A Voucher Mess in Florida
Double-dipping by voucher recipients costs public schools millions of dollars
Florida has a voucher problem.
It’s not getting better.
It’s costing public schools millions of dollars.
And it boils down to this: Families receiving one of Florida’s many vouchers while also keeping their kids in public schools.
Double-dipping.
Except when a student is on a voucher list, their local district doesn’t get that student’s per pupil allocation.
But a double-dipped student IS being educated by that local district.
More from Accountabaloney:
Florida relies on two official student counts each year — one in October and another in February — to allocate funding to school districts through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). But after the October 2024 Count, major red flags appeared. Nearly 30,000 students (at an estimated cost of almost $250 million) were identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. In some districts, almost all (more than all in one district) of their state funding had been absorbed by voucher payouts.
And, it seems this problem is cropping up again in 2025:
This year, even before the 2025 October count, another 22,000 students have been identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. Most of these students are sitting in classrooms daily, yet districts aren’t being funded for them because their names are on a scholarship lost. The FLDOE has asked school districts to help perform the critical cross-checking process — a time-consuming, unfunded task.
The rapid expansion of the state’s School Choice scholarship program burrowed a $47 million hole in the Florida Department of Education’s budget and left public and private schools complaining they aren’t getting properly paid.
Money problems that arose during the 2024-2025 school year can largely be attributed to the mobility that students enjoy to shift from public to private or to home education freely, said Adam Emerson, director of the Department of Education Office of School Choice.
In short: Taxpayers are paying twice for a significant number of students enrolled in Florida’s voucher scheme - and, it appears the state is doing little to rectify the problem.