Donalds Wants to “Repurpose” Florida’s Tax-Credit Scholarships?

But the program already funds hundreds of millions in homeschool vouchers—and demand is exceeding available money.

On Friday, a Florida television report featured Erika Donalds describing an education proposal from her husband, Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds.

“My husband’s Launchpad Initiative,” she said, “repurposes the tax credit scholarship program to allow companies to get tax credits by funding 11th and 12th graders achieving internships, apprenticeships and on-the-job experience.”

That word – repurposes – deserves some attention.

Because today, Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program (FTC) is being used overwhelmingly for something quite different than its original intention: funding Personalized Education Program scholarships, or PEP, for students educated “outside full-time public or private schools” – in other words, homeschooling.

And this year, there already isn’t enough FTC money to fund everyone who wants to homesschool with a PEP scholarship.

How FTC Changed

Florida established its Tax Credit Scholarship program in 2001. Businesses receive dollar-for-dollar credits against specified state taxes when they contribute to approved scholarship-funding organizations.

Those credits can be taken against several taxes, including Florida’s corporate income tax, insurance premium tax and excise taxes on liquor, wine and beer.

Alcohol distributors have been major participants.

Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, for example, says that since 2010 it has committed $1.2 billion to Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program through Step Up For Students, funding more than 191,000 scholarships.

Under current Florida law, eligible businesses can receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for contributions against alcohol beverage excise taxes, subject to statutory limits on the amount that can be claimed against the tax due. The resulting reduction in alcohol-tax collections is charged against state General Revenue.

So these are not simply charitable donations by corporations. They are contributions for which businesses receive credits against taxes they otherwise would owe the State of Florida.

The program itself was originally created to provide private-school scholarships to children from families with limited financial resources. Over time, eligibility expanded.

When Byron Donalds left the Florida House for Congress after the 2020 session, FTC was still primarily an income-targeted private-school tuition scholarship. In 2020–21, about 106,000 students participated, and state law authorized up to roughly $873 million in tax credits.

PEP did not exist until the passage of Florida’s 2023 universal-voucher legislation.

HB 1 (2023) eliminated financial eligibility restrictions for Florida’s major scholarship programs. Private-school scholarship expansion could now be funded through the directly state-funded Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options, or FES-EO.

HB 1 also created PEP within the FTC program.

PEP allows homeschool families to use an education savings account for an array of approved educational expenses while directing their child’s education outside a full-time public or private school.

The Legislature initially limited PEP participation to:

• 20,000 students in 2023–24
• 60,000 in 2024–25
• 100,000 in 2025–26
• 140,000 in 2026–27

Beginning in 2027–28, that numerical statutory limit disappears.

But eliminating the enrollment cap does not guarantee unlimited scholarships. PEP remains dependent upon available FTC revenue.

FTC Has Essentially Become the PEP Funding Stream

As PEP expanded, traditional private-school FTC recipients increasingly shifted to FES-EO, leaving FTC tax-credit funding available for the new PEP program.

For 2025–26, Florida’s March 2026 Education Estimating Conference projected about $692.7 million in FTC scholarship expenditures. The same forecast showed 77,410 PEP scholarships — about 92% of active FTC scholarships — compared with just 7,060 traditional private-school FTC scholarships, about 8%.

The state does not separately identify PEP and traditional-FTC scholarship expenditures in that forecast. But with more than nine of every ten active FTC scholarships going to PEP students, hundreds of millions of dollars in FTC scholarship funding are now supporting PEP.

The overall funding stream is larger still: for 2025–26, the state projected $809.3 million in FTC tax credits, another $71.6 million from motor-vehicle sales-tax designations, and about $162.8 million in legally authorized carry-forward and transferred funds.

In other words, the tax-credit program created to provide private-school tuition scholarships to lower-income children has, within a few years, become overwhelmingly the funding mechanism for publicly funded homeschool via PEP.

And demand is already exceeding available money.

For 2026–27, state law permits as many as 140,000 PEP students. But Step Up For Students told WUSF that it had received interest from more than 100,000 applicants and did not have enough FTC contributions to fund everyone seeking a scholarship.

That means PEP encountered a funding constraint before reaching its statutory enrollment ceiling.

Next year, the numerical cap disappears. But unless available FTC revenue grows enough to meet demand, removing that cap alone will not guarantee funding for every eligible applicant.

Which brings us back to LaunchPad.

What Does “Repurpose” Mean?

Erika Donalds says LaunchPad would “repurpose” the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program so businesses could receive tax credits for funding internships, apprenticeships and workplace experiences for high-school juniors and seniors.

But FTC tax-credit revenue is already being used overwhelmingly to fund PEP — and there currently isn’t enough of it to satisfy PEP demand.

So what exactly does “repurpose” mean?

Would LaunchPad compete with PEP for the existing pool of FTC tax credits?

Would Donalds seek to increase the amount of tax credits available and, if that were possible, why not use those credits to fund the current demand for PEP?

Would LaunchPad receive its own separate tax-credit allocation?

Or does the proposal envision moving PEP away from FTC and into direct state funding, as has been done for most of Florida’s conventional private-school scholarships? Such a shift could raise a new constitutional question.…

In 2006, Florida’s first voucher program, which was directly funded, was struck down by the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Holmes. By relying on tax credits, the FTC was created to avoid a constitutional challenge, which it later successfully survived when courts found that its tax-credit contributions were not appropriations from the state treasury.

Moving PEP from that tax-credit structure to direct state funding would, therefore, change more than its funding source. It could also change the legal posture of a program that now provides publicly subsidized education accounts for nearly 100,000 homeschool families.

At this point, we know only that the Donalds campaign says it intends to “repurpose”a tax-credit scholarship program that today overwhelmingly funds PEP — a program already experiencing more demand than its current tax-credit revenue can support.

That leaves a very basic question reporters covering Florida’s gubernatorial campaign should be asking:

When the Donalds campaign says it intends to “repurpose” the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, exactly what happens to the PEP scholarships that program currently funds?