Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go

The Texas House of Representatives closed out the 3^rd special session by filing a deeply flawed ESA bill but never held a hearing on it. Stay tuned for further developments. Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune filed a fantastic piece featuring three Dallas Black mothers who support a choice program in order to allow themselves and others in their communities to run and sustain their own schools. This is an amazing piece of journalism that looks past spokespeople with dueling sets of talking points in Austin to talk to real people and explore their concerns. You should read it and share it widely.

An earlier post on this blog described the era of peonage, whereby private interests availed themselves of convict labor at below-market rates. Described by some as “neo-slavery” this was a morally repugnant institution but one which benefited powerful interests. It lasted far longer than it should have, but eventually earned a well-deserved spot in the dustbin of history.

The parallel here is not to public schooling per se but rather to ZIP code assignment. ZIP code assignment to schools effectively reduces children into indentured funding units. Powerful interests in today’s society financially benefit reducing children into indentured funding units. Like southern plantation owners and railroad magnates from a bygone era, they are not going to let peonage go away without a fight.

The Tribune piece can be understood in this light: a struggle for a more humane system, one that acknowledges and respects the need for pluralism and variety in schooling. My heart sang when the story of these heroic women included a description of the aid they had received from their fellows in Arizona:

"In Arizona, 40 Black moms gathered in 2016 with the same worries for their children, ready to dismantle what they call the school-to-prison pipeline. Their kids were bullied in school and did not feel supported by the teachers. The moms started by pushing school districts to form a re-entry-after-suspension plan and find alternatives to suspension as a disciplinary measure.

By 2021, they had opened their own microschool, also known as outsourced home schooling. The Arizona microschools depend on the state’s education savings account program for sustainability.

“The public school system that was in place was not doing what it was supposed to do. Our children were not reaping the benefits,” said Janelle Wood, the founder of Black Mothers Forum in Arizona. “And so we needed a tool to help us fuel our vehicle of the microschool in order for us to grow."

Choice provides families with the tools to chart their own path and determine their own future. It gives teachers like those featured in the Tribune the opportunity to create their own schools. Choice gives families the opportunity to find a school that is a good fit for their children. Texas legislators must decide between clinging to an antiquated past or embracing a brighter future.

Steve Hicks

In a recent interview with The News Service of Florida, Hicks recounted working in the school-choice space in Florida for 25 years. The current scholarship program for students with special needs — called the “Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities” — is the product of lawmakers combining what formerly were the McKay and Gardiner scholarship programs.

Sarah Clanton, blind and developmentally delayed since birth, gives commands to her horse, Cappy, at the Emerald M. Therapeutic Riding Center as owner and therapist Lisa Michelangelo, left, lends support. Horse therapy, which makes Sarah stronger and improves her sensory skills, is eligible for reimbursement for families using the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities.

Emily Hamilton’s two kids learn most things best by doing. 

For science, that means making smears on slides, dissecting everything from seeds to mollusks, and conducting chemistry experiments with beakers and flasks. For her daughter’s math, that means using manipulatives such as dominoes, blocks or games.  

The costs for those supplies add up quickly for Hamilton, who with her husband homeschools their two children, Wesley, 12, and Holly, 8. Both receive the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities, which allows families to personalize their students’ education by directing funds to where they’re needed most.  

The funds can be used for a combination of programs and approved expenses including therapists, specialists, curriculum, private school, and more.  

“Having unique learners often requires unique approaches to learning, and oftentimes that is through hands-on problem solving, experiential methods that require all of kinds of components to bring to life,” said Hamilton, who pays out of pocket to cover costs that are more than the scholarships are worth. For students with disabilities, scholarships average about $10,000 per student.  

This year, new legislation extended the flexibility enjoyed by parents like Hamilton to all the state’s K-12 scholarship programs. 

That increased flexibility can be a boon for families who choose to assemble a range of different learning options for their children. But it can also create risks of confusion or costly mistakes. For example, a family might make a purchase they think is reimbursable, only to learn later that it isn’t considered an eligible expense.  

To help families make the best possible use of their increased flexibility, and minimize risks and confusion, the new legislation required scholarship funding organizations to create new purchasing guides that would provide clarity to parents on what education-related expenses are eligible expenses for their respective scholarship.  

“We wanted to provide clarity,” said Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, Florida’s largest scholarship funding organization and host of this blog.  

“We want to provide as much flexibility as possible for families so they can customize the education of their child but at the same time, we want to protect the public good and make sure the tax dollars are being spent in the most efficient and effective way possible.” 

Parent needs, legislative intent and continuous feedback 

There are now two purchasing guides. One is for the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options and Florida Tax Credit Scholarships. These programs are open to all students and include those choosing the new Personalized Education Program. The other guide is for families using the   Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities. The latter program, aimed at students with special needs, offers larger funding amounts and a wider range of eligible uses. 

Florida, which has offered ESAs to families of students with unique abilities since that program was created in 2014, has always had rules for how those families could use the money.  

“We had nine years of learning to help us develop the new purchasing guides,” said Tuthill. To develop the purchasing guides, the team also examined programs in other states, such as Arizona, which passed ESA legislation in 2011 and offered universal eligibility in 2022.  

Step Up For Students also offers an online purchasing platform for families. The goods and services on the platform are offered by approved vendors. Families don’t have to use the online marketplace and can be reimbursed for expenses if they find other items that fit their child’s needs, or identical items available through other vendors for a lower price. 

“A lot of our families do and will continue to receive funds through reimbursement,” said Catherine Bridgers, senior director for process improvement and risk management at Step Up For Students and leader of the teams that produced the guides. “We don’t want to put families in the position of interpreting statutes themselves or not having clear guidance in making purchases.” 

Tuthill said the guides also help families avoid costly purchases that aren’t allowed and end up being denied.  

“We want to minimize disputes between families and their scholarship funding organizations,” he said. However, he added that the guides are “living documents” and will continue to be revised.  

Among states with ESA programs, Florida is unique in the way it relies on scholarship funding organizations to determine which uses of scholarship funding are allowed under state law. In other states, government agencies make those determinations

The new law requires scholarship funding organizations to agree on purchasing guidelines that will be shared with the state Department of Education and published by the end of the year. Step Up For Students is coordinating with the state’s other scholarship funding organization, AAA, to produce high-level guidelines. However, eligible expenses may differ based on each organization’s policies. Families should check with their scholarship organizations to determine whether an expense is eligible before they make a purchase. The guides include links on the  Step Up For Students website for families using the Educational Options and Unique Abilities scholarships to offer feedback.  

“We use that feedback for continuous improvement,” Tuthill said.  

Each week, Bridgers and her team meet to examine parent feedback and purchases that fall into gray areas in state law. 

A parent recently expressed concern when Step Up asked for more information about a day program for her child, who has Down syndrome. Florida law does not expressly authorize spending scholarship funding on day programs not operated by schools. 

However, Bridgers’ team researched the provider and learned that the founder was certified in recreational therapy. That meant the program met the specifications for part-time tutoring under Florida law, which is eligible for scholarship funding. 

As a result of that feedback, Step Up For Students now approves reimbursements for full-time day programs that meet state specifications for students 16 and older with intellectual disabilities. 

“For this population, these programs are absolutely critical to those students’ development,” Bridgers said. 

Can I get it at a district school? 

Florida’s scholarship laws outline the types of purchases parents are allowed to make with their accounts. Some, like private school tuition, are straightforward. Other provisions of the law, such as one that allows parents to purchase instructional materials, leave more room for interpretation.  

To help determine whether a good or service would be covered by education savings accounts being administered by Step Up, Bridgers and her team asked a key question: Is it offered in a Florida public school? 

“We looked at our own statutes, but we also looked at other state statutes and policies and tried to come up with a public-school equivalency test,” Bridgers said. The team also examined statutes governing back-to-school tax holidays to help guide decisions on supplies. 

“The spirit of this is that these students on ESAs have the same opportunities as public-school students,” Bridgers said. 

That can include sports equipment, such as basketballs. But the guides set limits. The goal is to balance giving families access to a wide range of learning materials (including those a public school might purchase for gym class) while preventing uses of scholarship funds that stray beyond reasonable education-related purchases. Sports equipment can be replaced every two years, according to the guide. 

“You couldn’t get 600 basketballs like the public school district could,” Bridgers said. “We really tried to be comprehensive and thoughtful.”  

Field trips, including tickets to Florida theme parks, are also included as eligible instructional materials for families whose scholarships are managed by Step Up. However, the guide allows reimbursement of only the scholarship student’s ticket.  

“We had a lot of debate about theme parks, Tuthill recalled. “Is a trip to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World that educational? Well, it was when I went. We said, okay, if a family wants to go to Animal Kingdom, and it’s a field trip, and they built some learning activities around it, how would you manage it? It’s not unusual for public schools to take field trips to a theme park.” 

After all, Tuthill said, “learning can happen in all kinds of situations.” 

Bridgers and Tuthill hope the listings in the Step Up purchasing guides will encourage families to get creative when designing their child’s learning plans. 

That could include an evening at the Florida Orchestra concert or a community theater production. Research has found that taking students to live theater productions is an effective way to teach academic content, increase tolerance by providing exposure to a more diverse world, and improve students’ abilities to recognize what others are thinking or feeling.  

“Our hope is that guardians will sit down with their student learning plans and their students as they look through the guides and they get more ideas to use their funds to create a better experience for their families,” Bridgers said. 

For Hamilton and other parents whose customized programs have not relied heavily on co-ops or other offerings of outside groups, the guides have brought much needed clarity, especially to areas that once were considered gray. 

“This scholarship was started from a place of true understanding of the intersection of learners with unique abilities and the benefits of alternative schooling opportunities, including homeschooling for their ultimate success,” Hamilton said. “I expect that the end result of all the feedback is a guide that is more robust and clear and can be consistently interpreted by the SUFS processors that review all the reimbursement requests, and continues to allow the unique learners on the scholarship to continue to learn in the way that suits them best and be reimbursed for it.”

In 410, after years of enough backstabbing, civil wars and barbarian invasions to make a Games of Thrones scriptwriter blush, the Saxons invaded the Roman province of Britannia. The Roman Britons called upon the emperor for aid, which resulted in what is known as the Rescript of Honorius. In this rescript (a formal reply) Emperor Honorius, distracted by internal rebellion and Visigoth invasion, related “Britannia must look to her own defense.” It was not apparent then, but centuries of Roman rule over Britain ended.

Florida families suffered an Honorius-style rescript of their own in 2020 with the closure of schools. One can only describe the damage suffered by students as horrifying, and it could have been worse. The Florida Education Association, for example, pursued litigation all the way to the Florida Supreme Court in the hope of keeping schools closed. The case went against the FEA, but the message was clear: you are on your own.

Florida families evidently have not forgotten, as Step Up for Students has awarded 410,365 full-time scholarships under Florida’s expanded choice policies. Florida families are filing approximately 1,400 new applications daily. Being less dependent on a group of people eager to throw your children overboard when times get tough apparently appeals to many.

That constitutes a promising start, but it understates the significance of Florida’s new universal eligibility: Every Florida student now has an exit option. The ability to leave and take your money with you isn’t just a form of accountability; it’s the ultimate form of accountability. All Florida students will benefit from the universal expansion of choice regardless of whether they use the program.

American families must look to the defense of their children, and states like Florida have empowered them to do just that. Not coincidentally Americans have been moving to Florida in astounding numbers. Dominoes will accordingly continue to fall.

In 2019, just months away from what became the COVID-19 schooling debacle, this blog included a discussion of Robert Pondiscio’s concept of the “Tiffany Test.” Pondiscio defined students as a “Tiffany” if they had bought into the promise of education but had been let down by the system. The post included the following prediction:

"Maybe it’s a little early, maybe the time is not quite yet, but the day is coming when our K-12 policies will fully and appropriately respect the dignity of families to exercise autonomy in schooling. When that day comes, the unfulfilled, the disappointed, the mistreated, the misfit, and the dreamer will seek better situations for themselves.

They won’t ask for permission but rather will be exercising their rights as free people. Pleading with adults to do what is right won’t be the first or only option. When that day comes, “Tiffany” can speak softly, but her voice will be imperial; the system will center around her at last."

There was no shortage of Tiffany students in 2019 but a great many more beginning in 2020. In Florida and many other states, they’ll be in charge of their own education.

Students at Apollo Academy, a Tampa-based affiliate of Acton Academy, help each other with math. The Acton model emphasizes. student-led learning and includes 270 schools worldwide. Photo courtesy of Apollo Academy

When Apollo Academy opened in Tampa last year, 20 students showed up to participate in the inaugural year of student-led learning.

By the time the Tampa-based school closed for summer break, half that number remained. Some families moved away, while others dropped out of the program.

“We ended up with 10 very happy learners,” said founder Beth Ann Valavanis, an executive who left the corporate world to start Apollo, an Acton Academy affiliate, after a search for future schooling options for her preschool daughter left her unsatisfied. “When we started it was about creating an environment for joyful, happy, lifelong learners, and I feel we did that.”

Valavanis has every reason to call her first year a success. Schools in the Acton Academy network and other small learner-driven schools aren’t the best fit for everyone. Even for those who eventually thrive in that environment, there is an adjustment period, especially for parents who aren’t accustomed to independent learning and the lack of traditional metrics to gauge progress.

A former public school teacher who founded an Acton affiliate in Nevada described it as a “detox.”

“All of that is true,” Valavanis said. “There is a shock at the beginning, and that transition takes longer than we realized it would. Parents were saying, ‘We’re not getting worksheets. We’re not getting graded tests.’”

Students from traditional schools, who were not used to being able to make a move without raising their hand for permission, suddenly were free to take a restroom break or quell their hunger pangs with a snack. Valavanis and her guides told the kids: “You know your body better than we do.”

After five or six weeks, as families adjust to the new model, which trades homework and traditional grades for self-paced, competency-based learning, things change.

“Now we can’t imagine school not being like this,” Valavanis said.

Like other Acton schools, Apollo embraced project-based learning and the Socratic method, in which adults eschew directives in favor of guiding students with questions that help them form their own ideas. Students who felt stressed could visit the calming corner. Students involved in conflicts could visit a friendship tent to work out disagreements. On Fridays, “character callouts” offered an opportunity for students to publicly praise classmates for displays of hard work or positive behaviors they had observed during the week.

Apollo Academy founder Beth Anne Valavanis

Valavanis discovered Acton Academy, a network of small private schools that promotes education as an adventure in autonomy, while looking for acceptable options for her daughter, Emilia. Valavanis, who at the time was new to the Tampa Bay area, wasn’t critical of the A-rated neighborhood public school or faith-based private schools. She just wanted something different. During her morning commute to work, she listened to the audiobook “Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down” by Laura Sandefer, an educator who founded Acton Academy with her husband, Jeff, a billionaire entrepreneur from Texas.

Acton began in 2009 with the Sandefers’ two sons and five neighborhood kids in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Jeff Sandefer told reimaginED in a 2022 interview that the plan was to have only one school. But one family moved to California and wanted to start Acton there. Another friend from Guatemala saw Acton during a visit and asked to start an affiliate there.

From there, the concept went viral. Today, Acton has 270 affiliates worldwide, including 15 in Florida.

Valavanis’ school operated last year in a local YMCA after issues with the original location forced it to move. This year, Apollo will operate in space leased from Hyde Park Presbyterian Church in South Tampa. The new location will offer a host of amenities, including a creative makerspace, a renovated playground, a shaded parking lot for a basketball hoop, and a co-working space for parents.

Apollo, which accepts the state’s K-12 education choice scholarships, will offer part time services for families using personalized education plans to customize their children’s educations. So far, 30 students have signed up for the program, which serves learners from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Valavanis said they will take lessons learned from the first year and apply them, including devoting more time to the adjustment period, which Acton calls “Building Our Tribe.”

“It’s not like traditional school, where you jump in the first day, and the teacher has to give 540 instructional hours, so they have to start lesson one, chapter one,” Valavanis said. “It’s about discovering yourself and realizing this is a safe place and getting use to not only asking questions but answering other people’s questions.”

Christina Sheffield’s son, Graham, was soaring ahead of classmates. She wanted a learning environment that challenged him, so she created one herself.

She pulled him out of a private school and created a customized education plan. Using her know-how as a certified elementary virtual school teacher, she enrolled him in a hybrid homeschool co-op and designed projects to enhance the curriculum his former private school as using.

But there was a missing piece in her son's custom education plan: Their neighborhood public school.

That changed when the Tampa Bay area mom received the results of her son’s test for academic giftedness. Now officially identified, Graham, like other gifted homeschoolers, was able to access services offered by his local school district. He started going to a weekly gifted class at his zoned elementary school.

“It was his favorite day of the week,” Sheffield recalled. “After I picked him up on the first day, he said, ‘Mom, I finally feel like I fit in.’ That made my mom’s heart happy.”

Other students in similar circumstances might not be so lucky. Florida law allows homeschoolers to enroll in dual enrollment classes that lead to college credit, free of charge. Students participating in the state's growing array of educational choice options have access to extracurriculars at their local public schools under the state's "Tim Tebow law." But that same guaranteed access does not extend to math class.

Districts can offer homeschoolers access to career and technical courses, or services for exceptional students, included gifted programming for students like Graham. And a new law allows districts to receive proportional funding for any student who chooses to enroll part-time while participating in other educational options.

But they are not required to offer this opportunity.

A new analysis by the advocacy group yes.everykid. evaluated policies in all 50 states and found that states vary widely in policies that grant students access to their local public schools, regardless of where they live or whether they want to enroll full-time.

Florida's policies place it in the top 10 among states, but it has not yet guaranteed that every student has the right to access public schools on their terms.

Among the findings:

• 24 states explicitly outline a policy for nonpublic school students to access public schools.
• 15 states require districts to allow nonpublic school students to access public schools.
• 10 states treat public education access as a student right.

Florida tied with Alaska for ninth place when it came to allowing nonpublic and homeschool students access to public schools. Idaho, which met every criterion used in the rankings, was No. 1, followed by Iowa and Minnesota, which tied for second place.

Though HB 1 codified the option for Florida public school districts to offer part-time enrollment options and receive prorated state funding, it left the decision whether to participate up to the individual districts.

Districts may be reluctant to embrace this new flexibility, and some state policies make this understandable. For example, state class size limits may add to the staffing headaches for districts hoping to accommodate students who enroll part-time.

The new law also creates a process for districts to identify regulatory barriers that are preventing them from responding to the needs of students and families.

For decades, some districts have resisted the oncoming tsunami of new education options. Others have chosen to ride it, and now have new flexibility at their disposal. The question is whether they will capitalize on that flexibility to meet the needs of their students.

The number of Florida families choosing home education jumped nearly nine percent last school year.

The new numbers, based on registration data kept by districts and reported this summer by the state Department of Education, suggest that while the dramatic jump in homeschooling at the height of the pandemic appears to have slowed, the trend is still moving in one direction: up.

Reliable estimates of homeschooling participation are notoriously difficult to come by. These numbers are based on the number of families who registered with their districts as homeschoolers, as required by Florida law.

There is one quirk in the data. While the number of families choosing to homeschool jumped at a relatively high rate, the number of participating students leveled off, growing by just 1.4 percent.

Reasonable people can debate whether the number of families choosing to homeschool or the number of students participating is the more relevant data point. If you have thoughts, please send them my way.

Some learning options that look or feel like homeschooling may not be reflected in these numbers. They do not include students who enroll full time in online public schools or students who enroll in private schools that support learning at home.

Next school year, students will have the option to enroll part time with their local school districts. And students receiving state educational choice scholarships will have the option to enroll in "personalized education programs" that allow them to mix and match different learning options without attending a single school full time.

It's a safe bet that in the coming years, new options will mimic some flexibilities of homeschooling, while remaining legally distinct. Many traditional homeschoolers prefer to keep it that way.

This blurring of the lines means homeschoolers' impact on the overall education landscape may be growing faster than homeschooling itself, as measured by official statistics.

Was pandemic learning loss a necessary evil to create a more just society?

One teachers union representative from Richmond, Virginia seems to think so. In an interview with ProPublica, Melvin Hostman, who serves on the Richmond Education Association’s executive board, remarked that “the whole thing about learning loss I found funny is that, if everyone was out of school, and everyone had learning loss, then aren’t we all equal? We all have a deficit.”

When confronted with evidence that learning loss disproportionately affected already-disadvantaged populations, Hostman doubled down, pinning the blame on American society’s intrinsic inequities. “Now people are saying, ‘We’re going back to the way things were before,’” Hostman added. “But we didn’t like the way things were before.”

It’s worth noting that Hostman’s position is extreme and uncommon. The vast majority of educators — including those affiliated with prominent unions — are not only worried about learning loss, but also support traditional methods (like extra instructional time and targeted tutoring) of overcoming it. 

However, a disturbing number of union representatives and advocacy groups see the pandemic’s aftermath as an opportunity for social and educational re-engineering. In other words, terms like “learning loss” and merit” are now considered old-fashioned at best and something far more sinister at worst. 

If union representatives like Hostman want an honest conversation about reform, they have to stop trying to put lipstick on a pig. School closures were incredibly harmful — particularly for disadvantaged students who needed in-person education the most. 

More specifically, learning loss, at least in the 2020-2021 school year, was by no means an inevitability. Kids didn’t fall behind because of structural inequities in the American educational system; kids fell behind because many states and districts made a conscious decision to keep them out of school for extended periods of time. 

Salt Lake City didn’t even start reopening their schools until February 2021. Students in other places endured even greater turmoil — for New York City, Washington DC, and many school districts in states like California and Illinois, full reopening wouldn’t come until the 2021-2022 school year. 

As a result, private schools, which were much more likely to be open for in-person instruction, saw an influx of students. The greater awareness of alternatives helped fuel parents' demand for more choices and led many states to establish or expand education choice programs.

The results speak for themselves. A Harvard study released last year, which analyzed data from more than 2.1 million students, found that school districts that employed remote learning for longer suffered a higher degree of learning loss. In contrast, students in states like Texas and Florida, which resumed in-person learning as quickly as possible, “lost relatively little ground.”

“Interestingly, gaps in math achievement by race and school poverty did not widen in school districts in states such as Texas and Florida and elsewhere that remained largely in-person,” said Thomas Kane, one of the study’s authors, in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen…where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply.”

Taken to their logical end, Kane’s comments directly contradict Hostman’s claim, and confirm that America’s children’s experiences were not “all equal.” Children, many from already disadvantaged backgrounds, were kept out of school unnecessarily and suffered disproportionate learning loss as a result. 

I’m not about to claim that the chaos was intentional. I’m sure most school closures were done in good faith, even though the scientific research overwhelmingly backed reopening. However, all policy choices have consequences, and these consequences were particularly severe. 

Simply put, Hostman’s claim was just plain wrong. Any debate regarding what to do next must start there. 

Garion Frankel is an incoming doctoral student in PK-12 education administration at Texas A&M University. He is a Young Voices contributor, and frequently writes about education policy and American political thought.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released Long Term Trend data for 13-year-old students last week. On these exams, 10 points approximately equals a grade level worth of average academic progress. Mathematics achievement has dropped 14 points and reading seven points since 2012. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a pre-existing decline. Real spending per student was 160% higher in 2019-20 than in 1969-70, but reading scores are statistically identical (255 in 1970, 256 in 2023). Since 2019, spending has gone to record highs while achievement to near record lows.

The news gets worse when you examine achievement gaps. The chart below shows the mathematics trend by free or reduced lunch eligibility status. The smallest gap stood at a still appalling 24 points in 2008. In 2023 the gap stood at 34 points, the largest on record.

Similar story by disability status- bad for both, worst for IEP/504 plan students.

The gap between public school and Catholic school students increased from 11 points in favor of Catholic school students in 2004 to a 20-point advantage in 2023. The advantage for Hispanic students in Catholic schools stood at 23 points higher than their public-school peers.

Now it could be that you are not overly concerned about your child or grandchild learning civics, mathematics or reading. If so the union captured district system has growing numbers of empty seats just for you! As an added bonus, your special little ones can indirectly serve as funding units for some of the most reactionary special interests in American politics today!

Not your particular cup of tea? Well then consider making alternate plans. Millions before you have already done so, and the flight to freedom is just getting warmed up.

Herah Varmah, who received a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, speaks at the bill signing ceremony for HB 1, which established eligibility for education savings accounts for all Florida students. She now serves on the staff of the American Federation for Children.

Editor's note: The following column by Hera Varmah, a beneficiary of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and the communication and events assistant at the American Federation for Children, originally appeared June 16 in the Florida Courier. 

All Florida families with children in grades K-12 are now eligible to receive a state scholarship to find the best education setting for their kids – the kind that made a huge impact on my life, and the lives of my siblings.

I am one of 12 children whose parents are immigrants from Liberia and Jamaica, and in my assigned public school, I was a failing, unmotivated student. I never thought that I would go to college, and thus I would end up just like my parents in poverty. This was the life I envisioned for myself.

Everything changed when my parents enrolled me in Academy Prep Center of Tampa, a private, nonprofit middle school where three of my siblings were already attending. Its rigorous college-track curriculum proved to be the challenge that I needed. With the help of several teachers and their personalized instruction, I thrived in my new environment.

I then went on to Tampa Catholic High School, where I again successfully met high expectations. After graduating in 2017, I went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in food science and technology from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee.

To continue reading, go here.