Florida School Vouchers Intensify A National Debate The State Will Give Money To Students At Its Lowest-ranking Schools. Foes Say Private Schools Aren't Held To The Standards Public Schools Are.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Half her students are taught in trailers. She's seen children come to school hungry or sick, or worse. Too many parents show up only on report-card day - if then.

But when Patricia Ramsey, principal of the Orlo Vista Elementary School and seven-hour-a-day surrogate mother of 700, talks about all the challenges she faces as an educator, her eyes invariably turn first toward an inch-thick sheaf of computer printouts.

"Test scores," Ramsey said one day early this month, running a thumb along the sheets, which painted a dismal portrait of academic achievement at the school. In February 1998, they showed, more than two-thirds of her fourth-grade students failed Florida Writes!, a statewide standardized writing exam; just as many failed the SAT-8 standardized math test.

Ramsey's hopes for Orlo Vista's future were riding on the 1999 results, due before the end of the school year.

The school, barely 10 miles from the magic kingdom of Disney World, is in one of Orlando's poorest neighborhoods. Ramsey estimates that nine out of 10 students live below the poverty line. Domestic turmoil, welfare changes and other factors create a turnover rate so high that more than half of the students who start in Orlo Vista's kindergarten will finish elementary school somewhere else.

All that added up to test scores so low that Florida education officials long ago labeled Orlo Vista one of the worst schools in the state, a judgment that frustrated Ramsey.

"To judge the whole health of a school by this - they don't know what it means to be called a failure," she said angrily of the legislators. "The kids lose self-confidence, the school loses some pride." And she knew all too well that, if the scores stayed low, Orlo Vista would lose something else: students.

A week earlier, the Florida Legislature had approved the nation's first statewide tuition-voucher program, known as the A-plus plan. Pushed hard by Jeb Bush in his successful 1997 campaign for governor, it would rank public schools by letter grade - A through F - and give students at those schools that do not meet state academic standards a $4,000 annual voucher for tuition at any private school in Florida. The figure represents the state's share of educating one public-school pupil for a year.