Sen. Don Gaetz on Thursday filed legislation aimed at restructuring the funding and administrative framework of Florida’s school choice programs following a recent Auditor General report that identified significant tracking and accounting problems within the state’s universal scholarship system.
Senate Bill 318, filed by Gaetz and co-sponsored by Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education Chair Danny Burgess and Sen. Corey Simon, proposes a set of reforms designed to increase transparency, improve payment accuracy, and strengthen state oversight of scholarship operations.
Sens. Jason Pizzo and Rosalind Osgood indicated they plan to join as additional sponsors.
“We are all proud that Florida leads the nation in parental choice in education. We implemented the nation’s largest universal scholarship program in a very expedited, but well-intended manner over the last few years. We asked the Department, the SFOs, school districts, and others to move swiftly and to do a lot in a short period of time to get this program up and running,” said Burgess during Wednesday’s committee meeting. “However, to ensure our school choice programs live up to their full potential and promise, there are challenges we need to address.”
The bill follows an operational audit of the 2024–25 school year that found the state could not verify the whereabouts of roughly 30,000 scholarship-funded students at key points during the academic year.
According to the findings, more than $270 million in scholarship-related funding could not be reliably tracked on any given day, and approximately $100 million intended for public schools was instead paid out through scholarship accounts.
The audit also concluded that the state cannot accurately forecast scholarship participation or costs because current application timelines are not aligned with budget planning cycles.
To address these issues, the measure would establish a separate categorical within the Florida Education Finance Program to fund Family Empowerment Scholarships, removing them from the public-school FEFP calculation. The bill also expands the use of the Educational Stabilization Fund to ensure all eligible scholarships are funded and to help districts experiencing enrollment declines. Forty-five of Florida’s 67 school districts have recorded multi-year enrollment losses.
To improve planning and accountability, the measure creates fall and spring application periods; requires a single application for all scholarship programs; mandates additional documentation such as residency verification and birth certificates; and directs DOE to assign a Florida student ID to all scholarship recipients. Families would be required to verify that a student is not enrolled in a public school before receiving scholarship funds.
The bill would shift scholarship payments from quarterly to monthly installments, require eligibility verification prior to each payment, create standardized reimbursement procedures, and expand authorized uses of scholarship funds. It also reduces the administrative fee collected by SFOs and requires annual end-of-year audits, with SFOs returning funds associated with audit findings.
