TALLAHASSEE – 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 providing better oversight of the $4 billion program.
Now the Florida Department of Education and the scholarship funding organizations that administer the program, such as Step Up for Students, are attempting to fix the mismanagement of millions of dollars without legislative guidance.
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 who received the voucher payments were being educated.
The Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB 318) aimed at keeping better track of where the money goes. But the House never took 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 sponsor of SB 318. “The original bill, the scholarship bill was created in the House by senior staff, and there is an understandable pride of ownership.”
That bill was passed by lawmakers in 2023, expanding Florida’s existing school voucher program designed initially for low-income students to all students in the state.
Even so, the senator who carried that measure over the finish line, Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, co-sponsored Gaetz’s bill, which took the recommendations from the audit to set up guardrails for better accountability.
Those provisions included: requiring DOE to cross-check scholarship applicants against the latest district enrollment; student eligibility must be confirmed prior to each payment, and scholarship payment installments would increase from quarterly to monthly; and the scholarship funds would be separated into their own silo within the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP).
The FEFP is the formula the state uses to distribute money to public school districts. One of its main components is student enrollment data.
In its response to the audit, the DOE agreed “legislative solutions may be necessary to support and sustain Florida’s school choice and scholarship programs.”
While those solutions never materialized, the department has taken some steps to address the issue on its own.
For example, to avoid duplicate payments to public and private schools, enrollment was initially cross checked by the department with volunteer surveys sent to parents, a method auditors said “appeared to reward unresponsiveness and posed a significant challenge to accountability.”
Now, the DOE sends a preliminary list of voucher students to school districts at the beginning of each quarter to identify duplicate students.
Step Up for Students has also increased monitoring to reduce the number of duplicate payments and added parent attestations that their student is not a full-time public school student in all areas where families can apply for scholarships or spend money.
In August 2025, the funding organization and DOE either froze or did not fund the accounts of approximately 28,000 students in the August and October preliminary counts, said Scott Kent, a spokesperson for Step Up for Students.
This practice radically reduced “double funding” this year, Kent said, and by the third quarter count, the number of students in the cross-check had fallen to less than 6,000.
“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 told the News Service of Florida.
DOE, in its response to the auditor general’s report, also agreed with the recommendation that the scholarship money should be moved to its own plank within FEFP.
Even though DOE included this change in its legislative budget request, lawmakers haven’t adopted the change.
Last year, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, chairwoman of the House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee, said a separate silo for scholarship funds would be a “huge mistake.”
"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 will file the bill again 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.
