Florida’s three private school choice programs are growing, and as the state begins a new fiscal year, they have passed a milestone.
During the 2014-15 school year, Florida became the first state with more than 100,000 students enrolled in private school choice programs.
The tax credit scholarship program grew to help 69,846 low-income students afford private school tuition. The McKay scholarship program grew to serve 29,776 special needs students. In the first year of a new program, the parents of 1,655 special needs children signed them up for Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts (PLSAs).
Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post, helps administer the tax credit scholarship and PLSA programs.
Despite their recent growth, the three programs still serve fewer students than Florida’s most popular forms of public school choice. Charter schools alone enroll two and half times as many students.
As a large state with a variety of options, Florida continues to make up the largest chunk, by far, of the more than 350,000 students nationally who are using some form of private school choice.
In the coming years, the state’s programs will have more room to grow, as caps on the number of tax credit scholarships and funding for scholarship accounts are set to rise. These programs only grow, though, if parents continue to seek the options they provide.
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