Guest Author
Memorial Day is fast approaching, and with it, the unofficial beginning of the Summer vacation season for families with school-aged children.
But this year, many Florida parents could be in for a rude surprise – the Florida Legislature is considering a proposal requiring nearly 500,000 families to spend their Summer scrambling to come up with some additional paperwork to satisfy meddlesome bureaucrats.
Talk about a major buzzkill.
The proposal is found in a scholarship “glitch” bill that is still alive, even though the 2025 Legislative Session was supposed to conclude on May 2. The proposal would require nearly 500,000 Florida families that have applied for – and already been awarded! – school choice scholarships to circle back and cough up some new forms, such as a second proof of residency (because one proof of residency apparently wasn’t enough).
Now, I’m sure the legislators behind this misguided proposal mean well. Indeed, they are trying to cut down on some cost overruns that stem from sloppy accounting practices (particularly when K-12 students transition from one form of schooling to another). But there’s something gauche about making a Mom and a Dad who are packing the family car for a beach trip go back inside and rifle through the wastebasket to find a crumpled-up utility bill that can provide a second proof of residency.
And what makes all this particularly galling is that Mom and Dad satisfied all the K-12 scholarship paperwork requirements at the time of their application, whereas the Legislature failed to get its one job (passing a budget) done on time. Put another way, a proposal being considered during the legislative equivalent of “after-school detention” threatens to disrupt the summer plans of Florida families that got their work in on time.
What’s worse, the legislative proposal isn’t simply a one-time “Cruel Summer” annoyance (as Swifties might say). The proposal calls for hassling scholarship parents throughout the upcoming school year, forcing them to file periodic “attendance attestations” confirming that their children are still in the scholarship program (and not currently enrolled in public school full time).
These “attendance attestations” put a paperwork burden on scholarship parents that is not put on public school parents.
And that is the key point.
To their great credit, Florida leaders over the last half-century have taken heroic steps to “level the K-12 playing field” so that all families can send their child to the school that best suits them. Yet even though most Florida legislators now embrace the idea that “education funding should follow the student,” some legislators still want to treat education choice as a “privilege” which scholarship families must “earn” by jumping through hoops that public school parents would never be expected to jump through.
There are several cruel ironies to this unequal treatment, including one that ought to make MAGA legislators blush. If the current proposal goes forward, the children of “undocumented” immigrants wishing to attend a Florida public school this fall will be welcomed with open arms, while some longtime Florida citizens will be denied previously-promised K-12 scholarships due to – get this – “a lack of documentation.”
Something tells me most Floridians – MAGA or not – are apt to have a problem with that. Let’s hope the Legislature suspends consideration of this proposal during its “after-Session detention.”
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William Mattox is the senior director of the Marshall Center for Education Freedom at The James Madison Institute.
