Lottery earnings go to education fund
Money supports school construction, student aid, class-size reductions
As part of “Sound Off South Florida,” we’re investigating reader-submitted questions, and two readers wanted to know the same thing: Where’s all that Florida Lottery money?
“Where does the lottery money go that was promised for education?” asked Sun Sentinel reader Joan Weinstock.
And somewhat more sinisterly, an anonymous reader wanted to know, “What happens to all the money the lottery pulls in each day that we thought was for schools? No one will ever touch this subject.”
Well, take your seats on the school bus, readers, because we are touching it.
Both of these questions seem to suggest something nefarious is going on — that the Florida Lottery takes in gobs of money but that none of it goes toward education as it’s supposed to.
But that’s not the case. First, the money the lottery takes in pays for all of the costs associated in getting the lottery off the ground — salaries at the Florida Lottery, operating costs, advertising, printing all those scratch-off tickets and so on. Everything after that goes into the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund, which then gets doled out by the Florida Legislature every year when it writes the budget.
This year, the lottery contributed more than $1.3 billion to education in Florida, but most of that didn’t go to, say, teachers salaries or new textbooks or what have you. And it’s not necessarily supposed to. The lottery was supposed to pay for “educational enhancements” when it first passed in 1986. But what exactly that means was ill-defined.
In the 2018 budget, about $241 million from the trust fund went to pay off debt from the bonds issued for school construction. Another $467 million went to student aid, the vast majority of it the Bright Futures scholarship program, which is fully funded with lottery money. Another $104 million went to paying for class-size reductions. And $519 million went toward the Florida Educational Finance Program — that’s the per-student funding that most people think of when they think of lottery money as paying for education.
And half a billion dollars may sound like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $7.9 billion more the state paid this year in per-student education funding out of tax dollars, plus another $7.7 billion from local governments generated largely through property taxes.
So, in short, yes, Florida Lottery money is paying for education, just maybe not the parts of the education budget you may have thought.
If there’s anything nefarious going on here, it’s not that lottery money isn’t going to education-related budget items, but that it’s not supplementing education funding. It’s supplanting it.
When voters approved the Florida Lottery back in 1986, it came with the understanding that the money raised would be spent on education in addition to the money that was already there. But that’s not what happened. Before the lottery, the state paid for more than 60 percent of per-student funding. Now, it pays for just over 50 percent.
So, the better question would be not where is all that lottery money, but where’s all the money that used to go to education from tax dollars but now doesn’t?
Tax cuts. Shifting budget priorities. That money has gone in innumerable directions. It’s impossible to say exactly where.
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