ORLANDO, Fla. – Some Florida school administrators say it has been a stressful mess trying to get the funding to pay operating costs and teachers’ salaries.
Florida lawmakers recently expanded who qualifies for the School Choice voucher program and changed how scholarships are disbursed. It has left some schools on the brink of collapse.
Florida’s school voucher program is the largest in the country. More than 400,000 Florida students have been awarded scholarships through the $4 billion program.
Many of these scholarships go to special needs students, but according to school administrators, the contractor hired to distribute most of that money has failed to get it to schools on time.
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Miriam Lundell has been the executive director of Chase Academy in South Daytona for 15 years.
“It’s very stressful, very stressful,” Lundell told News 6. “In fact, the new system is completely stress-inducing.”
The school has 88 students, all special needs, and all receive scholarships from the state’s School Choice program.
In 15 years, she has never had a problem getting the funding on time, until now, Lundell said.
Back in December, Lundell says the school noticed it had not received full tuition payments for 18 of her students, shorting the school tens of thousands of dollars.
“I projected conservatively, over $30,000,” she said.
That’s for one quarter, leaving the school struggling to pay the bills.
“I’m running out of operating funds, enough to cover the next payrolls,” Lundell said. “So my rent was due, and I gave them a small check. I said, ‘I don’t have the money right now.’”
Lundell is by no means alone.
It’s happening around the state.
Mary Jo Walsh is founder and CEO of Mountaineers School of Autism in West Palm Beach.
“We were forced to take out high interest loans in order to make payroll and our rent,” Walsh told News 6. “In ten years of having a school, this has been the most stressful financially, spiritually, emotionally than I have ever experienced.”
Step Up for Students is the third-party contractor that Florida’s Department of Education uses to disburse scholarship funds.
When state lawmakers passed HB-1 last year, it turned scholarships into education savings accounts, or ESAs, and changed how the money is disbursed, according to Scott Kent, the director of Strategic Communications at Step up for Students.
“Last year we could send schools money directly after confirming enrollments,” Kent wrote in an email to News 6. “Now, by law, we must fund each individual student account first because they are now ESAs. That creates an invoice that schools must confirm, then we can pay schools.”
Now the money is disbursed quarterly, but schools say even that has been short and no one warned them this was coming.
“When the amounts came, they were not correct. They were often times largely underfunded and it made our budget very difficult,” Walsh said.
Administrators say even their Step Up for Students regional managers can’t explain it.
“Nobody knew why. Nobody,” Lundell said. “It took something that had been over the years, I would have to say, fairly streamlined, and turned it into a mess, and I don’t know the reason for it.”
Mary Jo Walsh says she has exhausted her personal savings.
She has not taken pay for eight weeks. She has taken out two loans and still is two months behind on the mortgage for one of her buildings.
“This is a new process that changed after years of schools using the prior method. It will take a few quarters for schools to become familiar and comfortable with the changes,” Kent wrote.
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