Chapter 120 of the Florida Statutes is the Administrative Procedure Act, which, among other things, authorizes the Florida Department of State to compile the rules and rulemaking authorities for all of Florida's state agencies. It is quite different from the Florida Statutes in that the statutes are designed, more or less, to provide agencies with the authority to make rules to carry out statute. In many, if not most, cases, the statute will not define specifically what can and cannot be done; that's the purpose of the Florida Administrative code.

The Florida Administrative Code is enormous, but fortunately, we educators don't have to trudge through all 69 chapters and literally thousands of pages to find what we need. The portion of the code relating to the Florida Department of Education is contained neatly in Chapter 6. Nearly all of the chapters are available in PDF form online,

However, Chapter 6, itself, is over 1,500 pages long. Fortunately again (or unfortunately, depending on your feelings), only a very small fraction of the document is related directly to community colleges. However, there are references to community colleges scattered throughout Chapter 6, and an Abode Acrobat search within the document will reveal those references.

(It should also be noted here that, at the time of this writing, the Florida Administrative Code relating to education has not been updated since the 2002 Statutes revised the Florida Education Code. Therefore, the rulemaking authority in the FAC will refer to statutes that have been renumbered.)

Chapter 6 outlined
This section gives a brief description of Chapter 6 and provides links to areas dealing heavily with community college affairs.

Home page for the Florida Administrative Code and Florida Administrative Weekly
The Department of State has put together this web site to help you better understand, search and navigate through the FAC.

Department 6, Florida Administrative Code, Department of Education