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A block from Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue sits St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where tuition can top $14,000 a year for a K-8 education.
But at this school in the heart of one of Central Florida’s wealthiest communities, about 98 percent of students used taxpayer-funded scholarships worth roughly $8,000 to help pay tuition last year.
Only three percent of St. Margaret Mary’s students got that state financial aid just one year earlier.
The change – repeated at schools around the state – is one powerful measure of how a 2023 Florida law has supercharged a school voucher initiative that was already the nation’s largest.
Once reserved for low-income students and those with disabilities, state scholarships, often called vouchers, are now available to all – and they’re fueling an unprecedented pipeline of public money, estimated at $3.4 billion this year, into private, mostly religious schools across the Sunshine State.
All that money is doing more than just expanding Florida’s voucher program. The new rules are transforming it.
Since their emergence as a conservative educational talking point four decades ago, vouchers have been pitched as a way to provide “school choice” – the opportunity for families who couldn’t otherwise afford private education to escape a substandard neighborhood public school.
But when lawmakers dropped the income limits on Florida’s programs, the key element of the 2023 law, the system became something else:
Choice for lower-income families plus a wide-open taxpayer subsidy for the better off.
More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions, according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.
So in many cases the new law did not expand these new families’ options. Instead, it provided state subsidies for the choices they had previously made and were able to afford on their own.
The implications of that shift are vast, an Orlando Sentinel analysis has found.
Program critics say Florida is now spending an inordinate amount of its education resources on the wrong people – rather than focusing on system improvements that would be good for all students.
“This is just a subsidy for wealthier people — people who already have the advantage,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from Boca Raton who voted against the expansion.
Skidmore is among those who fear the impact of the voucher explosion on public schools – which are losing money as students shift to private education – and the implications of handing millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools over which the state has little control.
These schools are free, as the Sentinel has reported previously, to hire teachers without college degrees, teach history and science lessons outside mainstream academics and discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. They do not face the same accountability requirements as their public counterparts, whose students’ test scores and graduation rates are publicly reported. Without such numbers for private schools, it’s difficult to assess the impact of Florida’s voucher program on the quality of education students receive.
Nevertheless, the voucher push shows no signs of abating, with more than 10% of all K-12 students in Florida now receiving the subsidy.
On Jan. 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated Florida’s “choice revolution” at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, which now enrolls more than 1,200 voucher students.
“The debate about school choice I think is over. Clearly you’re better offering choice than not offering choice,” DeSantis said.
And on Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring a study on how states could use federal education funds for “universal” K-12 scholarships, seeking to replicate Florida’s system nationwide.
Vouchers for all makes sense to many private school administrators and to parents like Candace Hebert, who argue those with children in private school pay taxes just like public school parents do, and also deserve the benefits.
An Orlando mother of four, Hebert sends her children to The First Academy, affiliated with First Baptist Church of Orlando, which charges more than $24,000 a year for high school students. Nearly 90% of the school’s students use vouchers now, up from about 20% two years ago.
Hebert paid the full cost for her two oldest, who have graduated, and could do the same for her two youngest, but she thinks state help makes sense.
“It’s our tax money. We just moved it,” she said. “I believe I should choose.”
Twenty-five years ago, the vision was far different.
In 1999, Florida adopted its first voucher program, which in its inaugural year served 57 students previously enrolled in failing public schools. The effort quickly expanded, and scholarships for students with disabilities were added.
But the key goal for the first 23 years of the program was to help low-income youngsters – and an income limit for the largest voucher programs ensured that focus.
Lacking other financial resources, many participating families used vouchers for private schools that charged no more than what the state scholarship covered. Some of those schools, housed in storefronts or converted offices, lacked the campuses and facilities – from cafeterias to outdoor play space to computer labs – found in public schools and higher-end private schools.
Yet tens of thousands of parents snapped up the scholarships, saying they wanted religious lessons, smaller classes and a way to escape the high-stakes standardized tests Florida requires public school students to take.
Amber Upshaw has relied on the scholarships for years to send her children to Wesley Christian Academy in Clermont, a place with modest tuition – just under $8,000 a year – but still out of her financial reach, if she had to pay herself.
“I’m so thankful,” said the single mother of seven, whose oldest is in middle school and has attended Wesley Christian since preschool. “That scholarship has saved me.”
Upshaw said the vouchers allow her children to get religious teachings alongside academics, as she wanted.
“They have that foundation of God,” she said, “and they also have those biblical moral compasses.”
Initially, only families whose children were enrolled in public schools could apply for the scholarships. A decade ago, the state deleted that requirement, allowing parents whose children had never been in public school to seek a voucher.
Florida also in recent years had bumped up the income cap, which by 2022 allowed applications from anyone who earned less than about $112,000 for a family of four.
In the 2022-2023 school year, more than 210,100 Florida students received vouchers.
But Florida’s leaders weren’t satisfied.
With its far-reaching 2023 voucher law (HB 1) that removed income requirements, Florida became one of 13 states with “universal” choice, meaning no limits on participation by family income or other criteria, according to EdChoice, a group that advocates for school scholarships nationwide.
When Florida’s expansion law passed, then-House Speaker Paul Renner touted the legislation as a way to “finish the job” and defended state help for families who could afford tuition on their own. “We don’t pick winners and losers,” he said.
Two years later, students from more well-off families – an equivalent of a yearly income of about $125,000 or more for a family of four, in 2024-25 numbers – constitute a quarter of all state scholarship recipients, income data from Step Up shows.
Youngsters from more impoverished families – less than $58,000 to support four people – were once the program’s poster children but now make up just 44% of the total.
Critics suspect the state’s new law actually undermines choice for many low-and-middle-income families. That’s because those families may struggle to afford private schools that charge more than the $8,000 scholarship – and an increasing number of schools are boosting tuition, powered by the fuel of taxpayer subsidies.
“It’s creating private school for all, but it’s really private school for all who can afford it,” said Rep. Fentrice Driskell, D- Tampa.
Of course, lower-income students can attend pricier private schools if they receive school financial aid to supplement their vouchers. But it’s unclear how much aid is available or whether it’s enough money to provide a viable choice.
The Master’s Academy in Oviedo, for example, will charge more than $18,000 for high school next year. The academy’s website directs parents searching for financial aid first to the state scholarships. Then it warns that other aid will not cover more than half a family’s out-of-pocket tuition costs.
Still, Step Up For Students argues that the 2023 law – which also provides homeschooling choices – has expanded the educational market to the benefit of low-income families, even if they are no longer the scholarship programs’ focus.
“More learning options means low-income families have a better chance of finding and accessing programs that meet their students’ academic and social needs,” the agency said in an unsigned statement.
But the Sentinel’s analysis suggests the new voucher largesse is benefitting wealthier students and wealthier schools.
At least 85 campuses with significant voucher growth advertise tuition of $15,000 or more, the news organization’s analysis found.
Those ranks include three Central Florida schools with 2025-26 tuition that will top $18,500 for high school students: Lake Mary Preparatory School in Seminole County ($20,600), Orangewood Christian School in Maitland ($18,900) and The Foundation Academy in Winter Garden ($18,640).
Of course, some of Florida’s new voucher families can make the case that they sorely needed the money.
Consider Orlando mother Kathryn Bojack, whose son, now a sixth-grader at Maitland Montessori School, received a scholarship for the first time last year. She and her husband had paid out-of-pocket since their son was in preschool because they preferred the school’s smaller class sizes and the Montessori approach.
But covering the tuition was a challenge for them – her husband works as a teacher and she is a landscape designer whose work slowed during the pandemic. They were rejected for a voucher a couple of years ago because their income was too high, before finally getting approval when the cap was lifted.
“It was a sigh of relief when that scholarship came through,” Bojack said, noting rising expenses kept squeezing the family budget.
While she values the help, Bojack worries that not everyone now getting vouchers really needs them, and she is not opposed to placing some sort of income limits on recipients.
“I wouldn’t want the program to be taken advantage of,” Bojack said.
Individual schools, too, are seeing benefits.
The number of students using vouchers nearly doubled last year at St. Luke’s Lutheran School in Oviedo. Most of the new scholarship recipients were already enrolled and qualified for state aid only when income restrictions were lifted, Superintendent Rod Jackson said. That included Jackson’s son, who was then an eighth grader.
After the voucher expansion was approved, St. Luke’s contacted parents and encouraged them to apply for the scholarships. Nearly 90% of St. Luke’s students now use them to help cover tuition of about $11,000 per year. The school received a total of $4.2 million in voucher funding last year.
The wider availability of vouchers has made the school more attractive to many families, Jackson said. The K-8 campus with outdoor classrooms, two gyms and fine arts and technology programs is full, with a waiting list of about 60 children, and that is “very unusual for us historically,” he added.
Jackson acknowledges that relying on vouchers to fund so much of the school’s budget has drawbacks. He said he’s concerned that in coming years the value of the scholarship won’t keep pace with the costs of running the campus, leaving the school or parents to shoulder the difference.
Other private school leaders worry that state money could lead to state strictures, and some continue to resist the voucher program.
Though more than 70% of Florida’s 3,200-plus private schools accepted vouchers last year, a few of the state’s most exclusive campuses do not, including Lake Highland Preparatory School and Trinity Preparatory School in the Orlando area.
In Jacksonville, The Bolles School also spurns state scholarships, citing the “desire to remain independent in our operation” on its website.
Tuition and fees are $30,000 or more annually at all of those campuses.
Florida’s religious institutions have long enjoyed the biggest share of the voucher pie.
These schools have been a critical lobbying force for state scholarships all along, pushed hard for the expansion, and have aggressively encouraged their families to help themselves to the money. As a result, Florida today pumps an amount of public money unprecedented anywhere in the country – more than $2 billion – into religious education.
About 82 percent of Florida’s voucher students attend religious schools, most of them Christian, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.
And a big chunk are in Florida’s politically active Catholic schools. Across the state, the number of Catholic school students using state scholarships more than doubled in the last two years, topping 80,000 in 2024-25, according to data from the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The organization, which lobbied on behalf of the expansion, declined an interview request from the Sentinel as did the Diocese of Orlando, which runs the second-largest Catholic school system in Florida.
The state’s Catholic campuses were “gifted a golden opportunity,” when the law changed, Gerald Barbarito, bishop of the Diocese of Palm Beach, wrote in Florida Catholic Media last year.
Catholic school leaders across Florida encouraged parents to take advantage of the vouchers.
“Everybody’s talking about it,” said Principal Todd Orlando at Jacksonville’s Bishop Kenny High School.
Nearly 90% of students at Bishop Kenny used vouchers to pay tuition last year, up from about 47% the previous year.
And the state-funded voucher money allowed Bishop Kenny’s own financial aid program, which helps about 30% of its families, go further, Orlando said.
At Bishop Moore in Orlando, the number of students using scholarships more than doubled, from 536 students in 2022-2023 to 1,144 just one year later, while the school’s total enrollment remained unchanged at just under 1,450 students. At St. James Cathedral School in Orlando, voucher use tripled after the law changed.
Gleni Peralta transferred her 10-year-old son from a public school to All Souls Catholic School in Sanford last year, after hearing about the voucher from a friend.
She likes the school’s small size compared to the larger public school. The tuition is doable, even without a voucher. “If I had to pay, I would,” Peralta said.
With so many families enjoying the benefits of the new subsidy, some of these schools have taken advantage of a rare opportunity: To increase tuition, without burdening parents as they otherwise might.
In early 2024, St. Margaret Mary in Winter Park announced a 4% tuition increase. In a message to parents about the hike, Principal Katie Walsh noted most of the school’s 470 students now use state vouchers.
“For this reason, the structure of the St. Margaret Mary Catholic School tuition schedule has been modified,” Walsh wrote.
Last month, Walsh advised parents that tuition would go up another 4% in the fall.
At The Village School of Naples, a United Methodist Church-affiliated campus in one of Florida’s wealthiest communities, administrators also boosted tuition after the law passed. The scholarships are “a factor that’s been part of the process in determining tuition increases,” Head of School Dennis Chapman acknowledged.
He's pleased with Florida's new direction.
“If you're not sending your children to public school, you should have the freedom to send your child to the school of your choice," he said.
It’s not only Christian schools that are gaining.
At Universal Academy of Florida, an Islamic school in Tampa, the number of students using scholarships grew from 497 during the 2022-2023 school year to 717, just one year later, when more than 90% of students received the state’s help.
About 60% of Florida’s Jewish school students now use state scholarships, up from 10% a decade ago, according to a report from the Teach Coalition, which advocates for Jewish schools and pushed for more scholarships, and Step Up.
The Jewish Academy of Orlando, for example, saw scholarship use more than double since the law changed in 2023. The campus also increased tuition for students in second through fifth grades from $18,925 to $19,966.
Parents who want a religious education for their children deserve Florida’s support, said Gabriel Aaronson, author of the Teach Coalition’s report, in an email.
“Investing in our students and schools is every bit as valuable for the state’s future as investing in public schools,” he said.
Public school advocates have warned for years that the voucher expansion hurts public schools, which are funded on a per-pupil basis, meaning they lose money when they lose students. Even though most of the new voucher recipients were already in private school, plenty of public school students continue to make the shift.
About 13% of the new scholarship students statewide in 2023-24, or more than 16,000 youngsters, previously attended public schools and 17% were kindergarteners, some of whom presumably would have enrolled in public schools if they hadn’t received vouchers, data from Step Up shows.
That included more than 3,200 former public school students from Central Florida.
This school year, early data shows that 25% percent of the new scholarship recipients statewide, or another 32,000 students, came from public schools. The proportion already in private schools dipped from 70% in 2023-24 – reflecting the first year of eligibility for better-off families – to 30%.
Stephanie Vanos, an Orlando mother of three elected last year to the Orange County School Board, testified against the voucher expansion when the Florida Legislature considered the bill in early 2023.
She doesn’t buy the argument that public tax money should follow students to private schools. Paying school taxes, she said, is no different than paying taxes that fund police departments you might not need, roads you might not drive on or parks your family might not use.
“We all pay for things that maybe we don’t always use. But we need them there because they benefit society,” Vanos said. “I just hope that our public school parents are paying attention to what is happening.”
Some school district costs drop when fewer students attend. But some costs are fixed – keeping campus air-conditioners running, for example, or paying for a principal – so vouchers drain away money school districts need, said Norin Dollard, senior policy analyst with the Florida Policy Institute, a left-leaning group. And that, in turn, threatens the quality of education for students who remain in public schools, she argued.
The 2023 law only amped up those consequences, Dollard said.
Rather than spend its education dollars to provide better offerings for public school students, Florida is handing out tax-free gifts to well-off parents, allowing them to shift the money once spent on tuition to discretionary expenses like vacations, Dollard said.
“I don’t fault the parents, but I don’t think it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars,” Dollard added.
This year, public school administrators in Broward, Duval and Miami-Dade counties have suggested they might need to close schools and partly blamed vouchers for their predicament.
But state leaders don’t buy that.
School closures likely stem not from scholarship use but from demographic changes in neighborhoods, said Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for the Florida Senate.
She noted that public school enrollment increased in the 2023-24 school year – the first after the voucher expansion took effect – compared to a year earlier.
Enrollment that year grew only by about 1,800 students in a state with more than 2.8 million public school students, however. And some districts, including Broward, Duval, Orange and Seminole, saw declines compared to the prior year, data from the Florida Department of Education shows.
But Orange’s public schools look to be growing again during the 2024-25 school year, Betta noted. Public school enrollment, she added, is not falling “due to school choice opportunities.”
For the foreseeable future, universal school choice in Florida is a settled issue, with so far unwavering support from the state’s Republican political leadership.
And at The First Academy, a private school located off John Young Parkway in Orange County, the new law has been a boon.
Thanks to the scholarships the average cost to attend dropped by about 33% last year, according to a message from the school’s board chair posted on the academy’s website. The typical family paid in the 2023-24 school year about what they would have a decade earlier – even as the school hiked tuition about 17% during the past two years, the website says.
Founded in 1986, The First Academy boasts on its website about its Advanced Placement courses, athletic prowess and its newly renovated student center and auditorium.
As at some other private Christian schools taking public scholarship money, not everyone is welcome. The school’s handbook notes students who engage in “homosexual/bisexual and transgender behaviors” can face expulsion.
The new law “creates more opportunities to serve families seeking a Christ-centered, college preparatory education marked by excellence,” said Head of School Steve Whitaker, who declined a request for an interview, in a statement.
The school collected more than $6.8 million in voucher payments last year, according to Step Up for Students.
Hebert, the Orlando mother, said she picked The First Academy because she wanted religious lessons woven into the academic day, good sports programs, and a place where she could have “a strong voice in my children’s education.”
She’s happy with the school – “It’s our small community in this big town” – and has been spreading the news about the scholarships.
“I tell everyone: Take advantage of it – it’s there.”
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