overall, Obama is proposing a 7.6 percent increase in U.S. education spending -- $49.7 billion to fund education programs in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2011. The proposal includes increased spending on early childhood education, competitive grants to encourage school innovation and new programs to train teachers.

The Obama administration said it aims to make the U.S. the world leader in college graduation rates by 2020. At Worst To First, our goal is to make Florida the national leader by 2020. We'll need your help to get there.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing a lot of resources in promoting innovation in America's schools, including a project getting under way in Tampa that is intended to improve teacher effectiveness. Foundation co-chair Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, writes in a column in this week's Newsweek that ingenuity can help make the difference between a bright future and a bleak one.

"Our education system has been fundamental to our success as a nation, but the way we prepare students has barely changed in 100 years. If we don't find ways to improve our schools, making them more effective and more accessible, we won't fulfill our commitment to equal opportunity, and we will become less competitive with other countries," Gates writes.

Gates is promoting incentives and processes to help teachers teach better, and his foundation is also looking at ways that interactive technology can help schools deliver the right resources to students.

You can read more about the programs the foundation is supporting in Bill Gates' annual letter here.

An editorial in today's Treasure Coast newspapers points out that the "No. 8 in the nation" ranking from Education Week isn't quite what it seems to be. The magazine's report card for Florida looks good at first, but Florida is being "graded on the curve, and the competition isn’t too tough," the newspaper writes

While Education Week praises Florida for gains by poor students, and equal distribution of funds to school districts, the magazine didn't actually account for last year’s budget cuts, which capped off a decade-long trend of declining state support for schools.

The Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy also calls attention to our D-minus for student achievement (scores on national standardized tests), F for funding per student, and F for college readiness (the state’s high-school graduation rate is 45th in the country).

Read more by downloading the issue brief from the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy here.