Gov. OKs school voucher bill
Signed at Catholic high school, law reduces oversight, expands eligibility, scholarships
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Tuesday greatly expanding the state’s K-12 school vouchers programs, limiting eligibility requirements and chipping away at oversight of the programs providing taxpayer-funded scholarships for low-income and disabled students to attend private schools.
DeSantis signed the bill, HB 7045, at the St. John the Apostle Catholic School in Hialeah, a school that relies heavily on state scholarships to cover student tuition. He repeated the motto of Florida GOP governors dating back to Jeb Bush, who signed the first voucher program into law in 1999: parents should decide where their child goes to school.
“By signing this bill we will be doubling down on our commitment to supporting our working families and making sure they have the ability to get their kids into the school of their choices,” DeSantis said.
The bill uses $200 million to allow about 61,000 more students to receive vouchers and expands eligibility so that families of four earning nearly $100,000 could qualify for the income-based scholarships once touted as a way to help children living in poverty. Those scholarships are now worth about 95% of public school per-student costs but under the new law will be worth the full amount, set at 7,795 per pupil in the budget passed by the Legislature. The governor signed the bill flanked by lawmakers and private school officials.
Robert Hernandez, principal of St. John the Apostle, called his school a “testament to the power of school choice.”
The scholarships help many families who could not afford his school pay for the Catholic education they want for their children, he said. This year, 162 of the school’s 190 students, or 85%, use them to pay tuition, he said. That amounts to more than $1 million in state voucher money for the school.
The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, a long-time supporter of Florida’s scholarships, lobbied for this year’s voucher expansion, calling it a “key” priority of the 2021 legislative session. More than 30,000 students statewide use state scholarships to attend a Catholic school. DeSantis held a second, ceremonial bill signing event at another Catholic school in Jacksonville later Tuesday.
The bill makes more students eligible by allowing children of active-duty military members, the siblings of disabled youngsters who already have scholarships, and youngsters who’ve never been in public school, among others, to qualify.
Under the new law, the Gardiner and McKay scholarships, which both serve children with disabilities, become “education savings accounts,” a pot of money parents can use for private school tuition but also homeschooling supplies, therapy, tutoring or technology, as long as their child was not in public school. Gardiner is currently run as a savings account, but McKay now only pays for tuition at private schools.
The new law also weakens oversight of the programs by requiring a state audit of the groups that administer the voucher programs, such as Step Up for Students, every three years instead of every year.
Teachers unions and most Democrats have slammed the expansion of programs they’ve long criticized, saying they come at the expense of investment in public schools.
“Our public schools — with qualified teachers and verifiable academic standards — are the best places for most kids to learn,” Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar posted on Twitter. “Draining money from public education to fund unaccountable private institutions is a betrayal of the 90% of students who are in public schools.”
As lawmakers debated the bill last month, union leaders and some Democrats criticized the legislation as a vehicle for sending more taxpayer money to unregulated private schools that, unlike public schools, do not have to hire college-educated teachers, make public student test scores or graduation rates or face consequences if their students don’t make academic gains.
The bill also has been criticized by Camile Gardiner, wife of former Orlando Republican Senate President Andy Gardiner, who the state’s Gardiner scholarships for disabled students was named after, because it merges those scholarships with another program, the McKay scholarships.
Both programs serve disabled students, but the Gardiner programs serves students with more severe disabilities. The Gardiners have a son with Down Syndrome. Camile Gardiner brought her concerns to a House committee as the bill was under consideration last month, saying it could lead to students with greater needs being shut out of the program, or receiving a smaller scholarship.
Supporters of the bill pushed back, noting that current recipients of the scholarships would be grandfathered in, and the move was done to streamline the programs and make them more efficient, not to hurt the students. DeSantis appeared to acknowledge the concerns at the bill signing ceremony, pledging to monitor the change and address any problems that crop up by merging the programs.
“To be quite frank, that was not a change that I had asked for,” DeSantis said. “If it turns out that there’s any hiccups in this, we will not hesitate to propose reforms in the January (2022) session.”