ATLANTA — This fall, thousands of Georgia students will attend a private school or study at home, and state government will help them pay for it.
Republican lawmakers led a push last year to give families $6,500 a year per student toward private education.
Georgia already had a state-funded voucher program, but it was limited to students with disabilities or certain medical conditions. Another program for all students was funded through tax credits rather than money directly from the state treasury.
The new state-funded “Promise Scholarship” program doesn’t require a disability. It only requires that students live in the attendance zone of a public school performing in the bottom 25% statewide. The student either must have attended it for a year or be a rising kindergartner.
As of Monday, nearly 13,000 had applied for a scholarship and more than 8,300 were considered preliminarily eligible, which translates to a cost of between $54 million and $84 million for the upcoming school year.
The application period runs through June, so more may apply, and there will be two more windows to apply during the upcoming school year.
The money can go toward tuition and fees at approved schools. It can also offset home school costs, paying for curriculum and even medical and therapeutic services by approved providers. Transportation costs are covered, too, at up to $500 per year.
As of Monday, about 60% of the preliminarily eligible students had said they wanted to attend a private school, the rest choosing home school or other educational support services or not yet making a selection, according to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which operates the program through a public non-profit organization. Nearly 400 private Georgia schools had been approved or were approved but still completing the registration process this week, with 150 applications denied. More than half of the approved schools were in greater metro Atlanta, with about three dozen in the city of Atlanta. Columbus, Macon and Savannah also had numerous approved schools.
More than 300 service providers made the approved list. About a third of them were outside Georgia, with several in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Florida.
Critics contended that most of the families that used the scholarships would be wealthy since they would be able to cover the cost between the state subsidy and tuition that can run to $10,000 or more.
So far, about three quarters of the preliminarily eligible students are from households earning less than 400% of the federal poverty threshold, or $106,600 a year for a family of three and $128,600 for a family of four.
Opponents of the program, including most Democrats in the General Assembly and public-school advocacy groups, argued that fly-by-night schools would take the money without properly educating the students. In the end, they said, these students would return to public schools and become their burden.
So the GOP lawmakers who pushed the bill added a requirement that all students in the program must take either the same state exams as public school students or one of three national “norm-referenced” tests to be selected by the state.
Private schools will have to report the results, along with other information, such as attendance rates and graduation rates.
Program proponents argued that public schools could not properly serve all 1.7 million students attending one in Georgia.
Shakia McCrary’s son, a rising second grader, will be among those leaving his neighborhood public school this fall.
He has learning disabilities that can lead to misbehavior if he is not kept on task, she said, describing how a teacher would put him on speaker phone so she could calm him down.
His public school in Fort Valley, south of Macon, lacks enough specialized staff to give him the attention he needs, McCrary said. So she is considering two private schools within a half hour drive because, she said, they have smaller class sizes.
The state-funded scholarship will cover all but about $1,000 of the tuition cost at each school, said McCrary, who works for a federal health insurance program.
She is thankful for the promise scholarships.
“Private school, it crossed my mind, but I knew that I just couldn’t afford it and still be able to live comfortably,” she said. If not for the state funding, her son would be heading back to public school this fall, she said, and she would be dealing with the same issues.
Republican lawmakers had been pushing for years to get the program approved, finally gathering enough votes to squeak Senate Bill 233 into law last year.
Sen. Larry Walker III, R-Perry, the Senate majority caucus secretary, sees the subsidies as an “incredibly popular” issue for his party.
“This school choice program is not just a life changer for the students and families that participate. It’s also a party expander,” Walker said at the Georgia GOP convention in Dalton in early June. “School choice introduces new constituents to our Republican values. It allows them to understand that it’s conservative Republicans, not liberal Democrats, who are fighting for better opportunities for working folks and families.”
On Thursday, fellow Senate Republicans voted to nominate Walker as their next president pro tempore. The full Senate will vote on his promotion to top-ranked senator when the body reconvenes in January.
Meanwhile, one group backing SB 233 is now promoting the scholarships, hoping as many parents as possible will access the $141 million that lawmakers allocated to it this year. Americans for Prosperity has placed four billboards around DeKalb County advertising the program, and volunteers have handwritten about 5,000 postcards to likely parents they think should know about it, said Tony West, the organization’s director in Georgia.
“We worked very hard to see Senate Bill 233 pass,” West said, “and now we want to work just as hard to make sure it’s a success.”