When children are approved for education savings accounts, a voucher-style program like the one Florida uses, states often put public money into accounts parents can use to pay expenses like tuition. If families can’t find a private school and don’t use the money, it may roll over to another year or, depending on the state, get returned.
About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its voucher program for disabled children was returned because recipients — kids like Amelia — were enrolled in public school instead, according to data from the nonprofit that disburses most of the funds. By comparison, just 1% of money in the state’s program open to all students was returned for the same reason.
Florida is one of three states where ProPublica obtained data allowing us to make such comparisons.
Louisiana, which launched an education savings account program in the 2025-26 school year, delivered $43.1 million to parent-controlled accounts. Overall, 6% was returned because the families didn’t spend the money, state data shows. But among students with disabilities, that rate was far higher at 30%.
In Texas, data is still coming in for the first year of its $1 billion voucher program. But so far, students with disabilities are opting out of using the money at slightly higher rates than all other students.
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Though families return the money for multiple reasons, many have indicated they did so because they couldn’t find suitable private schools that would enroll their students.
“Families are at the mercy of the schools — and schools choosing their kid — versus the other way around,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national association working on behalf of children with disabilities.
Today, at least 18 states have voucher-style programs with universal eligibility or are phasing them in. Florida eclipses them all. More than a half-million Florida schoolchildren — roughly 1 in 6 — use a voucher today. When lawmakers opened the state’s voucher program to all children in 2023, two-thirds of the newly enrolled students were already attending private schools.
Yet private schooling often remains out of reach for children like Amelia, the children lawmakers once used to gain a toehold for future voucher expansions. They shared disabled children’s compelling stories, named legislation in their honor and created some of the nation’s first statewide voucher programs specifically for these students.
They started in Florida.
Illusion of Choice
In 1999, an unassuming man wearing glasses and a lavender tie stood before his colleagues in the Florida Senate to champion a bill that would change the trajectory of American education. John McKay, a Republican, wanted to give parents of children with disabilities a chunk of taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.
McKay pointed to his own family’s experience. Public schools had failed to meet the needs of his daughter, who had significant learning disabilities. He and his wife could afford to send their daughter to a private boarding school, but not all parents had that option.
“We’re alienating parents,” McKay argued. “I’ve been alienated by the public system when I was told I didn’t have any choices with regard to my children.”
The McKay Scholarships began as a pilot program — the nation’s first voucher system specifically for students with disabilities. Lawmakers soon expanded it, creating the nation’s first statewide voucher program for this group of children. Ohio followed Florida’s lead, then Utah and Arizona and Georgia and, later, Louisiana and Oklahoma and others.
Across the statehouses, politicians stressed one sentiment: choice. Parents would no longer be tethered to their local public schools and could choose where to send their children.
Georgia’s sponsor said he sought “to give any disabled student whose parents are dissatisfied with their assigned public school the ability to attend the public or private school that best fits their needs.”
“They can just take the scholarship and go to private school,” an Oklahoma lawmaker pledged.
The programs have since helped thousands of children with disabilities move to private schools, including those designed to meet their unique needs. But for many children, especially those with more severe disabilities or who live in areas where few if any private schools operate, the promises of choice were never realistic.
Some legislators backing those early programs said they recognized this problem but argued that any children helped by the new options made the effort worthwhile. And they hoped that competition fueled by money flowing into private schools would create a more robust school marketplace in the long run, one that would accommodate students with special needs.
In 2021, West Virginia lawmakers adopted their first and only foray into vouchers, an education savings program that they have since opened to all students. To get the bill passed, some legislators made familiar promises to disabled children — even though the state has only a handful of schools that specifically say they will serve even the least-intensive of children’s needs.
“Our kids can’t go to a private school,” said Christy Black, an advocate for Disability Rights of West Virginia who has a daughter with Down syndrome. “I called every private school from Huntington to Charleston because that’s as far as we could drive her and work. But no one would accept her because she has a cognitive disability.”
More than half of Utah’s counties have no private schools that take its vouchers for students with disabilities. In Georgia, 71% of counties have none. And in Louisiana last year, among about 350 private schools, only 14 reported enrolling a single child with a disability. Eight of those admitted five or fewer such students.
Even in Florida, with its urban centers and roughly $5 billion voucher programs, ProPublica found that more than a dozen counties have no private schools that serve kids with disabilities or have only one school with limited offerings. Our analysis of state data also shows that more than half of Florida’s private schools say they do not serve students with any type of disability.
“It’s touted that this program is an equalizer, and then people have choice,” said Jinny Kim, managing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a national civil rights and policy nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. “But then if you really look at the details, it’s not actually how it happens.”
Anxious about her daughter’s upcoming transition to middle school, Atlanta-area mother Marguerite Lane decided to explore private schools that take the state’s voucher. Her daughter, who has autism, does well academically but can be very sensitive and struggle in bigger classrooms without enough behavioral support.
Lane applied to and visited several private schools and found a small, arts-infused one that said it would accept some children with learning challenges. She thought it would serve her daughter well, but then she opened an email from the enrollment director.
“We don’t believe we can support her needs and help her thrive in this class,” it read, “and we also don’t want to compromise the educational experience of the other students.” The last part hurt most. Lane thought, “God forbid the other children learn empathy.”
Toehold Strategy
As politicians debated those first voucher programs for children with disabilities, a common refrain echoed across statehouse chambers: The plans were just small programs for a specific group of students.
“It’s a very limited scholarship,” a Utah representative assured colleagues in 2004. “This really is about special needs.”
“It’s not, as I heard some of you say to me, the beginning of vouchers. No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a program to help a group of students that need our help,” a Georgia House member told colleagues in 2007.
Behind the political scenes, a different message spread.
As Arizona adopted its first program for children with disabilities in 2006, Clint Bolick wrote an essay entitled “Toe-Hold Strategies.” Bolick, who was then president of the advocacy group Alliance for School Choice, is now a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.
Voucher advocates, he wrote, were “acting smarter.” Rather than take on powerful teachers unions directly, they were pushing smaller programs geared toward specific students whose needs were harder for politicians to oppose. “The strategy makes sense from a moral perspective, for it focuses assistance on the neediest schoolchildren,” he added. “It also works politically, because choice begets choice: Once the Rubicon is crossed and legislators vote to adopt a school choice program — no matter how small or targeted — it becomes easier to support a new one, or expand the old one, the next time around.”
By 2011, a half dozen states had launched voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. At a “school choice” conference that year, Howie Beigelman sat on a panel that discussed the strategy. At the time, he was deputy director of public policy for the advocacy arm of the Orthodox Union, a prominent Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization. He offered guidance to those who might want to get into vouchers.
“Special needs is a very easy way to get into this business,” Beigelman said. “Anyone, no matter how partisan they are, it’s very hard to say special needs is not where people need ‘special’ education.” (He recently told ProPublica via email that this was his opinion and he had “never seen anything ‘intentional’ about using special needs scholarships for anything more than what they are plainly for: helping educate children with special needs.”)
Shortly after vouchers for disabled children spread to Arkansas in 2016, the University of Arkansas posted on its website an essay by Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the college’s Office for Education Policy. “Special education private school choice programs are often seen as a ‘foot in the door’ for school choice laws,” she wrote. “Once some success has been shown to the public, more laws can be passed to expand these programs.”
Indeed, following those wins, lawmakers across the country opened the floodgates, often to all or most comers, expanding voucher-style programs into a $10.6 billion tide of public money.
Today, two-thirds of states have some kind of voucher-style program on the books. These programs mostly serve a very different population of students than the early ones did. Most current voucher recipients don’t have disabilities, nor do they need to hunt for a private school that will enroll them. They were already in private schools when they tapped this new windfall.
North Carolina state Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer who advocates for people with disabilities, opposes her state’s voucher system, which is now open to all students. “The thing that genuinely infuriates me,” she said, “is when people with disabilities are used as pawns.”
Failure to Address Access
Two decades after states began adopting vouchers for children with disabilities, lawmakers have done little to improve access to private schools for them — even as they have created programs open to all comers. Most legislatures haven’t required private schools that take this public money to accept even a few kids with such needs. Nor have they created effective incentives to help operators open more specialized private schools, which can be costly to run.
That’s largely because one of the driving forces behind vouchers is the goal of keeping rules to a minimum so private schools will take the public money.
“Getting the government involved in private schools isn’t the answer,” said former West Virginia Delegate Amy Summers, a Republican who played a central role in creating her state’s universal voucher-like program. She thinks competition for students will prompt private and public schools to better serve children with disabilities.
Another key advocate in West Virginia was Republican state Sen. Patricia Puertas Rucker. She homeschooled her two children with disabilities, including a now-adult daughter who she said came home from public school with bite marks and bruises.
Rucker hopes that the state’s voucher program will give more families a way to foot tuition bills or band together to create small schools called microschools. But she regrets that her colleagues approved the payments without additional money for students with disabilities, as some states offer. That extra money could help families afford the higher tuition often charged by specialized schools — and make it more viable for operators to open them.
“It is very expensive to have all this special equipment and to even build the buildings for children that have very specialized special needs,” Rucker said.
But beyond raising those payments, she doesn’t think the state should do anything to cajole or require private schools to enroll children with disabilities. “The minute you start doing that, you are basically disincentivizing private schools from participating, and then you’re denying parents. I do not want to do that.”
It’s not that private schools haven’t opened to take advantage of the voucher windfall. They in fact have been proliferating in recent years. And some of these new schools specifically welcome children with disabilities. But most of them do not.
The Pain of Rejection
Parents described private school rejections as “insulting” and “heartbreaking,” especially when school personnel have met the children. But families don’t always need to apply or even call the schools to get a denial. Some websites or handbooks make it clear.
One small Baptist academy in rural Georgia invites applicants to “join our family” but declares in its handbook that it isn’t equipped to educate children with learning disabilities or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. “If such students are accepted in our school, it is up to the parents to provide extra services other than what the classroom teachers would do in the confines of the classroom.”
In 2023, Taylor Cordes, a former special education teacher, embarked on what she calls her “personal passion project” to see how many private schools in her home state of North Carolina post such clear rejections. She dug into every handbook she could find for 660 schools and found that only about a third of them indicated they would accept students with even limited disabilities. More than 1 in 10 declared they would not serve such students, she said.
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Many families endure deeply hurtful personal rejections in the search for education. Private schools typically decide who to enroll after meeting parents and their children, as Diavonni Jordan, an Atlanta-area mother, learned. Her now-8-year-old son, Jamir Souders, has ADHD. When he was suspended multiple times from his public school and started to get into fights, she searched for an option with smaller class sizes where she thought he would focus and learn better.
A single mother of two, Jordan applied to a local Christian school, then took time off work to visit it. She filled with hope as she toured the well-kept campus and spoke to its friendly staff. But within a week, she opened an email from the school. “The support that we could give in our 1st grade would not be enough for him this year,” it read. The school’s program was small, ill-equipped to provide for his needs, it added.
Jordan expanded her search to other traditional private schools, even when they would mean longer drives for her. She applied to five and toured two. But the verdicts never changed.
“Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family,” another Christian school wrote. Jordan wondered what child constituted a “good fit” for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son. Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future. But for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.