Ben Albritton’s priorities — rural spending and school voucher fixes — seem dead

Rural Renaissance appears to have been put out to pasture for a second consecutive Session.

House Speaker Daniel Perez told reporters that the House won’t consider in the last eight days of the 2026 Regular Session any legislation that has not already been heard by at least one House Committee.

“A bill that hasn’t moved in the House is not going to be brought up at this time,” Perez told reporters.

That means Rural Renaissance, a top priority for Senate President Ben Albritton, most likely won’t make it across the finish line.

Neither will a proposal from former Senate President Don Gaetz, a Crestview Republican, to address problems with the school voucher system detailed in a state audit.

The Rural Renaissance bill would have created the Office of Rural Prosperity within the Department of Commerce. The office would have facilitated planning and connected local governments to state and federal resources.

Still, the proposed $144.8 million appropriation for Rural Renaissance, directed toward roads, education, housing and health care, remains in play because the chambers still must craft a budget for Fiscal Year 2026-27.

This would be the second time in as many years that Albritton’s priority legislation has stalled.

The Gaetz bill lacked a House companion. While the House discussed the audit and accounting shortfalls in the school voucher program, it did not propose its own solution.

There was no appropriation for Gaetz’s bill (SB 318), but it eyes better management of billions of tax dollars. The Senate budget separates money for school vouchers from public K-12 schools for accounting purposes in the budget while the House budget does not.

The Phoenix asked Gaetz about what will happen if another year passes without a voucher fix.

“Everything will get worse. There will be more students who won’t be able to be tracked. Taxpayers will be paying for them but we won’t know where they are. We won’t know if the right money is going to the right place or the right student. More families who are relying on family empowerment scholarships to support homeschooling will be waiting for payments for weeks and months longer than they should,” Gaetz said.

More schools that take care of students with significant learning disabilities will be in “court fighting with Step Up For Students to try to get their money, months, sometimes years behind, and more public schools will be shortchanged because the students will be moving back and forth, as they do, between homeschooling and private schools and public schools with the money chasing the students but never quite catching up with it,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz said he is under the impression the Florida Department of Education is working on administrative rules to address “low-hanging fruit problems” but wishes it would do more.

As far as addressing the voucher programs’ accounting problems during budget talks, “that’s all up to the Speaker or the President,” Gaetz said.

A state audit found that voucher money was not moving the way it was supposed to. The audit concluded that “funding did not follow the child,” counter to the rallying cry of school choice proponents that tax dollars should be allocated to students, not schools.

In 2024-2025, the program dished out $3.17 billion in Family Empowerment Scholarship vouchers and recorded another $804.5 million in scholarship programs funded through corporate tax credits, totaling nearly $4 billion dollars.

Budget talks between the two chambers don’t seem to be moving, meaning lawmakers may extend their Session in Tallahassee that is supposed to end next week, or they will come back to town before the end of the fiscal year.

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Reporting by Jay Waagmeester. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].