Tampa Bay Times, Article Link, Published Dec. 17, 2025
Imagine if Florida lost track of $270 million of your tax dollars on any given day. Or that the state couldn’t find 30,000 students. You would be puzzled, stunned and outraged.
That’s exactly what’s happening under the unaccountable school voucher program lawmakers hastily and expensively set up two years ago. It’s a leaky sieve hidden within the larger funding system, and our tax dollars are pouring through it by the hundreds of millions.
These aren’t my conclusions. They come from state Sen. Don Gaetz, one of the powerful Republicans who want the state to bring some financial accountability to the Wild West of school vouchers, just as real conservatives should demand. I sat, gobsmacked, in a recent legislative education committee meeting in Tallahassee as the senator laid out the litany of issues. His pointed comments were backed by a 22-page state audit that noted “a myriad of accountability challenges” for the Florida Empowerment Scholarship Program, the formal name for vouchers, which now hands over billions of dollars a year to parents whose children have never attended public school to spend pretty much however they please on their child’s education. It’s a mess.
How bad? To confirm eligibility for a voucher, the state sent weekly surveys to 16,000 scholarship families. Only 3,000 families sent them back. In other words, 13,000 simply ignored the verification requirement. Yet, the state Department of Education rewarded many of them with money anyway.
Listening to the grim audit, the committee members were shocked about the gross mismanagement of the tax-funded scholarship program, which is ballooning to $5 billion this year with no end in sight. Supporters of vouchers talk a lot about parental choice and the “money following the child.” So, it’s painfully ironic that the audit discovered $100 million that should have followed students to public school districts last year was improperly awarded as vouchers instead. In this vein, remember that nearly 300,000 now tax-funded students (a $2.7 billion cost) were already in private or home school. We are not in Kansas anymore, friends. Vouchers are no longer “money following the student”; they are your tax dollars now funding private systems of education that are financially and academically unaccountable to you, the taxpayer.
Gaetz said that the auditor pointed out “that whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong.” Before we figure out how to fix it, let’s recap how this disaster unfolded. The origin of taxpayer-funded vouchers in Florida dates back to 1999, when they were directed to low-income families and students with disabilities who were attending public schools that didn’t meet their needs. A program that began with noble intentions for a select few with the greatest needs has morphed into vouchers for anyone, regardless of family income or special needs. There is no cap on how many vouchers the state hands out and no assurance the recipient is being well educated.
Because of the 2023 voucher bill HB1, each recipient receives roughly $9,000 annually, virtually a blank check from taxpayers. It’s currently permissible to spend taxpayer money on alleged “educational benefits” such as private voice or theater lessons, backyard renovations, video game systems, and trips to Disney World, Universal and SeaWorld — 8,400 theme park tickets just this year. Meanwhile, your public school teachers are asking parents to donate printer paper and tissues. It’s not right.
The Senate voucher reform proposal, SB 318, will address some glaring fiscal problems. For instance, it will improve monitoring so the state no longer loses track of students. It will require voucher recipients to prove their eligibility before they receive the next check, which would come monthly instead of quarterly.
Most important of all, it would separate the pot of voucher money from general education funding, which would make vouchers easier to track independently. Guardians of our tax dollars should no longer allow this quagmire to hide behind the skirts of the general education budget.
For these reasons, I was in Tallahassee a few days ago to speak in support of the bill. It passed the committee unanimously and now heads to the full Senate. Meantime, that same auditor’s report was heard in a Florida House committee to tepid response and few questions. Legislators were in no mood to separate voucher dollars so they could face scrutiny. Why not? If Florida is so proud of being No. 1 in the nation with our vouchers-for-all program, let them stand in the light, stand on their own. Ask your House member to support this bill.
The Senate bill is a good start to reforming the bloated voucher system. But it does not reimplement any income limits nor do anything to slow the runaway cost of vouchers that is pushing our state toward a deficit.
It’s also incredibly important that Florida create academic accountability. Are these students learning? Parental choice doesn’t mean that the state gives up all oversight over the use of your tax dollars or the education of our students. Too many voucher students return to the public school system who can neither read nor write. That’s wrong. Those children have lost vital years of learning.
The state should apply objective academic standards that students must meet to any educational setting that draws on our tax dollars. That’s the very definition of return on investment and accountability, concepts state educational leaders say they support. Private and home schools are at liberty to teach their children as they wish, they always have been. Once taxpayers are footing the bill, there should be a commensurate demonstration of learning. That’s the next important step in voucher reform.
Laura Hine serves on the Pinellas County School Board. She is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and earned an MBA in finance from USF. Her two children attend Pinellas public schools.
