Anastasios Kamoutsas curbs double counting in K-12 scholarships

Anastasios Kamoutsas has been in his new job for less than a year. But the rookie Commissioner of Education has already solved the most daunting administrative problem facing Florida’s K-12 system – how to avoid “double counting” students when they migrate mid-year from public schools to scholarship programs (or vice versa).

No one disputed that a fix was needed. Especially since double-counting often led to double payments (and, by year’s end, funding shortfalls).

But many families and education leaders balked at the Florida Senate’s proposed remedy to this problem: an onerous new requirement that scholarship recipients submit monthly – yes, monthly! – paperwork confirming that their children wish to remain enrolled in the program. (This proposed requirement had prompted some private schools to consider withdrawing from the scholarship program.)

Those proposed monthly reports can now be thrown in the waste basket. New data from the Florida Department of Education shows a dramatic decline in “double-counting “ cases during the current school year.

Specifically, fewer than 1% of Florida students receiving an “educational options” scholarship also appeared on a public-school enrollment list in 2025-26. And the total number of “cross-check” cases requiring enrollment verification has dropped from roughly 27,000 students in Q1 and Q2 all the way down to less than 6,000 students in Q3.

Moreover, thanks to temporary funding freezes when students appear on two enrollment lists (and need their status clarified), the net cost to the state for “double counting” in the 2025-26 school year now stands at $0.

That’s zero. Zilch. Nada.

Woo-hoo!

Commissioner K will no doubt want to share credit for this administrative achievement with his fine team at the Department (and with the scholarship funding organizations and School Districts with which the DOE works closely). And technological upgrades are still needed to make it easier for the Florida Department of Education to track students’ movement in the future.

Still, Kamoutsas deserves a hearty round of thanks from students, families, school officials, and legislators for spearheading administrative improvements to Florida’s scholarship programs.

And the current Ed Commish deserves credit for building upon the legacy of his predecessor (Manny Diaz), who collaborated with Florida’s main scholarship funding organization (Step Up for Students) to streamline the payment processing system. As a result, more than 99% of the millions of payments to schools and vendors are now made in under 3 days.

Most of all, Commissioner K deserves kudos for demonstrating that there’s no need to panic when program implementation challenges arise. Indeed, now that the scoreboard shows yet another implementation victory for Florida’s school choice programs, maybe it’s time we all learn to chill when a (temporary) administrative problem causes critics to prematurely pronounce an “existential crisis” in these much-loved K-12 scholarship programs.

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William Mattox is the senior director of the Marshall Center for Education Freedom at The James Madison Institute.