What is a School Advisory Council?
The School Advisory Council (SAC) is a team of people representing various segments of the community–parents, teachers, students, administrators, support staff, business/ industry people and other interested community members. The purpose of a SAC is to assist in the preparation and evaluation (developing and evaluating) of the results of the school improvement plan and to assist the principal with the annual school budget. Additionally, SAC receives funds "to be used at the discretion of the School Advisory Committee A portion of the money should be used for implementing the school improvement plan." "The improvement plan shall include performance indicators which are measurable." "Funding for use by the School Advisory Councils should be allocated directly to the School Advisory Councils, should be clearly earmarked for their use and is not subject to override by the Principal or interim approvals by school district staff. These moneys may be expended only on programs or projects selected by the school advisory council. These moneys may not be used for capital improvements."
Each school in the State of Florida must have a SAC. By law, each SAC must be composed of the principal and an “appropriately balanced” number of “stakeholders.” These individuals must be representative of the ethnic, racial and economic makeup of the community served by the school. High schools and vocational technical centers must have students on the SACs. Middle and junior high schools may to include students on their SAC. The majority of SAC members (over 50 percent) must not be employed by the school on whose SAC they serve.
"The whole point of school improvement is data-driven decision making. The process is SUPPOSED to be fairly simple and straight forward: The SAC reviews relevant data (which is much more than test scores), identifies problem areas, develops improvement strategies, monitors their implementation, and then starts the whole process over when the next round of data is available." -- KM, DOE