Step Up For Students, the nation’s largest education choice scholarship funding organization, is pleased to announce it has been renewed as an SFO for the 2026-27 school year following a unanimous vote by the Florida Board of Education. 

Step Up has served Florida for more than two decades, starting with the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. The nonprofit currently administers five programs and one stipend with over 520,000 students, and processes 10 million financial transactions. 

On Feb. 1, Step Up once again set the new national record in education choice: It received a record 200,000 applications in the first three days of Season Open, and by the 10th day it had received a record 300,000 applications. It is currently nearing 400,000 applications.  

“Step Up For Students is grateful for the confidence the Board of Education has shown in our ability to manage the state’s education choice programs,” said Step Up CEO Gretchen Schoenhaar. “There is no initiative of this size, scope and complexity in the country, and we are honored to serve the parents, students, schools, providers and vendors as well as to partner with the DOE and legislature in Florida.”  

When Florida in 2023 made all K-12 students in the state eligible for a scholarship program and transformed the programs into education savings accounts (ESAs) that gave parents more flexibility in how they spend their children’s scholarship funds, it unleashed unprecedented demand from families. Step Up has responded with technological innovations and process improvements that have defined the customer experience. 

Central to that is Step Up’s Education Market Assistant (EMA), an online platform to manage an ESA program from start to finish, including the onboarding of parents through the online application, the processing of those applications and the reporting features required by the state. EMA also serves as the platform for education service providers, vendors, and private schools to engage with parents.  

EMA brings together parents and providers in an efficient marketplace and ensures all ESA funds are spent effectively and efficiently consistent with state law, including preventing fraud. The platform has influenced similar technologies across the nation. 

For the second year in a row, Step Up has realized significant improvements in performance even as participation in the state’s scholarship programs continues to grow: 

• In the current school year (2025-26), it processed applications for nearly 650,000 students in an average of 3 days, down from 10 days the previous year. 

• 99.9% of 727,811 tuition payments to nearly 2,500 schools were paid within 2.5 business days, down from 4.6 last year. 

• 99.7% of 839,048 payments to product vendors and service providers paid within 2.1 days, down from 2.9 last year. 

• Step Up is on track this school year to have 2.75 million transactions on MyScholarShop, its online marketplace, for over $425 million. It does not charge fees for vendors or transactions in the marketplace, unlike other vendors across the country. 

• Step Up has over 160 product vendors on MyScholarShop offering over 80,000 educational products, 9,500 businesses (not counting private schools) and 16,000 individual service providers on EMA. 

• Step Up is on track to process over 4.5 million reimbursement requests, four times what it had just two years ago. Our active reimbursements are under 27 days, with a median age of nine days.

Step Up welcomes continued collaboration with the Florida Department of Education and the Legislature to find solutions to systemic challenges in the education choice scholarship programs. 

This school year, Florida is empowering half a million students to direct funding to education options of their family’s choice. 

In the 2023-24 school year, after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1, Florida saw the largest single-year expansion of education choice scholarships in U.S. history. That growth continued in 2024-25.  

Florida’s education choice scholarship programs have grown steadily over the past decade. *Numbers for the 2024-25 school years are preliminary. In 2022, the McKay Scholarship and Unique abilities programs merged. 

The numbers look like this: 

• The Florida Tax Credit Scholarships or Family Empowerment Scholarships for Educational Options have enabled nearly 344,000 students to cover the cost of private school tuition. These families can use any remaining funds for other eligible educational expenses.  

• Family Empowerment Scholarships for Students with Unique Abilities have enabled over 123,000 students with special needs to customize their education.  

• The Personalized Education Program has reached its statutory capacity of 60,000 students for the school year, tripling in size since its 2023-24 debut. These scholarships allow students who do not attend public or private school full-time to fully customize their education. 

 With more than 500,000 K-12 students participating in some type of full-time education savings account, Florida is home to nearly 7 of every 10 students using such programs nationwide.  

 If the students using these programs in Florida counted as a school district, it would be the largest in the state and third-largest in the country, trailing only New York and Los Angeles.
 

Add it all up, and half a million Florida students will direct funding from a state-supported program to access a learning option of their family’s choice. This is a milestone 25 years in the making.