State Audit Displays School Choice Woes Related to Funding

By Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix

The state’s school voucher program has exhibited “a myriad of accountability problems” and caused a funding shortfall for public schools, a state audit released this week shows.

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, “funding did not follow the child.”

Matthew Tracy, deputy auditor general for the state, presented the 22-page audit to each legislative education budget committee Thursday. Tracy’s team recommended the Legislature change the timing of scholarship application windows and provide more financial support to avoid funding shortfalls.

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 — traditional public or voucher-supported private or home schools — together worth $270 million in education support.

Gaetz spearheaded an unsuccessful bill last year, SB 7030, to change various parts of the voucher system. 

In 2024-2025, the department paid $655 million to middleman scholarship funding organizations, as statutes prescribe, before school started. That’s part of the questioned accounting practices. 

“Any improper payments, any ineligible amounts, you’re paying and chasing those amounts, because the dollar’s already gone out the door,” Tracy said. 

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’s largest scholarship funding organization sent at least $7 million to families before verifying whether their students were attending a private school or homeschooling.

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. 

Foreseeable for some

Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, said the audit showed “a lot of concerning information.” 

“I wouldn’t say wholly unforeseeable, given the rapid expansion of the program in the last couple years — which has been a point of concern that I’ve had for many years here — is how are we going to make sure that we track students, have budget accountability, have budget predictability,” Bradley said. 

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.  

In some respects, the state went “beyond” state law, but also missed “various opportunities … to further accountability over the use of State education funds and timelier and more effectively identify and halt duplicate payments and recoup ineligible amounts.”

“I’m disgusted; this is another, in eight years I’ve been here, ‘I told you so,’ and they’re just getting more and more expensive,” Sen. Jason Pizzo, NPA-Sunny Isles Beach, said. 

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.

At the end of the 2024-25 school year, nearly 300 accounts for students with disabilities held “excess balances,” or more than $50,000 each in unspent money. The sum of the excess alone was $2.3 million. 

Pizzo focused on “float,” the lost value of interest that could be collected on money that is not in state hands when it could or should be. 

“Certainly, you could never close out books for a company or an organization the way this is,” Pizzo said, adding that “a bunch of [Department of Education] bureaucrats just don’t understand finance. This is so bad.”

Tracy said it “was not evident that the department had sufficient staff resources to perform its critical duties.”

“I think that this is a cautionary tale to what can happen if you don’t phase things in and you don’t take the appropriate and adequate amount of time with something as transformational as this program truly was,” Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education Chair Sen. Danny Burgess, R-Zephyrhills, said.

The Department of Education said it has addressed concerns raised in the audit that directly implicate the department.

“We’re trusted with these dollars, and we kept using, ‘Does the department have the authority, the authority, the authority.’ I’m left myself asking, ‘Does the department have the ability to actually reconcile these issues?’” Pizzo said. 

Separate silo

Gaetz said he will introduce a bill in the coming days to address these concerns. 

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.

The auditor’s report recommended separating scholarship payments from the FEFP, making it a separate “silo” in the budget.

“The auditor general said in his meeting with the chair and myself that whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong,” Gaetz said. 

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. 

“We 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,” Gaetz said. 

There seems to already be a difference in House and Senate approaches.

House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee Chair Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, said moving scholarship funding outside of the FEFP “would be a huge mistake and that would end universal school choice in the state of Florida.”

Persons-Mulicka said the problem is not the funding model, but instead the implementation of the program. 

“If you change the funding model, create a new funding model, who’s to say there still won’t be implementation problems?” Persons-Mulicka said. 

Included in the audit is the Department of Education’s response, which agreed with separating the the school choice programs from the FEFP.

“The 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,” Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas wrote.

Gaetz said the program must be “partially reengineered.”

“We can’t just rearrange the deck chairs, we have to make sure that we change course in the ways that the auditor general has recommended,” Gaetz said.