STATE

DeSantis vows to expand controversial private school scholarship program

John Kennedy
jkennedy@gatehousemedia.com
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. [AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee/File]

TALLAHASSEE – Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that he plans to fulfill a campaign pledge to expand the state’s tax-credit scholarship program, a battleground between supporters of traditional public schools and school choice advocates.

The scholarship program, started under former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, has steadily expanded but now is struggling with fundraising challenges, resulting in a waiting list.

DeSantis said money is needed to enroll those students, and more.

“I would like to eliminate the wait list so every parent has the ability to make these choices,” DeSantis said at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event at Piney Grove Boys Academy in Lauderdale Lakes in Broward County.

Most of the 85 students attending the K-12 private, Piney Grove school receive the scholarships, which come from corporations drawing 100 percent tax credit for directing money from any of six different state taxes to a scholarship funding organization.

Close to 100,000 lower-income students in almost 1,800 private schools receive scholarships. But Step Up for Students, the largest of two-state approved scholarship organizations, has an almost 13,000-student waiting list, despite shutting down applications well before the start of the current school year.

While state law allows for $874 million in tax money to be directed to scholarships this year, corporations only earmarked $637 million through November, helping create the waiting list. There are also about 10,000 fewer students receiving scholarships than a year earlier.

DeSantis, who said Monday that the program would be a “priority for me in this next legislative session,” didn’t offer specific solutions.

But almost any possible fix is certain to stir opposition from the state’s largest teachers union, the Florida Education Association, and most Democrats, who see the scholarships as detracting from public schools.

Still, the tax-credit scholarships are very popular in many minority communities, where they enable parents to send students to private schools often considered better than nearby public schools.

These communities also lean Democratic in their politics, making tax-credit scholarships a complicated issue for some Democratic legislators to fight.

The FEA and its allies have unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the program through the years.

With DeSantis now also changing the make-up of the state’s Supreme Court as he replaces three retired justices in his early weeks as governor, it’s possible that legislative proposals making it easier for tax dollars to flow directly to private schools will advance.

The three justices DeSantis will replace — he’s already appointed two, Justices Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck — were part of a landmark ruling that overturned a Bush, first-in-the-nation, statewide voucher program, a decision some think may eventually be revisited by the new court.

That 2006 ruling found that a program was unconstitutional which “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools.”

“I’m very concerned about the focus,” FEA President Fedrick Ingram said about DeSantis’s comments. “I hope that he looks out more for the children who will be served by public schools.”