Education / School Funding

Escambia Schools Are Serving 335 Voucher Students—and Not Getting Paid for It

Superintendent Keith Leonard and School Board Chair Tom Harrell put the question directly to Tallahassee: fix the funding formula.

The Escambia County School District is educating hundreds of students who are simultaneously listed in Florida’s voucher program database. And under the current state funding formula, the district isn’t being compensated for serving them.

• That’s the core of a letter dated April 22, signed by Superintendent Keith Leonard and School Board Chair Tom Harrell and addressed to Suzanne Pridgeon, Deputy Commissioner for Finance and Operations at the Florida Department of Education. Read DOE Pridgeon

The letter is blunt. According to the district’s most recent report to FDOE, 335 students appear in the voucher program database and are also directly served by Escambia County district personnel. The district is providing those students with transportation, food services, and counseling—fulfilling every DOE priority—and receiving nothing for it from the voucher funding formula.

“Please advise us on what steps the Escambia County School District can take to ensure that these students are appropriately included in the funding formula for the Escambia County School District.”
—Leonard and Harrell, April 22, 2026

The Bigger Picture: A Broken Accountability System

Escambia’s letter lands in the middle of a statewide accountability crisis that Florida lawmakers have so far failed to fully resolve.

• Florida’s school voucher programs—primarily the Family Empowerment Scholarship administered by nonprofit Step Up for Students—have grown explosively since the Legislature passed HB 1 in 2023, making vouchers available to virtually all K-12 students regardless of family income. Voucher expenditures through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) have roughly tripled in three years, rising from $1.4 billion in FY 2022-23 to nearly $3.8 billion in FY 2025-26, with total voucher costs approaching $5 billion when tax credit scholarships are included.

The FEFP is the formula Florida uses to distribute education dollars to public school districts, and its main driver is student enrollment data. The problem: the system was not built to handle students who appear in both district and voucher rolls simultaneously. A 2024 state audit found a statewide funding shortfall and what auditors called a “myriad of accountability challenges” in which funding did not reliably follow the child.

What the Letter Means for Escambia

For a school district the size of Escambia County, 335 students is not a rounding error. Each of those students represents real costs to the district—a bus route, a lunch tray, a counselor’s caseload, a classroom seat—that the FEFP formula is not currently compensating.

• Under state law, if a student’s name appears in both the district enrollment system and the voucher database, funding is supposed to be frozen to prevent duplicate payments to both a public school and a private voucher provider. But the Escambia letter suggests that students are appearing in the voucher database who are, in practice, fully served by the public school district—leaving the district holding the bill.

The letter does not allege fraud. It asks a procedural question: What is the mechanism to ensure these students are counted correctly so the district can be funded for the work it is already doing?

• That question has no clean answer under the current system, which is precisely what makes the letter newsworthy.