ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida lawmakers aren’t abandoning school choice – but they’re ready to enact guard rails on a system criticized as a free-for-all two years after throwing open the doors.
In a harsh meeting last week, auditors laid out all the problems they found with the Florida Empowerment Scholarship program, from the tens of thousands of “missing” children in the state’s system to the money the state has shelled out to the wrong people.
“The amount of money which we cannot account for as being in the right place at the right time exceeds $270 million on any given day,” Sen. Don Gaetz (R-Escambia) summarized.
Another Republican equated the voucher system to a plane they launched into the air before it was fully built, a rare admission in a political environment that has more often seen lawmakers double down.
In response, Gaetz filed his bill, titled SB 318, that he said would go a long way toward fixing the system’s problems.
The bill focuses on tightening Florida’s school voucher system by separating scholarship funding from school district budgets, creating clearer application windows and standardizing paperwork so families and schools can plan with more certainty.
The proposal also adds new verification steps to ensure public money follows the student like cross-checking enrollment records.
It also aims to bring greater accountability to how scholarship dollars are distributed and monitored, which would include annual audits.
Finally, the bill allows public schools to offer classes and services à la carte to scholarship students for a fee, which could pad tightening budgets. It also creates a fund to help shore up districts with declining enrollments.
“Our family empowerment scholarships are historic and successful, and hundreds of thousands of Florida families can tell you why,” Gaetz said. “But the architecture of our current system needs to be partially re-engineered in order to work. We can’t just rearrange the deck chairs.”
Democrats, who spent the bulk of the meeting calling the situation Florida finds itself in predictable, quickly hopped on in support of Gaetz’s proposal.
They said School Choice, which now covers an estimated 20% of Florida students, was quickly devolving into a budget crisis for the state.
“We are practicing what we preach,” Rosalind Osgood (D-Broward) said. “We’re doing Doge. We’re holding everybody else accountable. So today is a message to the public that we’re also holding ourselves accountable.”
Lawmakers said members of the House were working on their own proposal. The bills will have to be passed in both chambers and reconciled into a final agreement before they can head to Gov. DeSantis’ desk next year.
Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
©2025 Cox Media Group
