KISSIMMEE, Fla. – What were you thinking about when you were in middle school?
On Friday morning in Osceola County, these teens were telling community leaders why they wanted to pass a law.
“We literally sit back and look at each other and go, ‘we didn’t have to think about these things when we were that age.’ We didn’t need to come up with these solutions. These were not problems that we were faced with,” said State Rep. Paula, R-St. Cloud.
Stark started the Build-a-Bill competition in Osceola County three years ago to help teach seventh and eighth graders how Florida laws pass — or fail.
Students from across the county put together presentations. Then the five finalists pitch their proposals, “Shark Tank” style, to Stark and a group of judges.
Stark then writes a bill from the winning proposal and takes it to Tallahassee for the annual legislative session.
“It’s important to know what your government is doing,” said Marley Reynolds. “You need to keep up with all the statutes and laws and stuff so you know how they affect you.”
Reynolds won the Build-a-Bill competition last year with a proposal to allow teachers two mental health days off during the school year. Stark presented the bill as HB 1151 during the 2025 legislative session.
While the Florida Legislature did not take up the bill, Reynolds still found the experience invaluable. She went to Tallahassee, presented the bill in a mock hearing, and took part in a news conference with reporters.
“I realized, you know what, I was never looking back on it. And you know, that’s OK. I mean, I really enjoyed my experience there. Kind of made me feel a little bit important. It was really nice,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds returned as a finalist on Friday, this time with a proposal to implement clear trash bags and/or bins to help reduce illegal dumping.
“If it’s a clear bag, then you know for a fact that, like, you’d find an animal or a child or illegal substances or a weapon or something,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds got her idea after seeing a video about dumpster divers finding a baby in a trash can.
For Jayden Gonzalez, it was seeing his father’s hospital bill after a visit for high blood pressure.
“The hospital bill was insane. He was forced to stay in there for a couple of days and I was like, ‘hospital bill, what? Why is it so high?’” he said.
Gonzalez and his partners, Luis Marquez and Xavier Hernandez, came up with the REHMM Health bill. They proposed smaller hospitals, based on the rural emergency hospital model, that could treat serious illnesses that don’t require extensive hospital time or treatment as a way to lower hospital bills.
They also included a provision to require claims of medical malpractice to be answered more expeditiously.
“It normally gets almost immediately dismissed unless they have a good case,” Marquez said.
The boys were happy to learn from one of the judges, an Orlando Health official, that the hospital company was opening freestanding emergency rooms similar to what the boys were proposing.
“It makes us feel really good,” Gonzalez said. “Like, you know, the actual official people are doing the same things that we’re trying to do. Makes us feel kind of like starting a health care revolution.”
Camille Hiatt, a student at Canoe Creek K-8, was inspired by her love for animals to call for the state to use tax incentives to get property owners to conserve more land.
“Florida will have double or even triple housing by 2060,” Hiatt said during her presentation. “There probably won’t be much land left for animals in Florida besides the Everglades.”
Hiatt learned about the Forever Florida program, as well as the Wildlife Corridor project to preserve land for wildlife.
“It’s very complicated. And you need a lot of information to persuade the representative. And the end is worth it,” Hiatt said.
Some student presentations also hit closer to home.
Amelia Hernandez called for creating a safe space in schools to make sure more is done to improve safety communication and reassure students that they are safe.
For Hernandez, it was personal. During her presentation, she told the judges her school had held a drill just the day before — except no one told her class it was a drill.
“We should be able to still go to school, still learn, be in a comfortable environment and be happy,” Hernandez told the judges. “But it doesn’t feel like that.”
Stark says it’s a concern she plans to pursue further, noting that many student presentations in the last couple of years have focused on mental health in school.
“They are thoughtful and they’re not always just thinking about themselves. They’re thinking about their peers. They’re thinking about what happens at home. So, I’m really, really, really pleased with what I hear and see from these kids. It’s just unfortunate, sometimes, they have to think about the subject matters they think about," Stark said.
In fact, the winning proposal was also about student mental health.
Carly Leach, Lucy Graham and Elysmar Francois presented a bill to build break time into the school day, separate from lunch. The Neptune Middle School students said students could use the time to recharge, socialize, or read.
“It’s hard to shake off the exhausting feeling from work,” Francois said. “And so people from work have work breaks. School is just like work without the pay. And so because of that, we believe that kids should also have a time to have a break, and just decompress, relax, take a breather from everything that’s been happening during school."
The idea reminded the judges of something most kids today have only seen in movies or on TV — study hall.
The girls also suggested that the break time could be incentivized, an idea they got from the school store, where students can use “sand dollars” they get as rewards.
"There’s a PBIS store where you can buy notebooks and toys and plushies. So we were thinking the sand dollars are given as a reward," Graham said.
“It is a really good incentive so that kids can get their own free time,” Leach said. “Like you behave in class, you get a sand dollar. You can use that sand dollar to buy a minute.”
“The more minutes you get, the longer you can relax,” added Francois. “As long as it doesn’t reach a max of around 30 minutes.”
Stark will now take the proposal to Tallahassee and, with a few tweaks, present it as a bill at the legislative session in January.
Whether it gets passed is anyone’s guess, but as Stark will tell you, it can take years to get a bill to the governor’s desk.
That’s also why Stark tries to find ways to use the runner-up ideas as well.
For instance, later this month, Parkway Middle School will be unveiling a farm bot program so that kids can learn both technology and how to grow their own food, which sprang from a presentation last year.
“They got to see what that means to be engaged. So hopefully, through some of those examples, that encourages the kids to continue to participate,” Stark said.