Voucher program eyed despite legislative inaction

Months after the state’s auditor general found a “myriad of accountability challenges” with Florida’s K-12 school voucher system, the Legislature failed to pass a bill aimed at improving oversight of the $4 billion program.

Now, the Florida Department of Education and scholarship funding organizations that administer the program, such as Step Up for Students, are working to address mismanagement of millions of dollars without legislative direction.

A 2024-2025 report on the Family Empowerment Scholarship, released in November, showed overspending and delays in scholarship payments that resulted in a funding shortfall and a system without proper controls to verify where students receiving voucher payments were being educated.

The Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB 318) designed to better track how the money is used, but the House did not take up the measure.

“We knew that it would be a very, very steep hill to get anything done in the House,” said Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, the bill’s sponsor. “The original bill, the scholarship bill, was created in the House by senior staff, and there is an understandable pride of ownership.”

That earlier measure, passed in 2023, expanded Florida’s school voucher program — initially designed for low-income students — to all students in the state.

Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, who helped pass that expansion, co-sponsored Gaetz’s bill, which incorporated recommendations from the audit to establish stronger accountability measures.

Those provisions included requiring the Department of Education to cross-check scholarship applicants against district enrollment, confirming student eligibility before each payment, increasing payment frequency from quarterly to monthly and separating scholarship funds into their own category within the Florida Education Finance Program.

The Florida Education Finance Program is the formula used to distribute funding to public school districts, with student enrollment data as a key component.

In its response to the audit, the Department of Education said “legislative solutions may be necessary to support and sustain Florida’s school choice and scholarship programs.”

While lawmakers did not adopt those changes, the department has taken steps to address the issues.

Initially, the department attempted to avoid duplicate payments to public and private schools by using voluntary parent surveys, a method auditors said “appeared to reward unresponsiveness and posed a significant challenge to accountability.”

Now, the department provides school districts with preliminary lists of voucher students each quarter to identify duplicates.

Step Up for Students has also increased monitoring, including requiring parents to attest that their child is not enrolled full time in a public school when applying for or using scholarship funds.

In August 2025, the organization and the department froze or declined to fund accounts for about 28,000 students during preliminary counts, according to Step Up spokesperson Scott Kent.

Kent said those actions significantly reduced duplicate payments, with the number of flagged students dropping to fewer than 6,000 by the third-quarter count.

“Step Up For Students continues to make enhancements to our platform and processes based on our strong collaboration with the DOE to improve the education choice experience while helping ensure scholarship students are funded appropriately,” Kent said.

The Department of Education also agreed with a recommendation to separate scholarship funding within the state’s financing system, though lawmakers have not approved the change.

Last year, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, chair of the House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee, opposed the idea.

“That would end universal school choice in Florida,” she said at the time. “It’s not a fix to the problem. The problem isn’t the funding model. The problem is in the implementation.”

Gaetz said he plans to refile the bill next year and believes it will pass.

“I have some high hopes that we will have some different important players on the scene next year. We’ll have a different speaker, a different Senate president, a different governor,” Gaetz said.