For the first time, during the 2024-25 school year, Utah parents are able to access public taxpayer funding to enroll their child in private religious schools, or to cover home-schooling expenses. In this post, we’ll talk about the basics of how the program works and how public money flows from the legislature and into the hands of private schools.
Managed Outside of Utah
When Utah’s school voucher program - called the "Utah Fits All Scholarships" - was launched by school privatization proponents, the legislature directed the Utah State Board of Education (USBE), to find a third-party “program manager” to administer it. Nearly $83 million in taxpayer money is funneled to this third party, which does not have the same reporting and accountability requirements as a public agency like USBE.
The voucher program manager, Alliance for Choice in Education (ACE), or ACE Scholarships, is located in Colorado. ACE claims to have distributed nearly $212 million in public funding to non-public schools since 2000. The non-profit organization received public funding to run school voucher programs in nine states, including: Utah, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Fun fact: ACE’s current CEO, Norton Rainey, makes $409,023 a year (by comparison, we pay Governor Cox around $166,000 a year).
How Families Get Their Vouchers
We only have one year of information to examine regarding how ACE administers Utah’s voucher program. But so far, here’s how the process works:
- Parents “pre-apply” through the program website at the beginning of the calendar year.
- Those who “pre-apply” are notified when the full voucher application process opens in March.
- The third-party program manager, ACE, decides who gets to participate in the voucher program for the upcoming school year. According to state law, they are supposed to prioritize in the following order:
- Children who are already in the voucher program or have a sibling in the program; then
- Children in families living at 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL) or below (a family of four with a household income of $60,000/year or less); then
- Children in families living between 200% and 555% of FPL (a family of four making up to $165,000/year); then finally,
- Any other eligible students.
- For families that are selected to receive the $8,000 voucher, ACE creates an Educational Savings Account (ESA, also referred to by ACE as a “digital wallet”), where the $8,000 is held.
- Families access their student’s ESA through ACE’s online portal, from which they can directly pay (through the portal) any “qualified providers” or “eligible service” pre-approved by ACE.
So Many Allowable Uses for Tax-payer Funded Vouchers
Voucher recipients can use the taxpayer funding to pay for private school tuition and fees, of course. But there are many other approved educational expenses, such as:
- After-school programs;
- Extra tutoring services;
- Physical, occupational and speech therapy;
- Transportation to and from a “qualified provider”;
- Devices like computers, laptops and tablets, as well as software and apps; and
- Fees for college entrance exams (as well as for prep courses for those exams).
There are a lot more details, rules, and guidance, but these are the basics of how the program is meant to work.
Our Public Money, No Public Accountability
There are no educational standard requirements for voucher students. And no student assessments are required to evaluate whether the private school or homeschool curriculum is actually teaching children to read, write, do math, or understand basic scientific facts.
In fact, state law prohibits any public influence over how and what voucher students are taught.
In our next post in this series, we will discuss how Utah - a state where vouchers have been roundly rejected for nearly 20 years, and where only 8% of students attend private school or homeschool - got steamrolled by national privatization proponents.
Read more from our series, Vouchers and School Privatization, here.