After the Audit

As widespread failures come to light, Florida’s legislative leaders split on the path forward for voucher funding and oversight.

In October, I asked, “Where Did the Money Go?” and urged lawmakers to insist on a full and transparent accounting of the 2024–25 funding breakdown. I wrote:
“Taxpayers deserve answers. Release the Fourth Calculation — and order a complete audit of the 2024–25 FEFP.”

The Fourth Calculation still has not been released. But last week, the Auditor General’s report — 2024-25 School Year Funding Accountability Challenges — confirmed what many suspected: massive, systemic failures at both Step Up For Students (SUFS), the state’s primary “nonprofit” Scholarship Funding Organization, and the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE). The mismanagement produced a $47 million deficit in the 2024–25 K–12 education budget.

Following the Auditor General’s jaw-dropping presentation on 11/19/25, Senator Don Gaetz filed SB 318, “Educational Scholarship Programs,” describing it as an attempt to “re-engineer” the voucher system to address the audit’s findings and “safeguard school choice and parental empowerment.”

SB 318 was filed on 11/21/25 and is co-sponsored by Senators Simon, Burgess, and Pizzo. Notably, its only committee reference is Senate Appropriations — highly unusual for a bill of this magnitude, which bypasses all education committees. At present, there is no House companion bill.

How SB 318 compares to last year’s SB 7030

Like last year’s SB 7030 (also carried by Senator Gaetz), which passed the Senate but died in Conference, SB 318 would:

• Move the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) into a separate categorical within the FEFP, funded by the General Appropriations Act.
• Expand use of the Educational Stabilization Fund to backfill enrollment changes for districts and guarantee scholarship funding.
• Shift scholarship payments from quarterly to monthly.
• Assign state student ID numbers to all scholarship recipients.
• Standardize fall and spring application windows and require families to verify eligibility before each payment.
• Require an annual FTE audit of scholarship programs , with SFOs required to return misallocated funds (as is required of districts).

What SB 318 adds this year

SB 318 includes additional fiscal guardrails and structural changes, such as:

• Establishing a $250 million minimum balance for the Educational Stabilization Fund.
• Expanding FLDOE authority for data reconciliation and financial oversight.
• Tightening requirements for how stabilization funds are released.
• Restoring the name “McKay-Gardiner Scholarship” to the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Unique Abilities (FES-UA).
• Standardizing authorized purchases among scholarships to include digital devices for homeschooled PEP students.
• Requiring homeschooled voucher users enrolled in Florida Virtual School to pay tuition/fees first, just as private school families must, before accessing additional funds.

Homeschool voucher families will welcome expanded access to digital devices but may resist the shift to monthly payments. SB 318 defines “curriculum” as “a complete course of study,” which often requires up-front purchases that are difficult to make on monthly disbursements.

What advocates have long called for — and what SB 318 finally includes

There is genuine merit in several reforms — many of which public education advocates have requested for years :

• Assigning official student ID numbers to all funded students
• Requiring eligibility verification before payments
• Establishing application windows
• Conducting annual FTE audits

These should have been in place before lawmakers expanded vouchers universally.

The bill’s central — and most important — change

Senator Gaetz emphasized what he calls the audit’s top recommendation:
Separating voucher funding from district funding in the FEFP.

As he explained:

“The architecture of our current funding system has scrambled together the funds for public schools, private schools, home schooling, and unique ability scholarships — and then the Department and the SFOs have to unscramble upwards of $4 billion.
No wonder there are problems.”

Separating these funding streams will improve transparency and prevent unpredicted voucher growth from destabilizing district budgets. It will also make clear — perhaps uncomfortably so for some lawmakers — the extent to which voucher expansion has been subsidized at the expense of public schools.

The House immediately pushed back

Just hours after Gaetz emphasized the need to follow the Auditor General’s recommendations, the Florida House rejected the idea.

After receiving the same audit presentation, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, Chair of the House PreK–12 Budget Subcommittee, declared that separating voucher and district funds would be “a huge mistake” that would “end universal school choice.”

Her concern is not fiscal responsibility but political vulnerability:

“If vouchers are moved to their own pot, trust me, there will be a cap, and those funds will be targeted.”

It’s worth noting:
The Auditor General examined tracking of voucher funds, not how those dollars were spent — on everything from Christmas gifts (LEGOs, bicycles, American Girl dolls), to theme parks, to kitchen appliances, to “Flat Earth” curriculum.
Someone should probably audit that, too.

To date, the House has filed no bill addressing the audit findings, though the PreK–12 Budget Subcommittee held four meetings on the topic during committee weeks.

What comes next

The 2025 Legislative Session begins January 13.
This will be a major issue — and one that will reveal whether lawmakers intend to fix the problems the audit exposed or preserve the very system that caused them.

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Addendum: While I was writing this, The Foundation for Florida’s Future issued the following statement in response to the filing of SB318:

“The Foundation appreciates Sen. Gaetz’s interest in ensuring the nation’s largest parental choice program works better for the half a million families that utilize it and the districts that are impacted by families making different decisions.

The administration of the program has not been perfect, and there’s plenty of room for improvement, but layering new, additional parental requirements will not solve what is ultimately a student tracking problem. Upgraded technology and unified data reporting standards like those used in Texas and Indiana are the best solutions to this.

We look forward to working with Sen. Gaetz, Chairman Burgess and Chairwoman Jenna Persons-Mulicka to modernize the state’s student tracking infrastructure and data reporting standards while protecting families who utilize the state’s scholarship programs.”