Advice from your peers…

Learn About Tuition Exemption

Florida Statutes provide former foster youth and youth in formal relative care with a tuition and fee exemption at a public school district that provides post secondary career programs, community college, or state university. Check the Florida K‐20 Education code for updates.

The following students are eligible for tuition and fee exemption:

A student who is or was at the time he or she reached 18 years of age in the custody of the Department of Children and Family Services or a relative under s. 39.5085, who was adopted from the Department of Children and Family Services after May 5, 1997, or who, after spending at least 6 months in the custody of the department after reaching 16 years of age, was placed in a guardianship by the court.

Such exemption includes fees associated with enrollment in career‐preparatory instruction and completion of the college‐level communication and computation skills testing program. Such an exemption is available to any student who was in the custody of a relative under s. 39.5085 at the time he or she reached 18 years of age or was adopted from the Department of Children and Family Services after May 5, 1997.

Other Advice From Peers

• Definitely do not take the tuition exemption for granted. Take it very, very seriously and keep your GPA up. Go to tutoring if you need to. Go to the writing center for help. Know where to go, what resources there are around you in order for you to get help.
• Don’t stop, keep going. If you stop, you lose a lot of the hard work you have put into it. The best thing is to keep going.
• It is easier to keep going than it is to stop and then go again. It takes time to try to get back in the groove of things. If you stop, get right back in. Just get it done.
• It is just a waste of time to stop and then try to come back. It is better if you just try to find a way to continue. It is not worth it to stop going to school and years later have to come back. It has been 3 or 4 years now and I am trying to go back to school and it is difficult.
• Don’t fall off your goals. The easy part is the falling down. The hard part is getting up. So some days, you are going in the wrong direction but you have to have your sight on what you want to do. What I did was I put up an information wall—everything that I wanted to accomplish was on this wall. My information wall is where I put certain things that I want to accomplish. Every time I accomplish something, I take it off the wall and add some notes to it so you always have this vision of what you are going to school for. If you are going for financial reasons, you can put up pictures of a big house, a nice car. If you are going for other reasons, you can put up those, like some meaning in life, some unique purpose.
• Don’t party so much. Don’t drink so much. If you do, you’ll probably skip class the next day. Wait until the weekend.
• Live somewhere where you won’t be tempted to party. Move if you have to.
• If you feel like you are failing a class early on, then drop it and add another class before the deadline to drop/add.
• If you have to drop a class or drop out for a semester, be sure to officially withdraw by the right dates. If not, you will get all these F’s or your record and then your grade point average drops.