Scholarship Program Expansion Advances in the Senate

Florida is on the cutting edge of the school choice movement. Over 170,000 students are currently enrolled in one of Florida's five scholarship programs. This includes about 30,000 Catholic school students. Parents of qualifying students can use scholarship funds to pay for costs and tuition at an eligible private school. SB 48 (Diaz), a Catholic Days at the Capitol priority, streamlines and expands access to Florida's K-12 scholarship programs.

Provisions of the bill include:

• consolidates five scholarship programs into two streamlined scholarships: one for students with special needs and one for low-income students;
• removes all prior-public-school attendance requirements from income-based and special-needs scholarship programs so that private school students can immediately qualify;
• converts scholarship programs to educational savings accounts (ESAs). ESAs offer greater flexibility in appropriate uses of scholarship funds;
• increases scholarship amounts for the Family Empowerment Scholarship to 97.5% of the FEFP; and
• continues to provide millions of dollars in education cost-savings to the state of Florida.

SB 48 passed its first committee of reference, Senate Education, on February 3 and is now in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education. For more information, see the  Catholic Days backgrounder.