A program once pitched as a lifeline for families stuck in failing schools has now morphed into one where charter schools are vying to occupy vacant space in existing schools, even ones that are A-rated.
“Schools of Hope,” which are a special type of charter school, were created after a 2017 law authorized the state to provide incentives to high-performing charter operators from around the country to open in neighborhoods with schools designated as “persistently low performing.”
There are now about 12 in the state, but the number of schools of hope is expected to skyrocket in the next few years due to a recent change in state law that allows operators to co-locate rent-free on traditional school campuses.
The change has reignited a long-standing debate over whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but usually privately run, are helping or hurting public education. It’s also created a new debate about whether allowing charter schools to co-locate is a good way to deal with declining enrollment on traditional public school campuses. Supporters say it is.
“When you have a school that isn’t even at 50% capacity, and those are our hard-earned taxpayer dollars that went to go build that building, we have a responsibility to ensure that we are utilizing it to its full capacity for our students,” Demi Busatta, a state representative from Coral Gables who sponsored the bill, said at a March 27 committee hearing.
This month, at least 15 Florida school districts have received requests to open schools of hope on an estimated 300 school campuses for the 2027-28 school year, Andrea Messina, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
The requests so far have all come from one operator, Miami-based Mater Academy, which is affiliated with Academica, the nation’s largest charter school management company. But districts and education experts say the application period doesn’t actually open until November, and when it does, they expect many more requests.
Two current schools of hope providers, IDEA Public Schools and Renaissance Charter School Inc., told the Sun Sentinel they are considering expansion but didn’t reveal any specific plans.
The Renaissance governing board “is always open to serve more students who Schools of Hope were designed to help,” said Colleen Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Renaissance, which is affiliated with Charter Schools USA.
Broward County has received requests from Mater Academy to locate on 27 campuses. And based on the sites identified, the schools of hope mission may have shifted from serving communities with low-performing schools to serving those with low-enrolled schools.
Broward has no D- and F- rated schools, but it has plenty of schools with open space, and Mater has requested about 18,000 seats throughout the district. If Mater were able to fill all those seats, their charter school students would make up the majority of the population on nearly all of the 27 campuses.
The effort has drawn concern. Crystal Etienne, president of Eduvote, a group that advocates for traditional schools, questions whether it’s a bid for a “hostile takeover” to eventually “take over the school itself completely.” She figures “the end goal here is to privatize public education.”
Seven of the Broward schools requested by Mater have A grades, eight have B’s, seven have C’s. Five are specialty schools serving special needs populations that don’t get grades.
Three A-rated schools — Atlantic Technical High in Coconut Creek, McFatter Technical High in Davie and Sheridan Technical High in Fort Lauderdale — have been designated by the state as “Schools of Excellence” for the past eight years due to continued high achievement.
While Broward has six schools labeled as “persistently low performing” by the state, only two, Walker Elementary in Fort Lauderdale and Tedder Elementary in Deerfield Beach, made Mater’s list of requested campuses.
“This is no longer about helping children in failing schools. It’s about getting free real estate,” State Rep. Robin Bartleman, D-Weston, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Others see the change as an innovative way to deal with dwindling enrollment in traditional public schools. The Foundation for Florida’s Future, a group that supports education reform, has been a strong supporter of schools of hope and allowing them to locate on school campuses.
“Our tax dollars go to support educational facilities in local school districts. Many of them are underutilized, many of them are sitting vacant, many of them are considered surplus,” Nathan Hoffman, legislative director for the foundation, told a House committee in March. “There is no better reuse of a surplus vacant or underutilized educational facility in my mind or in the foundation’s mind than another school building that’s going to educate students.”
A foundation spokesman declined a request for an interview but said in an email Thursday that “the foundation continues to believe the Legislature passed a pragmatic solution.”
The rules for schools of hope have dramatically changed since the law was first passed in 2017.
Under the original law, charter school providers who could demonstrate a record of improving the outcomes of low-performing students were offered financial and regulatory incentives to open a charter school within five miles of the boundary of “persistently low-performing schools,” defined at the time as schools that had received a D or F grade for multiple years.
“We cannot continue to allow our most precious commodity, Florida students, to languish in failure factories,” then-state Rep. Chris Latvala, who sponsored the House version of the bill, said during a 2017 committee hearing.
The state has issued nearly $100 million in low-interest loans to help the operators secure facilities, according to the Department of Education.
But critics say the academic results have been underwhelming.
The first schools of hope were in opened in 2017 in Jefferson County, where legislators had complained about years of poor academic performance. The Jefferson School Board contracted with Somerset Academy, which is affiliated with Academica, to take over the district’s only two schools, creating an all-charter district.
But Somerset’s efforts resulted in little improvement on standardized, test scores, with the schools D graded in 2022. That year, the company opted not to renew its contract after five years, and the school was returned to local control.
The district has one K-12 school that received a C grade in 2023 and its first B grade for the district in 2024. The school slipped back to a C in 2025.
Of the 11 schools of hope in Florida that got grades in 2025, three got A’s, seven got C’s and one got a D. Mater’s four schools of hope in Miami-Dade received the three A’s, as well as one C.
“What record do these people have that they can teach these students any better than a traditional public school?” asked Etienne.
But as Mater’s requests in Broward suggest, schools of hope may no longer be limiting themselves to communities with failing schools.
Etienne said the state has loosened the definition of where a school of hope can operate that she believes they’ll be able to open just about anywhere there’s extra space, regardless of whether it’s close to a struggling school.
The current law still refers to persistently low-performing schools, but it has widened that definition. Previously, schools made the list if they received multiple D or F grades over several years. But this year, that was expanded to include any school where students perform in the bottom 10% in the state in third-grade reading or fourth-grade math.
As a result, the number of schools labeled as low performing skyrocketed from 47 to 267, even as state standardized test scores showed overall improvement this year. Twelve schools on the persistently low performing list got A grades and 35 got B’s.
The state also added new ways to open a school of hope without being near a school labeled as low performing. The schools can now locate in an “opportunity zone,” which is a federal distinction for areas that have faced economic hardships. These can be found inside cities such as Lauderhill, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miramar, Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach.
That may explain why Mater requested to co-locate on schools such as Hollywood Central K-8, McNicol Middle in Hollywood, Miramar Elementary and Fairway Elementary, none of which are close to any schools labeled as low-performing.
However, some schools requested by Mater may not meet any of the criteria. McFatter is eight miles from the nearest persistently low-performing school, Coral Springs Elementary is about 12 miles away and three Pembroke Pines schools — Palm Cove Elementary, Panther Run Elementary and Pines 6-12 Collegiate Academy — are 15 to 20 miles away. None of the schools are in a federally designated opportunity zone either.
Mater did not respond to repeated requests for clarification of how these schools were chosen. A state Department of Education spokesperson also didn’t respond to questions from the Sun Sentinel.
The Department of Education regulations say there are circumstances where a school of hope can operate in an area that doesn’t otherwise meet the main criteria.
“A School of Hope may be located outside of a Florida Opportunity Zone or persistently low-performing school attendance zone in the nearest suitable underused, vacant or surplus facility if the district does not have such a facility available for the Hope Operator to use within a Florida Opportunity Zone or persistently low-performing school attendance zone,” the rule states.
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said “that could be anywhere, which gets into this crazy idea that they’re essentially giving away public school space to for-profit charter companies.”
It’s questionable whether all the schools have room for a second school.
Mater appeared to request extra seats listed at schools on a vacant and underused facilities report posted on the state Department of Education website.
But the state website lists far more student capacity at the three technical high schools than the district has in its records. For example, a district school planning tool lists Atlantic High with a capacity of 566, while a state report lists Atlantic Technical College, which shares the same campus as having a capacity of 2,500 and 1,782 extra seats. Mater requested 1,748 seats at Atlantic Tech.
Broward School Board member Nora Rupert said she doesn’t understand how those extra seats were calculated. She said Atlantic Technical High School is so popular that it has a 150-student waiting list.
“If we have that many seats, why don’t we just open up our waiting list and call every single one of those parents?” Rupert asked.