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The study investigated the extent to which coordinating councils for vocational education are fulfilling the requirements of the Florida State Board of Education Regulation 6A-6.67, which mandates that "a coordinating council for vocational education, adult general education, and community instructional services shall be established in each community college district." A coordinating council practices checklist was sent to all district superintendents and district directors of vocational education of the Florida school districts and all community college presidents and community college deans/directors. Of 179 checklists, 109 usable checklists were returned and followed up with personal interviews. Minutes of the past three years from each of 20 coordinating councils were analyzed on an effectiveness scale to determine how well individual councils performed the State requirements. Responses on the checklist were correlated with the ranking of councils on an effectiveness scale. Distribution on the effectiveness scale indicated that 19 of 20 coordinating councils had complied only minimally with the State regulations. Others appeared not to be functioning at all since only 20 of the possible 28 councils responded with minutes of meetings. More than half of the document consists of statistical tables, a copy of the checklist, and supplementary information in the appendixes. (EA)

The purposes of the study were to: (1) determine the extent of advisory committee activity in vocational and technical education in the State of Florida, (2) measure the effectiveness of the committees as perceived by members, and (3) discover practices characteristic of effective advisory committees. Two types of committees, a general and a specialized, necessitated distribution of two separate questionnaires to a random sampling of members within each committee type. Data were analyzed in two ways: by cross tabulation indicating the relationship between participants' self-reported effectiveness rating and their responsiveness on committee activities, and by a frequencies program indicating the practices performed most often by each type of committee. The appendixes, which comprise more than half of the document, contain an analysis of each survey item with respect to performance or nonperformance and the categorization of each item as a planning, implementation, or evaluation practice. A list of recommendations for Florida committees was generated from the results of the study and is included in the report. (Author/KH)