A Non-Standard Standard

Florida law fixes the grading scale for every district in the state: a D is 60 to 69, worth one quality point, defined as lowest acceptable progress. What Florida does not fix is what a teacher must put in the box when a student hands in nothing. Teachers are saying a Lee County policy from the chief academic office now answers that with a 50. Sixty-six other districts answer it however they like. Here is what that does to a diploma, and why a district losing a statewide race for money would reach for it. Our fact-check rides at the bottom.

By Amber Cebull and Ali Olivo · August 6, 2026

The memo is a page and a half, addressed to School Staff. For 2026-2027, it says, our school will be following the School District of Lee County's Secondary Grading Handbook. Most of what follows is unremarkable. One grade per week. Work returned within a week. No pop quizzes. Then, under Grading Work:

The lowest grade to be put into the gradebook for a general education student for an assessment / assignment is a 50%. If work has not been turned in or completed, this must be documented in the grade notes in Focus.
A Lee County high school staff memo, 2026-27

It closes the way these things close. Following these procedures is a staff expectation and requirement, daily. Non-compliance will result in a meeting with administration.

Start here: What a 50 does to an average, and to a diploma

It is not in the handbook

So we got the handbook. Twenty-two pages, updated March 10, 2026. The floor is not in it. Lowest grade, minimum grade, missing work, not turned in: none of those phrases appear anywhere in the document the memo says it is summarizing. Neither does the Amnesty Calendar the memo also imposes.

Nor is this loose paraphrase. Where the handbook says something, the memo quotes it exactly, including the entire make-up work paragraph, word for word from page 20. The memo is faithful everywhere except the two rules that change what a grade means.

What the handbook prescribes instead is a 4.0 scale applied by individual grade entry, in its own words, to balance accountability while promoting resiliency. That is a real idea and it is not a floor. The same page prints the state scale as Florida writes it, F equals zero to 59. Page 3 affirms that students are entitled to grades that provide an accurate measure of their achievement.

The board policy says the opposite, and already fixed this

Above the handbook sits the only level the elected board votes on: Policy 5421, Grading, adopted June 27, 2023. Four sentences.

The School Board requires that the District's grading scale be consistent with State statutes. Furthermore, the Board believes that each student's grades should accurately reflect his/her degree of accomplishment of those expected learning outcomes.
School Board of Lee County, Policy 5421

A student who turned in nothing has a degree of accomplishment. It is zero. A 50 is off by fifty points, in one direction, every time, which is a bias rather than an error. The policy delegates procedures to the Superintendent, and the handbook is that procedure. So the chain runs board policy, statute, handbook, then a memo on one desk. The floor appears only at the last link.

The teachers have a position on this too, and it is now on the record. We asked the Teachers Association of Lee County where it stands. Its president answered:

Grades should accurately reflect what a student has learned and demonstrated in relation to the academic standards, not an artificially assigned minimum score. Every student and their families deserve honest, meaningful feedback, and every teacher deserves the professional autonomy to evaluate student performance based on demonstrated mastery of the standards. While TALC expects members to comply with lawful directives, we also stand firmly behind educators' professional judgment. If any member is disciplined in connection with a school-level directive requiring a minimum grade for student work, TALC will vigorously defend that member's contractual and legal rights through every available avenue.
Kevin Daly, President, Teachers Association of Lee County

Read that second paragraph against the last line of the memo. A school tells its staff that non-compliance will result in a meeting with administration. The union representing that staff has now said, in public, that it will defend anyone disciplined for it. That is not a disagreement about grading philosophy. That is a union president putting the district on notice over a rule the district's own handbook does not contain.

The board also built the honest version. Policy 5421.01, Grade Forgiveness, adopted the same day, lets a student replace a D or F with a C or better earned by retaking the course. Lee County already has a way to rescue a failing student. It works by making the student learn the material. A floor of 50 does the same job to the transcript with that part removed.

A standard that is not a standard

Section 1003.437 sets the scale for all sixty-seven districts: D is 60 to 69 and one quality point, F is zero to 59. Nowhere does it say what a teacher must enter for missing work. The state fixed the output and left the input alone.

If a standard is not a standard across the board, it creates benefits and deficits where those same tactics are not leveraged. Two tenth graders, same courses, same three assignments never turned in, one of them in a district that enters zeros. Same letters on both transcripts, same statute, read by the same colleges. One graduates.

This is not one school

The memo is not a replacement for the handbook. It is a supplement to it, handed to staff alongside the district document, and that is the whole mechanism. The handbook is the thing with a version date and a table of contents and a public trail. The supplement is the thing that actually tells a teacher what to type, and it is written at the building level, distributed internally, and published nowhere.

We hold two of them. But teachers, parents and a former substitute across this county have confirmed the same practice at multiple schools, and not only at high schools. A middle school in the West zone is doing it too. We are not naming those buildings or the people in them, because several are current employees and this district has given them reason to be careful.

And the level matters more than anything else in this piece. A high school grade contains a graduation rate, so a floor at least has a theory behind it, however thin. An elementary school grade does not. Neither does a middle school grade. There is no graduation component at those levels for a 50 to move, which means at an elementary school a grading floor cannot improve the state's number by a single point.

So what is it doing there? It is not moving the school grade. It is moving the only number a parent ever actually reads. Whatever else this is, at an elementary school it is not an accountability strategy. It is a communication one.

The memo is not where this started

Since we began asking, teachers, parents and a former substitute have told us this is already in use in other buildings. We are not publishing those accounts or naming those schools, because several are current employees. But a thirteen year old described the before state to me on camera yesterday. Asked what happens when a student turns in nothing, my son said it varies teacher to teacher, that there are no strict school rules about it, and that teachers can choose. What changed is not that Lee County discovered the 50. It is that here it stopped being a choice.

Now the money

Florida does not simply fund districts to teach children. It pays them for outcomes. The Academic Acceleration Options Supplement is $596 million a year, earned by accumulating acceleration values: 0.16 for an AP score of 3, 0.2 for an industry certification, up to 1.0 for certifications carrying college credit. About 131,000 values statewide, roughly $4,534 apiece.

The statute allocates it by each district's proportionate share of the state total. The pot does not grow when a district improves. It is divided by how you did against everyone else, so every dollar gained came off another district's slice. Florida did not build a reward. It built a race, and did not tell the parents.

One value is 0.3 for a student who completes three courses and an industry certification and exits with a standard diploma. Not who finishes the coursework. Who exits with the diploma. A Florida diploma requires 24 credits and an unweighted 2.0, precisely the two gates a 50 moves a student across. The floor is pointed at the paperwork that turns a marginal senior into about $1,360.

Lee County is losing this race

Big districts collect more of everything, so we took size out of it. Divide a district's share of statewide values by its share of enrollment, where 1.0 is what your size predicts. Lee comes in at 0.74, fortieth of sixty-seven, about $155 per student where St. Johns collects $371. Polk, where the governor announced record test scores in June, is 0.57. Miami-Dade is 0.94. At the bottom, Gadsden at 0.23 earns zero AP, IB and AICE value because it has none of those programs.

And here is the number that stopped us. Lee ranks nineteenth in Florida on academic acceleration and sixty-second of sixty-seven on career and technical value per student. Sixty-second, on the exact thing it has spent two years pushing. Last year Lee raised exam volume 56 percent while failures went from 715 to 1,548 and the pass rate fell from 82 to 75.

I just wanted to ease your mind about that because it's not something I was worried about going down six or seven points because of the volume that we're now testing at.
District staff to the School Board of Lee County, August 3, 2026

A board member restated it: you were testing too many kind of that weren't ready. Correct, came the answer. Correct. Staff said they had to change the mentality of schools too hung up on not testing enough kids, and that programs must be certifying, because it's funding back to the programs to keep themselves sustainable. That is a district near the bottom trying to climb, in a pot where climbing means taking Gadsden's share. The students are the volume.

Tell me if you were serious today when you applauded your CTE department while they stood there asking you to support teachers. That is not a system that is working. That is a system carried by the teachers.
Ali Olivo, public comment, August 3, 2026

A letter grade pays too, and so does money nobody spent

Section 1008.36 pays awards to schools that sustain an A or improve at least one letter grade. A C school that becomes a B qualifies. Lee has thirty C schools and a goal of zero, and every school that moves brings money into that building for staff bonuses. Defensible alone. Less so beside a memo telling those same teachers a blank page is worth 50. Then a board member asked whether schools had misused money they had already earned:

I don't think the schools necessarily knew how to use the funds. They were just sitting there not being put back into the programs.
District staff, August 3, 2026 workshop

Where does it go? Not back to Tallahassee. It arrives inside the district's state funding, and section 1011.62 has no clawback and no reversion clause. It stays. So the district pushed volume up 56 percent, doubled the number of children who failed, earned $3.9 million doing it, and at some schools that money sat unspent because nobody knew what it was for, while 198 teachers in this district keep public wishlists asking strangers to buy basic classroom supplies, totaling more than $128,000 in unmet need.

Nobody has to break a rule

Not one thing described here is illegal. The state wrote a scale and left the floor to districts. It built a fixed pot and told sixty-seven districts to race. It attached money to diplomas and to improved letter grades. Lee County is doing what that architecture rewards.

People who work inside systems like this one are very good at systems. They find the technicality, the workaround, the reading of the rule that produces the number. It is a real skill and in most jobs, it is the whole job. What it is not built to ask is whether the thing being optimized is the same thing as a child learning to read.

So the question never gets asked. A student floored up to a D still has to pass the statewide English assessment and the Algebra 1 end-of-course exam, and a 50 cannot touch either. Under Florida law that student earns a certificate of completion instead of a diploma. That student does not count as a graduate. That student does not generate the 0.3. That student spent four years being told they are fine by a system that had already collected what it needed from them.

The district has not said whether it supports this

Here is what has not happened. The School District of Lee County has not publicly stated a position on any of it. It has not said the 50 percent floor is district policy. It has not said it is not district policy. It has not said whether a school may write a rule the district handbook does not contain and attach a compliance consequence to it, or how many schools have done so, or whether the chief academic office knows.

We are not asking anyone to agree with us. We are asking the district to say, in public and on the record, whether this practice has its support. That is a question with two available answers and no third one. Until one of them arrives, every parent in this county is grading their child's report card without knowing what the number in it was allowed to mean.

We will publish the answer when it comes.

Ask your child's school what its floor is. Ask whether missing work still reads as missing in the portal. Ask the district for the Secondary Grading Handbook by name, because now you know the name. And when someone says the grades are improving, ask which part improved: what the children can do, or what the district agreed to write down.

Fact check

The document, the statutes and the funding architecture all check out. The capture-ratio analysis is our own and is described below so anyone can rebuild it. One hypothesis we tested is reported here as false.

The 50 percent language in this piece is quoted from an anonymized copy of a Lee County school's staff memo, not from a recording. The school is redacted in the copy we hold and is not named here. Every statute was read in its raw text at flsenate.gov rather than summarized.

Checked August 6, 2026

School Board Policy 5421 requires that grades accurately reflect a student's degree of accomplishment and that the grading scale be consistent with state statutes.

Quoted in full from the district's Neola-hosted policy manual. Policy 5421, Grading, adopted June 27, 2023, cites F.S. 1001.42 and F.S. 1003.437 as its legal basis and reads in its entirety: 'The School Board requires that the District's grading scale be consistent with State statutes. Furthermore, the Board believes that each student's grades should accurately reflect his/her degree of accomplishment of those expected learning outcomes which are stated for each program at every grade level, kindergarten through twelve. The Superintendent shall develop and update administrative procedures necessary to implement this policy.' The characterization that a 50 for uncompleted work does not accurately reflect a degree of accomplishment is the authors' argument, not language from the policy.

Policy 5421.01 already provides a board-adopted way for a student to erase a failing grade, and it requires retaking the course.

Policy 5421.01, Grade Forgiveness, adopted June 27, 2023, citing F.S. 1003.4282(6): high school students may replace a D or F for a required course with a grade of C or higher earned subsequently in the same or comparable course, and for electives with a C or higher in another course; middle grades students taking high school courses may replace a C, D or F on the same terms. 'Only the new grade shall be used in the calculation of the student's GPA.'

No Lee County board policy authorizes a minimum grade.

We reviewed Policy 5421 (Grading), 5421.01 (Grade Forgiveness) and 5440 (Student Progress Through Mastery Learning, which turns out to address emergency closures under the Emergency Management Act and is not relevant), plus the full Secondary Grading Handbook. None contains a minimum-grade provision. We have not read every policy in the 5000 series or the Student Progression Plan in full, so this is a statement about the documents most directly on point rather than an exhaustive audit of district policy.

The 50 percent floor does not appear in the School District of Lee County's Secondary Grading Handbook.

We obtained the handbook, 22 pages, stamped updated 03/10/2026, and searched the full text with whitespace normalized so line breaks could not hide a phrase. There are no occurrences of 50%, 50 percent, lowest grade, minimum grade, grade of 50, no lower than, not turned in, missing work, zero, floor, general education student or amnesty. The only matches for 0% were inside 100%, 60% and 40%. The word minimum appears only in reference to a minimum NUMBER of gradebook entries, one per week and nine per quarter. Page 14 instead prescribes that 'a 4.0 grading scale is applied by individual grade entry to balance accountability while promoting resiliency,' and reproduces the state scale with F as 0-59. Page 3 states that the district 'affirms that all students are entitled to grades that provide an accurate measure of their achievement.'

Where the district handbook does say something, the school memo quotes it verbatim.

The memo's make-up work block, covering excused absences, School Board Policy 5200 and days absent plus one additional day, is reproduced word for word from page 20 of the handbook. This is why the piece treats the 50 percent bullet and the Amnesty Calendar as additions rather than paraphrase.

One school is a B just above the cutoff where a B becomes a C next year; the other is a C. Both post math learning gains in the low forties and graduate more than 95 percent of seniors.

Verified against FLDOE's 2026 school grades workbook, which publishes every school's components. We are withholding both schools' names, exact percentages and per-component scores: those figures are public and unique enough to identify a specific building, which would expose the staff who came to us. The 2026-27 high school scale is A at 70 and B at 65, so a B sitting in the low sixties falls into the C band next year on identical performance. Readers who want the underlying grade data can pull the FLDOE workbook themselves.

The practice of entering a 50 rather than a zero was already in use in Lee County before it appeared in these memos.

Parents for Transparency has received accounts from teachers, parents and a former substitute describing the practice in buildings other than the two named here. Those accounts are not published, the individuals are not named, and their schools are not identified, because several are current district employees. They are therefore not independently verifiable by a reader and the piece presents them as accounts rather than as established fact. The one on-the-record corroboration is a recorded interview with the author's own son, published by this site, in which he describes 50s as common, discretionary and varying teacher to teacher at his middle school. The distinction the piece draws, between a discretionary practice and a written requirement carrying a compliance consequence, rests on the memo itself, which is a document we hold.

Both schools known to be running the 50 percent floor sit at a grade threshold.

This is an observation about two schools, not a demonstrated pattern, and the piece says so in those words. We hold supplemental memos from two schools. Beyond those documents, teachers, parents and a former substitute have described the same practice in other buildings at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Those accounts are not published and those schools are not named. We have not surveyed all 96 schools and cannot state a count, so the piece says the practice is in use at multiple schools across levels rather than asserting a number or the word districtwide. The schools are described by zone rather than named, and their exact grade percentages are withheld, to protect the employees who contacted us. We are not asserting that either school adopted the rule because of its grade position, and no document we hold states a motive.

A Lee County school's staff memo instructs that the lowest grade entered for a general education student on an assessment or assignment is a 50%.

Quoted verbatim from the memo, which states it is implementing the School District of Lee County's Secondary Grading Handbook for 2026-27. The full bullet reads: 'The lowest grade to be put into the gradebook for a general education student for an assessment / assignment is a 50%. If work has not been turned in or completed, this must be documented in the grade notes in Focus.' The memo also states that following these procedures is a staff expectation and requirement and that non-compliance will result in a meeting with administration. The document applies the floor to general education students, which on its face excludes students on ESE plans.

Florida law sets the 6-12 grading scale statewide but does not set a minimum grade that must be entered.

Fla. Stat. 1003.437 fixes the scale for grades 6 through 12: A is 90-100 and four quality points, B 80-89 and three, C 70-79 and two, D 60-69 and one, defined as 'lowest acceptable progress,' F 0-59 and zero, defined as 'failure.' The section contains no provision about a minimum entry for missing work. That makes a grading floor a district or school choice, which is the basis for this piece's central claim that the standard is not uniform. We have not surveyed all 67 districts' handbooks and do not claim to know which others have a floor.

The Academic Acceleration Options Supplement is a fixed pot allocated by each district's proportionate share of statewide acceleration values.

Fla. Stat. 1011.62(17): 'The supplement shall be allocated based on each school district's proportionate share of the state's total academic acceleration values.' The 2025-26 FEFP Third Calculation puts the supplement at $596,771,896. The value table in the same subsection assigns 0.16 for an AP score of 3 or higher, 0.16 for IB and AICE results, 0.2 for an issued industry certification, 0.3 for an AP Capstone, IB or AICE diploma, and 0.5 or 1.0 for CAPE Acceleration certifications by college-credit tier.

One acceleration value is worth roughly $4,534, and the 0.3 career-education value requires the student to exit with a standard diploma.

The $4,534 is ours: total supplement divided by total statewide values as parsed from page 34 of the FEFP Third Calculation, which yields about 131,000 values against roughly $596 million. It is an average, not a posted rate, and the actual per-district math runs through proportionate share. The diploma condition is statutory: a value of 0.3 goes to a high school student who 'completes at least three courses and an industry certification in a single career and technical education program or program of study and who exits with a standard high school diploma.'

A standard Florida diploma requires 24 credits and a cumulative unweighted 2.0 GPA.

Fla. Stat. 1003.4282, and restated in the School District of Lee County's Student Progression Plan. The same plan provides that a student who earns the credits but fails the required statewide assessments or does not reach a 2.0 receives a certificate of completion rather than a diploma.

Lee County's capture ratio is 0.74, ranking 40th of 67; Polk is 0.57 and Miami-Dade 0.94; St. Johns is highest and Liberty lowest.

This analysis is ours and no state agency publishes it. Method: parse each district's total acceleration values and supplement dollars from page 34 of the 2025-26 FEFP Third Calculation, then divide each district's share of statewide values by its share of statewide enrollment. Enrollment is 2024 district headcount, which is not identical to the FEFP unweighted FTE the state uses, so treat the ratios as a ranking rather than a precise figure. Per-student dollars cited: Lee $155, St. Johns $371. This is a single year and therefore shows who is ahead, not who is gaining; a multi-year series would be needed to support any claim that money is being redistributed over time.

Lee ranks 19th in Florida on academic acceleration value per student and 62nd of 67 on career and technical value per student.

Same source and same caveat as above. Computed by splitting each district's values into the AP, IB and AICE categories versus the industry-certification and career categories, then dividing by enrollment. The gap between Lee's two ranks is large enough that the enrollment-basis caveat does not plausibly explain it, but it is our computation, not a published statistic.

Industry certification exam volume rose 56 percent while failures went from 715 to 1,548 and the pass rate fell from 82 to 75 percent.

From the district's own presentation to the school board on August 3, 2026. Parents for Transparency is preparing a fuller piece on the certification program; this piece uses the figures as evidence of the volume strategy.

District staff told the board the falling pass rate was expected given testing volume, that schools were testing students who were not ready, and that program sustainability depends on testing volume.

All three are verbatim from the on-device transcript of the August 3, 2026 workshop. On the pass rate: 'I just wanted to ease your mind about that because it's not something I was worried about going down six or seven points because of the volume that we're now testing at.' A board member restated it as 'you were testing too many kind of that weren't ready' and staff answered 'Correct. Correct.' On the change required: 'It's just this year I had to change the mentality of the schools. They were too hung up on not testing enough kids.' On sustainability, staff said programs 'must be certifying,' which goes back to volume of students testing, 'because it's funding back to the programs to keep themselves sustainable.' We have not attributed these by name because the workshop transcript is not diarized.

Schools left earned CAPE certification money unspent because they did not know how to use it.

Verbatim from the same workshop, answering a board member who asked whether schools had been misallocating or underutilizing the funds: 'I don't think the schools necessarily knew how to use the funds. So they weren't necessarily utilizing the funds in some cases at all. They were just sitting there not being put back into the programs.' Staff was explicit that this was not misuse, attributed it in part to principal turnover, and said some schools were using the money properly. The district's stated remedy was to sit down with principals and explain how the funds can be spent.

The Florida School Recognition Program pays schools that improve at least one letter grade.

Fla. Stat. 1008.36 provides awards to schools that sustain an A or that 'demonstrate exemplary improvement due to innovation and effort by improving at least one letter grade.' Awards go to the school's account and are spent on nonrecurring staff bonuses, educational equipment or temporary personnel, and if the staff and school advisory council cannot agree by February 1 the money is divided equally among classroom teachers. The per-student award amount is set in the annual appropriation, not in statute, and we do not state a figure because we have not verified the current one.

Districts the governor visited are capturing a larger share of this money.

We tested this and it is not true, and we are reporting it because we looked. Polk County, where the governor announced record test results in June 2026, ranks 53rd of 67 at 0.57. Miami-Dade, another 2026 education-event location, is 25th at 0.94. Lee County, where he signed teacher union legislation in May 2026, is 40th at 0.74. All three are below their enrollment share. The pattern in the data is affluence and program infrastructure, not political attention.

Kevin Daly, President of the Teachers Association of Lee County, provided a statement on the minimum-grade practice.

Provided to Parents for Transparency by Kevin Daly in his capacity as TALC president and published here in full, in two paragraphs, unedited except that one em dash was rendered as a comma to match this site's house style. No word was changed. TALC is the collective bargaining unit for Lee County teachers; its contract is cited in the district's own Secondary Grading Handbook. The statement commits the union to defending members disciplined in connection with a school-level minimum-grade directive. We have not asked the district to respond to it.

Ali Olivo's public comment quotes.

Verbatim from the on-device transcript of the August 3, 2026 School Board action meeting, where she is called to the podium as Alicia Olivo. The full line reads: 'One, tell me if you were serious today when you applauded your CTE department while they stood there asking you to support teachers.' She is a co-author of this piece and a Lee County parent. Her characterization of the CTE presentation as asking the board to support teachers is her own reading of what she watched that afternoon; the department did not use the word support in the passages we transcribed.

Unspent Academic Acceleration money is not returned to the state.

Fla. Stat. 1011.62 contains no reversion, clawback or deadline provision for the Academic Acceleration Options Supplement. It requires only that a district use the funds for expenses associated with the applicable courses and not use them to supplant base FEFP funding. The money reaches the district as part of its FEFP payment, so unspent amounts remain with the district rather than returning to the state. We have NOT verified how Lee County accounts for these balances, and the annual General Appropriations Act can attach conditions that the statute does not; the piece says so and calls it a records question rather than asserting a figure or a destination. The district's own explanation for why the money sat is quoted from the August 3 workshop: schools were not putting it back into the programs because district CTE funds were covering most of those expenditures.

Amber Cebull's line about a standard that is not a standard.

Her own words, written in a private message exchange and reproduced here with her permission as the author of this piece. The other party to that conversation is a private individual and is not named, quoted or pictured here or in any accompanying graphic.

Fact-check sources

About the authors

Amber Cebull Amber is a Fort Myers native. Her two kids, 13 and 12, go to Cypress Lake Middle School. She grew up in Lee County schools herself: Tanglewood Elementary, Allen Park Elementary, Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School's Gifted Program, Fort Myers High School's IB Program. She graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in English Literature and a minor in Psychology. An entrepreneur for 15 years, she has owned multiple businesses in the Fort Myers area, including a marketing and business strategy consulting practice and a brewery in Downtown Fort Myers.

Ali Olivo Ali is a Fort Myers mom with two kids, 12 and 9. She has served on the Golden Apple Selection Committee for the Foundation for Lee County Public Schools and on the United Way Allocations Committee. She has more than 18 years of experience in corporate business, M&A, and law. She holds a B.A. from the University of Florida and a J.D. from Marquette University Law School.

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