{"id":57246,"date":"2025-11-23T02:17:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T02:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/57246\/"},"modified":"2025-11-23T02:17:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T02:17:25","slug":"state-audit-displays-school-choice-woes-related-to-funding-tallahassee-reports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/57246\/","title":{"rendered":"State Audit Displays School Choice Woes Related to Funding \u2013 Tallahassee Reports"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s school voucher program has exhibited \u201ca myriad of accountability problems\u201d and caused a funding shortfall for public schools, a state audit released this week shows.<\/p>\n

The audit, encompassing the 2024-2025 school year, was presented this week to lawmakers, who are spending the weeks leading up to the legislative session learning the woes of the universal school voucher system in which, contrary to how it was marketed, \u201cfunding did not follow the child.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew Tracy, deputy auditor general for the state, presented the\u00a022-page audit<\/a>\u00a0to each legislative education budget committee Thursday. Tracy\u2019s team recommended the Legislature change the timing of scholarship application windows and provide more financial support to avoid funding shortfalls.<\/p>\n

Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, said that at any given moment the state does not know where 30,000 students are in terms of school categories \u2014 traditional public or voucher-supported private or home schools \u2014 together worth $270 million in education support.<\/p>\n

Gaetz spearheaded an unsuccessful bill last year,\u00a0SB 7030<\/a>, to change various parts of the voucher system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2024-2025, the department paid $655 million to middleman scholarship funding organizations, as statutes prescribe, before school started. That\u2019s part of the questioned accounting practices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAny improper payments, any ineligible amounts, you\u2019re paying and chasing those amounts, because the dollar\u2019s already gone out the door,\u201d Tracy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last month, the House held committee meetings during which members asked scholarship funding organizations and the department about miscalculations and processes. Those meetings provided initial numbers of how many students were double-counted or lost in fuzzy accounting. For example, the state\u2019s largest scholarship funding organization sent at least $7 million to families before verifying whether their students were attending a private school or homeschooling.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, legislators approved a $47 million budget amendment to make up for traditional public schools shortchanged by the accounting inaccuracies at the end of the previous fiscal year, even after tapping into $118 million from the education stabilization fund, through which the Legislature can cover voucher-related budget overruns. In the meantime, some districts were caught off guard after education funding from the state ran dry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Foreseeable for some<\/p>\n

Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, said the audit showed \u201ca lot of concerning information.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say wholly unforeseeable, given the rapid expansion of the program in the last couple years \u2014 which has been a point of concern that I\u2019ve had for many years here \u2014 is how are we going to make sure that we track students, have budget accountability, have budget predictability,\u201d Bradley said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the past four years, the voucher program has grown rapidly, serving about 500,000 students during the past school year. In 2021-2022, the program had served about 200,000 students. In 2024-2025, the program dished out $3.17 billion in Family Empowerment Scholarship vouchers and recorded another $804.5 million in scholarship programs funded through corporate tax credits, totaling nearly $4 billion dollars.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In some respects, the state went \u201cbeyond\u201d state law, but also missed \u201cvarious opportunities \u2026 to further accountability over the use of State education funds and timelier and more effectively identify and halt duplicate payments and recoup ineligible amounts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m disgusted; this is another, in eight years I\u2019ve been here, \u2018I told you so,\u2019 and they\u2019re just getting more and more expensive,\u201d Sen. Jason Pizzo, NPA-Sunny Isles Beach, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The audit found that as of June 30, the end of the last fiscal year, $36 million sat in scholarship accounts unspent as did more than $367 million in scholarship accounts for students with disabilities.<\/p>\n

At the end of the 2024-25 school year, nearly 300 accounts for students with disabilities held \u201cexcess balances,\u201d or more than $50,000 each in unspent money. The sum of the excess alone was $2.3 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pizzo focused on \u201cfloat,\u201d the lost value of interest that could be collected on money that is not in state hands when it could or should be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly, you could never close out books for a company or an organization the way this is,\u201d Pizzo said, adding that \u201ca bunch of [Department of Education] bureaucrats just don\u2019t understand finance. This is so bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracy said it \u201cwas not evident that the department had sufficient staff resources to perform its critical duties.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that this is a cautionary tale to what can happen if you don\u2019t phase things in and you don\u2019t take the appropriate and adequate amount of time with something as transformational as this program truly was,\u201d Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education Chair Sen. Danny Burgess, R-Zephyrhills, said.<\/p>\n

The Department of Education said it has addressed concerns raised in the audit that directly implicate the department.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trusted with these dollars, and we kept using, \u2018Does the department have the authority, the authority, the authority.\u2019 I\u2019m left myself asking, \u2018Does the department have the ability to actually reconcile these issues?\u2019\u201d Pizzo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Separate silo<\/p>\n

Gaetz said he will introduce a bill in the coming days to address these concerns.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His bill, to be co-introduced by Burgess and Committee on Education Pre-K-12 Chair Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, would separate the school choice scholarships from the Florida Education Finance Program (FEPF), the mechanism that funds traditional public schools, and would expand the education stabilization fund.<\/p>\n

The auditor\u2019s report recommended separating scholarship payments from the FEFP, making it a separate \u201csilo\u201d in the budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe auditor general said in his meeting with the chair and myself that whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong,\u201d Gaetz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bill would establish monthly payments to families and schools and provide student IDs to private school students, too, a focus of House committee hearings last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not have a perfect bill to introduce, but we have a bill which fixes these issues, which, left unaddressed, will continue to worsen and threaten to disrupt and imperil school choice in Florida,\u201d Gaetz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There seems to already be a difference in House and Senate approaches.<\/p>\n

House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee Chair Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, said moving scholarship funding outside of the FEFP \u201cwould be a huge mistake and that would end universal school choice in the state of Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n

Persons-Mulicka said the problem is not the funding model, but instead the implementation of the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you change the funding model, create a new funding model, who\u2019s to say there still won\u2019t be implementation problems?\u201d Persons-Mulicka said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Included in the audit is the Department of Education\u2019s response, which agreed with separating the the school choice programs from the FEFP.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department acknowledges that, while the popularity and growth of the scholarship programs evidence their value and need, the administrative systems supporting these programs must keep pace with their implementation,\u201d Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas wrote.<\/p>\n

Gaetz said the program must be \u201cpartially reengineered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t just rearrange the deck chairs, we have to make sure that we change course in the ways that the auditor general has recommended,\u201d Gaetz said.<\/p>\n

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