More students, fewer teachers: Florida’s voucher squeeze

Key points:

• • Budget Squeeze: St. Johns County is adding 1,000 students while cutting 130 positions due to voucher shifts.
• • Funding Migration: Florida vouchers now take 24% of state education funds, up from 12% in 2021.
• • Accounting Errors: A state audit found $270M in unaccounted spending and widespread payment delays.

June 2026 — The St. Johns County School District will add roughly 1,000 students this year and cut 130 positions to do it. That contradiction captures Florida’s voucher program challenges now reshaping district budgets statewide — massive accounting errors, delayed tuition payments to private schools, and unexpected multimillion-dollar budget cuts that reach even growing districts.

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Brennan Asplen, the superintendent of St. Johns County, looks at the math plainly in his interview with Invest: Jacksonville: “Instead of adding about 40 teachers for 1,000 additional students, we are having to cut 130 positions.”

He is not an opponent of school choice, and none of Florida’s district leaders can afford to be. The state runs the largest school-choice program in the country. The question facing every superintendent is no longer whether to compete, but how to compete while the funding base shifts under their feet. Enrollment, revenue, and headcount now move on the family’s timeline, not the district’s.

Choice is the baseline

Florida families can direct public dollars to traditional schools, magnet programs, charter schools, private schools, home schools, and micro-schools. Howard Hepburn, who leads Broward County Public Schools, frames the shift as a simple expansion of options for parents — more choice than they had a decade ago, alongside a charter sector that keeps growing. The universal voucher has pulled in families who never used public schools at all.

Van Ayres, the superintendent of Hillsborough County Public Schools, treats that competition as a feature rather than a threat. “Choice creates accountability, and we are confident in the quality of what we offer,” he said in his interview with Invest: Tampa Bay. The posture is consistent across the state’s largest districts: back choice, then compete hard to keep students enrolled.

The scale is not theoretical. The Florida Policy Institute reports the share of state education funding routed to vouchers climbed from 12% in 2021 to 24% in 2025. Statewide, public-school enrollment is projected to fall by up to 70,000 students over the next five years.

When dollars exit first

The strain is not mainly about losing students a district already taught. It is about funding students it never enrolled. Asplen said it “becomes difficult to compete when public school districts lose revenue for students who may never have attended the district in the first place.” That dynamic defines the Florida voucher program: money follows the student wherever the family lands, including into seats that were never public to begin with.

St. Johns shows the squeeze in detail. The district adds about 1,000 students a year, yet roughly 6,000 county students attend private or home schools — many of whom have never sat in a public classroom. Each student carries about $9,100 in funding, so as inflation and enrollment growth push costs up, voucher migration pulls revenue down, according to Asplen. The accountability runs one way: public districts answer to strict reporting rules tied to taxpayer dollars, while the same per-student amount can follow a child into a private or home setting with far lighter oversight.

The response is cuts. Beyond the 130 positions, Asplen’s team has trimmed $8 million from the district office, eliminated 22 administrative roles, and reduced leases. St. Johns is not closing schools. Other Florida districts are.

The audit behind the gap

The competition the superintendents describe sits on top of a documented accounting failure. A state audit released in December found the Florida voucher program could not fully account for $270 million in spending during the 2024-25 school year, and estimated overpayments for roughly 30,000 students. The errors trace to a system that pays before it verifies — about 23,000 students were double-counted in 2024-25 as families moved between sectors midyear — and the year’s shortfall reached $47 million.

Private operators have felt the lag, too. A lawsuit filed in February accuses Step Up For Students — the nonprofit that administers most Florida vouchers — of delaying or freezing payments, in some cases for more than two years, with schools serving students with disabilities hit hardest.

Lawmakers divided over the remedy. The Senate passed SB 318 to separate scholarship money from the public-school formula and require annual audits; the House declined. The budget finalized in late May kept the $4.5 billion in scholarships inside the main K-12 formula and added a cushion for shrinking districts, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the roughly $115.1 billion plan.

The structural question the auditors raised stayed open, which means the pressure Asplen describes will carry into the next budget cycle. District finance officers should watch three markers: the declining-enrollment cushion as the fiscal year opens July 1, the Department of Education’s program-administration recommendation due in December, and the discovery phase of the private-school lawsuit. Education providers that rely on voucher receivables should price in payment lag and stress-test liquidity now. In the nation’s largest choice market — where the Florida voucher program moves billions out of the public formula — the districts that hold their footing will be the ones that treat marketing and cost discipline as permanent functions, not temporary fixes.

Want more? Read the Invest: reports.