The Florida Senate on Wednesday approved legislation that would revise how the state administers its school choice scholarship programs, including changes to funding structure, application procedures, and verification requirements.
Senate Bill 318, sponsored by Sen. Don Gaetz, follows recommendations made in a 2025 operational audit by Florida’s Auditor General that reviewed school funding and scholarship administration. The bill updates statutes governing Florida’s education scholarship programs, which include scholarships used for private school tuition, home education and personalized education services.
Under the proposal, the state would create a categorical fund for the Family Empowerment Scholarship program. The change would move Family Empowerment Scholarship funding out of school districts’ Florida Education Finance Program calculations and instead fund those scholarships separately within the state formula.
“We set out on this journey with the best of intentions, but in the words of the Auditor General, ‘whatever could go wrong has gone wrong,’” said Sen. Gaetz. “If this issue is left to fester, it will imperil school choice in our state. We who believe in school choice and parent empowerment want to safeguard it. That’s what our bill does.”
SB 318 also reduces the scholarship administrative fee associated with the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, with the intent of directing a larger share of available dollars to scholarships.
The legislation creates fall and spring application windows and requires a single application for all scholarship programs. It would also require additional documentation at the time of application, including more than one form of proof of residency and a child’s birth certificate.
To verify eligibility and reduce duplicate funding, the bill requires families to attest that a scholarship recipient is not enrolled in a public school and is enrolled in an eligible private school, registered with a district for a home education program, or registered with a scholarship funding organization as a Personalized Education Program student. Private schools would be allowed to submit attestations to scholarship funding organizations on behalf of parents.
The bill also requires the Florida Department of Education to cross-check scholarship applicants against the most recent district enrollment files and to assign a Florida student identification number to all scholarship recipients to be used when processing scholarship information.
SB 318 changes scholarship payments from quarterly to monthly and requires student eligibility to be confirmed before each payment. The bill also allows the Department of Education to provide funds to scholarship funding organizations for the first quarter of the fiscal year based on forecasted scholarship participation.
Additional provisions require the department to develop a uniform reimbursement and invoicing process and expand authorized uses of scholarship funds, including certain membership and activity fees tied to career and technical student organizations. It also expands eligibility criteria for individuals who may provide tutoring services.
The bill increases auditing and reporting requirements, including directing the Auditor General to conduct an annual end-of-year full-time equivalent audit of the scholarship programs and requiring scholarship funding organizations to return funds tied to audit findings.
