With a bipartisan unanimous vote, the Senate has passed a bill to add more oversight for the taxpayer-funded private school voucher program because thousands of students — and the money that follows them — are missing in the system.

SB 318 does not currently have a House companion bill even though the lengthy package of reforms has cleared the upper chamber.

Florida’s $4 billion universal school choice industry has experienced explosive growth but left an education system ripe for abuse.

“On any given day of the week, the (Florida) Department of Education (FDOE) can’t find 30,000 students we’re paying for,” Sen. Don Gaetz, the SB 318 co-sponsor, said on the Senate floor. “That’s $270 million we’re paying for students we can’t locate. The Auditor General criticizes our funding model as ‘pay and chase,’ and they don’t mean it as a compliment.”

SB 318, approved late Wednesday, would make sweeping changes, including creating a separate category for the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) so it would no longer be mixed into the state’s K-12 funding formula calculation.

SB 318 also would expand the education stabilization fund to $250 million so that if more students leave traditional public schools than expected, they can still get fully funded vouchers. 

Democrats told Gaetz they wished his bill could have helped public school districts facing declining enrollment and big funding losses as the voucher program has grown to more than 500,000 students. Gaetz told lawmakers he was trying to get a stabilization fund provision in a conforming bill to help buffer public schools and give them a declining enrollment subsidy.

The bill also would reduce scholarship administrative fees from 3% to 2% to fund more scholarships through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

Other changes would streamline the process, including requiring one single application for all scholarship programs and ordering the necessary documentation, like a child’s birth certificate, be submitted when the application is turned in.

To improve transparency, the child’s guardian would need to attest that the student is not enrolled in a public school and say where the child is educated. A private school can speak out in some cases on behalf of the parent.

Going forward, the FDOE would be required to assign a Florida student ID for all voucher recipients to process their scholarship information to make sure the families receive the taxpayer funds.

“It’s kind of hard to keep track of hundreds of thousands of students if we don’t know who they are and where they are, but by giving every student a number, that is a first step,” Gaetz said.

FDOE would also be required to create a standard withdrawal form when voucher students leave the traditional public school system.

“Fraudsters, unfortunately, have discovered our school choice program, and they spammed millions of dollars by creating fictitious students — not Minnesota, but not a good look,” Gaetz said. “So this bill provides that each provider will receive funding for students only if, and after, they are confirmed as being actually enrolled.”

The bill also would stop the practice of organizations, like Step Up For Students, keeping large sums of taxpayer money in their own accounts, Gaetz added.

“Last year, the Department of Education advanced $600 million to the school funding organizations even before the parents made their school choices. And then the Department chased the money to find if the dollars wound up in the right place for the right students, and the result is that public schools were shortchanged by $100 million for students they served, but the money was sent someplace else,” said Gaetz, a former Superintendent of Schools for Okaloosa County.

The FDOE would also reexamine how it works with those organizations and create a business plan to become more competitive and create contracts with performance requirements.

“If this bill passes, the Department of Education will no longer work with a scholarship funding organization in the way that we have done in the past,” Gaetz said. “Right now, there is performance, but there are not always performance requirements. And as a consequence, there has been some ragged performance, candidly.”

The bill also addresses problems parents are experiencing, Gaetz said.

For instance, some parents homeschooling their children wait months to get reimbursed for materials and services. 

His bill “reduces red tape and reduces long waits for payments,” Gaetz said. “Our bill asks families to help us help them by confirming monthly with a simple checkoff where their student is attending school so that the right amount can be disbursed to the right place and private schools can do that on parents’ behalf in this bill.”

After a scathing report, the Auditor General would audit the FDOE and the nonprofits issuing the vouchers, like Step Up, every year going forward under the bill’s direction.

“To all of us who believe in parental choice and education as I do, the Auditor General’s report was tough medicine,” Gaetz said. “To disregard the Auditor General’s findings and warnings and recommendations and just let things roll on as they are, would be legislative malpractice.

Democrat Sen. Shevrin Jones praised Gaetz’s bill but warned more legislation is needed in future bills to add more oversight to private schools. Some of these private schools, now getting public dollars, are not good learning environments or properly teaching students, he said.

Gaetz joked it was the first-ever “tripartisan” bill to be heard on the Senate floor since the legislation was also co-sponsored by Republicans Sens. Corey Simon and Danny Burgess, Democratic Sens. Rosalind Osgood and Darryl Rouson, and Sen. Jason Pizzo, who is independent.

Orange County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the state, welcomed the bill’s passage in the Senate. The district is planning to close seven schools as it faces a financial crisis from a student enrollment dip.

“SB 318 puts students first and protects taxpayer dollars,” Orange County School Board member Angie Gallo said in a statement. “It supports public school classrooms, respects local decision-making, and brings much-needed accountability to Florida’s state K-12 education taxpayer-funded voucher system.”