Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DeSantis touts voucher program
Plan aims to end scholarship waiting list, expand choice
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday he wants to create a new private school voucher program that would pay tuition for students now on the waiting list for the state’s popular Tax Credit Scholarship Program.
Florida now has four voucher programs, which provide money for public school students to attend private school. The tax credit program is the state’s largest, serving nearly 100,000 students from low-income families. About 14,000 are on its waiting list.
The Florida Legislature should pass a bill this spring creating a new program that would be a “supplement” to the taxcredit program, DeSantis said, and help the students still waiting for a scholarship.
Then, he added, “We’ll be able to wake up in May and say, ‘Wow, we’re taking big, bold action here in Florida on behalf of our schoolkids.’”
The plan would cost from $90 million to $100 million to offer scholarships to all those on the
waiting list, DeSantis said.
The announcement was greeted with loud applause from the crowd of supporters, parents and students gathered with DeSantis at Calvary City Academy in Orlando. The school has nearly 300 students using tax credit scholarships.
But a push for another voucher program quickly met with objections from Florida’s teacher unions and other public school advocates, who dislike that the programs use taxpayer money to send children to private, often religious, schools.
Critics of the voucher programs also note that the private schools don’t have to meet the same requirements as public schools when it comes to teacher qualifications, standardized testing or academic standards. In 2017, the Orlando Sentinel published a series that documented how some private schools that take the state scholarships have falsified fire and health inspections, set up shop in rundown facilities and hired teachers with criminal records and without college degrees.
The Florida Education Association, which unsuccessfully sued to have the tax credit program declared unconstitutional, released a critical statement soon after the governor’s announcement. The statewide teachers union said “voucher schemes” help private schools, not students, and funnel state money to schools that may discriminate based on disability, language skills or sexual orientation, among other factors. The union also noted that nearly 60 percent of the students who use a tax credit scholarship return to public school within one or two years and claimed those who returned did worse on state tests than those who remained.
The Florida Democratic Party called DeSantis’ proposal “another Republican plan aimed at starving public schools of funding and funneling tax dollars into the hands of unaccountable special interests.”
In a statement Chair Terrie Rizzo said the scholarship announcement makes it clear DeSantis is no different than his Republican predecessors. “In other words, Ron DeSantis, the honeymoon is over.”
The Republican governor’s plan got plenty of support from schoolchoice advocates and likely will get a warm reception in the Republicancontrolled Florida Legislature.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush, who ushered in Florida’s first voucher program, quickly announced his influential educational foundation supported DeSantis’ plan. “I applaud the Governor’s leadership and look forward to a future where every hard-working family has the ability to choose a school that works best for their children, ” Bush said in a statement.
Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Secretary of Education and a longtime supporter of school voucher programs, tweeted her support. “Completely agree @GovRonDeSantis,” she wrote.
The long waiting list for the tax-credit program means parents value the program, said DeSantis, who ran for governor promising to support Florida’s voucher programs.
“This tells me people are doing this right,” he said. “I think it’s been a really great success.”
DeSantis promoted the idea at a Friday afternoon visit to Greater Miami Adventist Academy, a pre-K through 12th grade Christian school.
Joining him at the news conference was Janeris Marte, 37, who said her 5-year-old daughter, Aleyna, has been on the wait list for a scholarship to attend Beacon Hill School in Miami Gardens since last summer. Marte said she’s at least one month behind trying to make payments for tuition, which is about $9,000 a year for kindergarten, according to the school’s website.
Marte was laid off and is trying to start a business. Her husband is a mechanic and they also have a younger daughter, Alisha, 3. She said she hasn’t visited her daughter’s zoned school, Crest View Elementary, but saw that the school had a rating online of two out of 10.
“I see the kids that are walking by but wouldn’t want my daughter to be doing the same,” she said, adding that most of her neighbors send their children to charter or private schools.
Though Florida’s voucher programs have faced court challenges, only one has been deemed unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court.
That was the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the nation’s first statewide voucher program. In 2006, the state’s top court said the program — which offered private-school vouchers to children in Frated public schools — violated a provision of the state constitution that requires “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality” public schools.
Florida’s other voucher programs — Gardiner, Hope and McKay — serve students with disabilities and those who say they’ve been bullied in public school.
The tax credit program is financed by corporate donations, with the businesses getting a dollar-fordollar credit on their state tax bills in exchange for funding the scholarships. There is a waiting list because donations have slowed, according to officials who help run the program.
Courts have turned down challenges to the constitutionality of the tax credit program in part because it is not funded by a direct appropriation from the state budget.
But the new effort would be, DeSantis said, adding he still believed it would pass muster with the state supreme court, recently transformed by the addition of three conservative-leaning justices to replace three retiring liberal-leaning ones. He noted that the Gardiner and McKay programs have not been challenged.
“I think we’re going to be on firm footing,” he added.
The new scholarship would be capped at 14,000 students for the first year, DeSantis said, but “obviously, we have ambitions to do more.”
He noted the tax credit scholarship, which pays from about $6,500 to about $7,100 depending on the student’s grade, cost the state less than educating a child in public school, where the average per-child expenditure is about $7,300.