The Florida Senate this month unanimously passed a bill to overhaul Florida's school voucher system to bring more efficiency and transparency to the state's popular school voucher program. It followed a Florida Auditor General report that concluded the state Department of Education's system featured "a myriad of accountability challenges."
The law separates private school voucher funds from public school funds.
"There are a number of good elements to this bill," said Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute. "Can it undo what's been done? I don't know that it can, but will it have to be a sounder system of managing my money, your money, every Floridian's money? I think going forward it should."
Through the Family Empowerment Scholarship, parents can expense education expenses like private school tuition, homeschooling materials and tutoring. Voucher funding organizations manage the money, the biggest of which is Step Up for Students.
State reports have revealed the state mismanaged school vouchers and has been unable to accurately track student enrollment, resulting in delayed and missing funds to families and private school leaders.
Almost 24,000 Florida students had their funds frozen last school year because they were identified as being recipients of vouchers and enrolled in public school. Of those, about 80% were on the type of voucher meant for students with disabilities. Today, taxpayers are funding about 30,000 students the state can't accurately track — representing about $270 million.
Part of the issue is the inability to track students in the program. Not everyone has a unique ID number, making it harder to track applications. The bill, introduced by Republican state Sen. Don Gaetz and received bi-partisan support, ensures each student has Florida Identification number.
The bill also proposes to give DOE access to records and data kept by voucher funding organizations and would require an annual end-of-year audit. There will also be a return of funds to the state from inactive voucher accounts after one year. Voucher payment windows don't fully align with enrollment surveys used to budget voucher funding; the bill changes the payment timeline to more closely have those dates match up.
"We have to separate the funding for public schools from the funding for the educational choice that's not public schools," Gaetz told WLRN recently. "By mixing it all together and then trying to unscramble it, there is a system which is designed to work, but turns out to fail simply because it's hard to unscramble an egg — and that's what's happening in this system every year."
The rollout of the dramatic expansion of the billion-dollar program has affected students depending on vouchers, also known as scholarships.
Dollard laid out the impacts of the bill and the changes to safeguard taxpayer money.
This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
WLRN: What were some of the things that stood out to you about the approaches to improve accountability?
DOLLARD: There are a number of good elements to this bill. The Florida Education ID absolutely is a good approach. There are other things they did so that payments are made more frequently. They're also changing the application windows to more closely reflect the education budgeting process, which includes estimates of how many students we expect to see now. So you get the estimates, then you're able to budget accordingly. So having those dates line up definitely is an improvement.
We, the Florida Policy [Institute] and the education advocacy community, have asked for better reporting. There used to be regular reports from the Department of Education that at least provided basic information on students receiving the Family Empowerment Scholarships or the Tax Credit Scholarships and those reports stopped in June of 2023 that I think would also help with accountability and transparency.
Can it undo what's been done? I don't know that it can, but will it have be a sounder system of managing my money, your money, every Floridian's money? I think going forward it should.
What in the bill also caught your attention about how it's addressing the voucher funding organizations that handle the money for students on vouchers?
Reinstating annual audits of the scholarship funding organizations. So this will provide additional safeguards to the expenditure of those funds. The scholarship funding organizations should be able to more transparently show their business processes because these are tax dollars. I think the public has a right to know what's being done with their money.
READ MORE: 'We're all getting frustrated': Florida lawmakers desperate to solve school voucher funding mishaps
The biggest change in the bill would separate funding for public school students from funding for voucher students. How would this help prevent the kinds of costly mistakes we've already seen?
Well, it would help because all the funding would be readily identifiable in the reports that are are put out. So you could see exactly 'where' and 'how much.' [It's] slightly better accounting.
Are there potential negative impacts of that separation? Does it give lawmakers too much power to decide where the money goes?
The money goes based on the per pupil expenditures. (The total funding available divided by student enrollment.) So that's the same whether you're a neighborhood school, a charter school or a voucher recipient — the 'per pupil' is exactly the same, and it has to do with enrollment projections, so I don't think it does that.
What do you make of seeing this legislation happen now after so many mistakes — and warning signs as far back as 2023.
In 2023, immediately there were people talking about, "We're buying all these things, you know, surfboards and Disney tickets and things like that." But we already knew [that was possible] because Arizona started down the universal voucher path a year before we did, and they were already seeing fraud and abuse. So yeah, the question is what took you so long to really shore up these accounting practices that are not adequately protecting taxpayer dollars?
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