The Florida Department of Education announced on Friday that it is creating a rule to control how Family Empowerment Scholarship funds are distributed to families.
The agency would meet on August 22 at public request to establish time constraints for eligible scholarship recipients to obtain all four quarterly scholarship payments in a year.
On Friday, the proposed rule’s text was unavailable.
When the department receives a funding request from a scholarship funding organization will determine the limits. The public announcement also says that additional changes to enhance the scholarship will be taken into consideration.
This session, lawmakers debated and failed to approve SB 7030, a significant package that addressed school choice scholarships, including the timing and method of payment distribution to families and schools.
School administrators expressed concerns early in the 105-day session that the state was losing track of where pupils were enrolled and that state funds intended to accompany students to their preferred schools were occasionally getting misplaced.
Sen. Don Gaetz, the bill’s sponsor, stated after its introduction that the state is unable to locate 23,000 pupils at any given moment.
“If the state maintained a universal system to track students’ locations at any snapshot in time, that would cut out a lot of forecasting, cut out a lot of voodoo math, if you will,” Hendry County Superintendent Mike Swindle told a legislative committee, adding that it would create a lot of confusion for everyone.
During the same meeting, Polk County Superintendent Frederick Heid stated, citing a district analysis, that 750 students who were claiming school choice scholarships were also enrolled in at least one class at Polk County public schools. As a result, $1.3 million in funding, equivalent to 30 teacher salaries, was not being received by the school.
According to Heid, budget fluctuations may have an impact on the ongoing availability of our services and programs for students.
Florida’s Jay Waagmeester The Phoenix
