- March 14, 2025
Bill Corkran
AGE: 64
FAMILY: married 44 years, three kids, six grandchildren
QUIRKY FACT: Was mugged about 100 times as a police decoy
BIO: A resident of Flagler County since 1989, Bill Corkran is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. He was part of the Iron Workers Local 40 and helped build the Twin Towers. He is retired from the New York City Transit Police Department. He taught at West Babylon High and West Babylon Middle school, in New York, as well as Deltona Middle, Buddy Taylor Middle and Flagler Palm Coast High schools, in Florida. He is a past president of the Flagler County Educators Association. He was part of the FCEA Bargaining Team and on the Florida Educators Association Delegate Convention. He is a member of the Florida Geographical Alliance. He received his Bachelor of Science from New York Institute of Technology and his Master of Science from Long Island University.
What is your attitude toward high-stakes testing?
I am not in favor of the FCAT. It puts too much pressure on the students to have one test decide whether they’re going to graduate from high school. The FCAT ... was put out to help teachers see where the kids were deficient. ... But then it turned into let’s compare counties and schools to each other. But every year, the state would change the goalpost. ... So a lot of these students that failed the first test by two points, they figured they had a good shot at passing it the following year, but they didn’t because the score went up higher.
I taught both 11th- and 12th-grade social studies, so my area was never tested in FCAT, so all my scores depended on other teachers, which really isn’t fair, either. But you get a 12th-grade student who’s taking the test for the last time before graduation, and then they come into your classroom and they sit down and they start crying because they’ve just been told they failed the FCAT again and they won’t be graduating with a high school diploma. That is a horrible thing. ...
But I agree with what they’re starting to come up with, which is the end-of-the-year test. If we test the student at the beginning of the year and test them again at the end, you can use the same test because they’re not going to remember the questions. ...
I think they intend to get rid of the FCAT test. ... As a School Board member, I’d be pushing to get rid of it as soon as possible.
What can be done to reduce the School Board budget?
I’m probably going to get in trouble with a few people, but we have too many administrators, too many people working in non-teaching positions.
We also have the Phoenix Program next door to FPC; Indian Trails has a whole vacant wing. Phoenix students could go into that wing and Pathways, which we’re renting all those portables for $8,000 to $10,000 I believe per month, we could put Pathways into the building that Phoenix is now in. ...
Some of the areas are mandated by the state, so there’s not much we can do with that money. We either use it or lose it. And it doesn’t affect the teaching at all. Most of our capital outlay that we used to have has gone to the charter schools, so we don’t have that money now.
What is the biggest challenge facing the School Board in the next four years?
The No. 1 biggest challenge is the governor. He keeps reducing our budget. ... They gave us a starting point in March. School hasn’t even started, and they reduced it already. He had promised to put money into education, but he’s still taking money out of education and as a result, personal income in Flagler County or Florida vs. the amount of money that we pay for each student’s education has put us in 50 out of 51 in the nation. ...
We can’t keep reducing your budget. Eventually you’re going to have to fire your teachers, have class sizes of 50. It’s a horrible situation. All a School Board member can do is send letters to the state, start a petition with the other counties. ...
The scheduling at the high school right now, you know all the teachers have first planning period that in effect eliminates 22 teaching days a year from the high school schedule. We should be educating our students more; we’re now educating them less. They say that they save $2 million by doing that, but you shouldn’t be saving money on students. ...
What is your vision for Flagler County schools in the next four years?
Flagler County has always had a very good reputation. When the FCAT test first came out, we were always in the top 10%. We had plenty of money in the budget, so we could do things. Now the money is tight and ... there’s so much testing going on that it’s hard to have good continuity in the classroom and teaching.
I still have a very good vision for Flagler County because the teachers and the staff are dedicated to the students. ... Teachers haven’t had pay raises in a long time because the budgets have been bad. Administrators haven’t had pay raises in the past four years, so everybody has shared in the hurt. ... There’s a collegial atmosphere between the union and the School Board, and actually everybody thinks the School Board is running all this. It really isn’t. The School Board is only in control of the finance budget and policy decision-making. They have no day-to-day business with the school. ...
Everybody’s under the misconception that we have a high dropout rate because we see the graduation rate at 83.5% or somewhere around there. Our actual dropout rate is 1.7%. The reason there’s such a large gap in there is because the way the state is measuring this. They take the ninth grade, count the numbers through from the ninth grade and at the end of the 12th grade, they count how many of those students that have actually graduated. Well, you have some students that take five years to graduate; there are some students who left and transferred; you have ESE students who can stay there until they’re 21 — so you’ve got this large gap and everybody thinks the dropout rate is 17%. It’s not.
