Florida lawmakers held off on finding a comprehensive solution to millions of overspent dollars on scholarship funds paid to families to send their children to a school of their choice.
Yet even though they’re unable to recover those millions, lawmakers didn’t pinch pennies for the ballooning voucher program.
In the latest budget proposal, Florida senators set aside upwards of $4.5 billion to go to the Family Empowerment Scholarship. That’s where families mostly get school choice scholarship payments.
It’s not fully clear how much money is fully budgeted since it’s pooled in with a larger funding mechanism called the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). It’s the state’s main funding formula that distributes money to public school districts based primarily on student enrollment and educational needs.
The potential for uncontrolled funding was a budget nightmare come true, revealed in a November state audit which found that in the 2024-25 school year, the Florida Department of Education lacked oversight in its scholarship payments, leading to millions of dollars in overspending.
This set off alarms for senators who advised the state to follow the audit’s recommendation, which was to better monitor spending by separating the scholarship funds in the FEFP from money that is distributed to school districts. That didn’t happen, since the House largely resisted these efforts in budget negotiations.
Instead, lawmakers proposed a potential solution using technology to automatically cross-check whether students receiving funds are attending a public school, and they also allocated multiple millions to help districts with declining enrollment.
“We just could not get to an agreement this session that seemed to satisfy everybody’s wishes,” said Republican state Sen. Ed Hooper of Clearwater, the chamber’s budget chief.
Also, House lawmakers knocked out Senate legislative proposals that would have followed the state auditor’s recommendations, including a proposed 148-page bill filed by veteran state Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville.
“It’s legislative malpractice not to remedy this issue,” Gaetz said in an interview with the USA TODAY NETWORK — Florida. “I plan to charge up the hill in the next session … and I have every intention of passing it.”
Gaetz said, during negotiations, the House was adamant about not separating the money in this large pool that includes school voucher funding.
In a budget conference meeting, former state Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, said both sides have the same goal of providing “the best funding model for education.” (She was the House budget chief for Pre K-12 education, but resigned after being appointed Lee County’s supervisor of elections by Gov. Ron DeSantis.)
Yet Persons-Mulicka has said moving the voucher funds into its own silo would be a “huge mistake,” adding it would “end universal school choice in Florida.”
Repeatedly since 2021, when the legislation creating these scholarships for universal school choice was created, DeSantis and his administration has brushed off concerns that the rapidly increasing program would inevitably harm school districts by declining enrollments.
In the school choice program, families have the opportunity to obtain funding for homeschooling or to send their child to a private school.
This also includes religious private schools, which First Amendment experts worry could run afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s constitutional guarantee that the government can’t favor religion, particularly if it limits voucher funding for any particular religious schools.
Budget may track some voucher spending
Although no major reform altered the pool of money used to pay out scholarship funds, lawmakers are looking for a technological solution to streamline and cross-check that money isn’t being overpaid in school vouchers.
One provision of a one-year implementing bill in the budget is requiring the Florida Department of Education to seek out providers for a platform that would automatically cross-check whether a student is getting paid in voucher funds while attending a public school, and it would resolve this issue automatically.
By November, the department must turn in what they’ve learned from potential providers for this automatic platform to the House and Senate leaders.
“We tried a variety of things,” Hooper said of discussions for the technological proposal. “We’re hopeful that – neither one of us will be here next year to deal with that – but that our successors will find a solution that works.”
Enrollment declines addressed in proposed budget
Lawmakers did also seek to ease some of the reservations about school voucher payments by proposing $79 million to help school districts suffering from declining enrollment. This stems from more families choosing private or home schooling funded by the state, rather than public school.
These approved funds came from a significant decrease in student enrollment, which causes a loss of revenue and budget impacts for these schools.
“We wanted to try and have not only take care of declining enrollment for the previous year, but maybe for the first time in a while, have a conversation about this year,” state Rep. Lawrence McClure, R-Dover and the House budget chief, told reporters during budget negotiations.
This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida First Amendment reporter Stephany Matat is based in Tallahassee, Fla. She can be reached at SMatat@usatodayco.com. On X: @stephanymatat.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida lawmakers take pause on school voucher overhaul
Reporting by Stephany Matat, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
