A new state law has replaced Florida’s patchwork of local zoning rules that had prevented some small private schools from opening, paving the way for robust school choice options to expand.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 182 on April 20. In addition to a broad swath of education changes, from a cursive writing mandate to a teacher mentoring program, it includes a provision that exempts private schools with 150 or fewer students from applying for costly rezoning and land use changes when operating in commercial or mixed-use zones and in nontraditional buildings, provided they meet fire safety standards or similar checks.
The new law takes effect on July 1. It benefits private schools of all sizes by expanding legislation passed in 2024 that allowed them to operate in houses of worship, museums, theaters, colleges, and former schools or day care centers without needing these changes.
SB 182 also lets them build new facilities on these properties or on land owned by Florida College System schools and state universities without zoning changes.
The new law covers faith-based and secular schools, with Jewish education leaders leading the push for its passage. According to the Florida Department of Education, 15,679 students are enrolled in 85 Jewish schools across the state.
Demand for Jewish day schools has soared as families primarily from the Northeast move to Florida because of its robust education choice scholarship programs. The migration has meant fewer available seats for those seeking schools that provide academic and Judaic instruction.
Teach Florida, a division of the Teach Coalition, which advocates for Jewish nonpublic schools and parents, praised the law as “a transformational moment” for all Florida families.
“Today, Florida confirmed its commitment to students by removing one of the biggest barriers standing between Florida families and the education they want for their children,” said Melissa Glaser, executive director of Teach Florida. “For too long, local zoning restrictions have prevented schools from opening where demand is greatest. This law will help more schools grow, create more classroom seats, and ensure that more students can access the education they deserve.”
Last year, the group published a report on regulations governing the opening of private schools across South Florida. It concluded that local zoning restrictions were a major barrier to opening a new school, due to a patchwork of local laws that limit where schools can open, allow public schools to open in the same areas where private schools are prohibited, impose extra requirements on new private schools such as costly traffic studies regardless of school size, nebulous standards for “compatibility” and “scale,” and arbitrary requirements for lot size, fence height, building sharing and more.
As a result, the typical time to obtain zoning approval for a new school in South Florida was 12 to 18 months, and the process cost more than $150,000 in legal, architectural, and study fees.
“All nonpublic schools should receive the same protections and flexibilities as public schools,” the report said.
For microschools that register as private schools, the law exempts them from fire code complications that limit them to a maximum of five students.
Alison Rini, the founder of Star Lab in Sarasota, could serve only five students during her first year due to fire codes that would require her to spend $97,000 on a sprinkler system for the rec center of a public housing complex where Star Lab operated. A local philanthropy stepped forward to help the housing authority pay for the system, but many founders are not as fortunate.
“The new law is a major win for diverse educational options,” Rini said. “The zoning process is incredibly burdensome.” In addition to the sprinkler system, Rini said she spent $10,000 to apply for a minor conditional use permit to use a one-story building less than 3,000 square feet that had previously housed a day center. The whole process took nearly two years and cost a total of $130,000.
“All of that time and money could have gone into our students and our curriculum; it was so frustrating,” Rini said.
Rini said she had to invest all the time and money with no guarantee of success. However, she said the planning commission easily approved her proposal when she was finally able to present it after 22 months of preparation.
After the vote, Rini said the chairperson commented, “I don’t know why this had to be so hard for her. I’m from Europe, and we have schools in apartment complexes all the time. This is a very compatible use.”
Danny Aqua, projects director for Teach Florida, recently told EdChoice the law adopts common sense fire code reform by 1) requiring fire officials to recognize alternative fire safety methods that are already in the code, and 2) treating similar facilities like day cares and churches as existing schools when applying the fire code.
“The goal is not to reduce safety, but to ensure that regulations designed for large, traditional schools are applied more appropriately to smaller educational environments,” he said.
By Lauren May, Mary Camp, and Ron Matus
First, Florida. Now, Indiana. Which state will be next for a Catholic school comeback?
Our new, 2026 “Catholic school update brief” highlights not only continued Catholic school growth in Florida – which saw enrollment rise for a fifth straight year – but signs of resurgence beyond Florida, nudged by the historic expansion of school choice across America.
As we noted when the latest National Catholic Educational Association statistics were released in March, Indiana is now, like Florida, showing net enrollment growth over the past decade. Among the Top 10 states for Catholic school enrollment, the Sunshine State and Hoosier State are, for now, the outliers.
But don’t sleep on Ohio, which saw its Catholic schools grow by more than 3,000 students this year; or Texas, where a jaw-dropping 274,000 students applied for that state’s brand-new choice program. Don’t overlook smaller states with big choice programs and momentum, including Iowa and New Hampshire. And don’t forget about the potential of the new federal scholarship tax credit to enhance what’s been happening in the states.
Our brief includes a 50-state chart where you can track Catholic school enrollment year-by-year over the past decade. (Big thanks to the NCEA for collecting the data.)
It also includes more insight into the pace-setting growth in Florida, including a rapid rise in the number of students using special-needs scholarships.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our emails are in the bios at the end of the brief.
Editor's note: This post is shared by our sister organization, Step Up, Step Further Scholarship Fund, a new federal scholarship program launching in 2027 to support students in public and private schools.
At Florida TaxWatch’s policy forum, Step Up For Students Founder and Chairman John Kirtley shared how the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will help expand opportunity for K-12 low income district school students. “The income levels that the federal law allows are, in my opinion, pretty generous,” Kirtley said. “They’re 300% of the area’s median income, which in Florida will be anywhere up to probably $250,000. However, a scholarship organization can set its own income limits.”
The new tax credit will continue to allow Step Up, Step Further, sister organization of Step Up For Students, to focus on serving the lowest-income students in Florida.
Kirtley went on to illustrate how Florida school districts have seen a dramatic increase in graduation rates since 1981, when the graduation rate hovered under 50%. He noted that a statewide push for greater accountability in schools and grading them has resulted in a graduation rate of over 90%.
“That’s an incredible improvement, and we should all be very proud of that. A great example of how the districts have responded is very close to home for me. My high school, Fort Lauderdale High School, when schools were first graded back in 1999, my high school was an ‘F.’ And it was an ‘F’ for several years,” Kirtley said.
Read the full article at Florida Politics > https://floridapolitics.com/archives/791109-john-kirtley-makes-case-for-choice-encouraging-use-of-education-savings-accounts/
TRINITY, Fla. – Noah Allen was in middle school when he began to teach himself Latin. College-level Latin. He did that for two years.
He also taught himself Japanese. And Korean.
“It’s his superpower,” Noah’s mom, Josie, said. “He loves to learn.”
Noah, 16, is inherently curious. Theater, art, and music are a few areas that pique his interest. Also, the periodic table of the elements.
When he was 8, he wanted to be a nuclear physicist and work with a cyclotron. Later, he thought of a career in linguistics.
Now, as he completes the final semester of high school, Noah wants to study global law.
In Italy.
At Bocconi University in Milan.
To gain admission, he needs at least a 1340 on his SAT, which he has, and a 4.0 GPA, which he also has.
Noah is interested in law. He likes to help others. He has a passion for connecting with people from other cultures. He sees a career in global law as the perfect blend of those interests. He could work for an international organization or practice immigration law.
“I think he has a really bright future,” Josie said. “Noah is going to do amazing things.”
***
Noah, who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, receives the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities. Step Up For Students, which manages the scholarship program, said that 140,147 students received the scholarship during 2025-26. The average scholarship is worth about $10,000.
He is home educated and learns online through the Florida Virtual School. He also uses the funds from the scholarship to cover the cost of his tutoring, SAT prep classes, and exam fees, and his registration for the Melanated Homeschool Cooperative, which provides field trips, program days for middle and high school students, a graduation ceremony and banquet, and a prom.
The scholarship also pays for his dual enrollment to Pasco-Hernando State College, where he has completed college-level courses in math, psychology, government, and humanities.
“I have been really grateful for the opportunities that the scholarship has given me,” Noah said, adding that having the SAT prep classes and exams paid for was beneficial since he took the test three times to achieve his high score.
“The scholarship helps fund his academic health and his social health,” Josie said, “which, I guess, is his mental health.”
Josie, who has a degree in early childhood education, and her husband, Aaron, who owns a construction company, realized their son was academically gifted at an early age. He was reading by age 4.
“I thought, he’s going to go to school, and all the other kids are going to be learning their alphabet, and he's already reading. He's going to be bored,” Josie said. “We're going to have to figure something else out. We’re going to have to do something different with him.”
Learning at home allowed Noah to move at his own pace, accelerated in most cases, and make accommodations for his ADHD. He could schedule his schoolwork around his therapies and the family's active travel schedule.
Josie is a travel tour guide who writes a travel blog, Traveling in Spanglish.
The family, who lives north of St. Petersburg in Trinity, frequent Europe, especially Italy, where Josie and Aaron met.
Noah has traveled to Mexico, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Canada, St. Martin, and Haiti. He has done schoolwork on trains traveling between European cities and logged into an SAT prep course at 10 p.m. local time from Venice, Italy.
His time abroad fueled his passion to learn other languages and cultures, and the customs of the people he met during his journeys.
He said he couldn’t have done that if he attended a traditional school.
“I wouldn't have been able to have those experiences,” he said, “and I might be in a completely different spot than I am now.”
***
Noah has acted in plays and musicals at the Center Stage Youth Theater near his home and the Stageworks Theater in Tampa. He recently appeared in “Hadestown.” He was Eugene in “Grease” and Wally Webb in “Our Town.” He’s also appeared in “Les Misérables.”
“I really like doing theater,” he said. “I like singing, and dancing, and acting.”
For his 16th birthday, Josie treated Noah to a weekend in New York City, where they visited the Museum of Modern Art.
“We had a blast,” he said. “I do love a good art museum.”
He can gaze for hours upon Claude Monet's “Water Lilies” or Vincent van Gogh's “Starry Night.”
“I love impressionist paintings,” Noah said. “They're really beautiful. I just like capturing the vibe of something, or the feeling of something. Not necessarily what it looks like, but how it feels to you.”
For Noah, to be immersed in a painting is the only way to see art.
That’s similar to the reasons why he wants to attend Bocconi University in Milan. He can also begin studying law as a freshman, and the tuition of $15,000 per semester is almost laughable compared to the cost of a college education in the United States. (Tuition for international students at the University of Bologna in Italy, another school that has Noah’s interest, is $2,000 a year.)
Those two are certainly perks, but global law will require Noah to interact with clients from around the world. He’ll need to learn their customs, their methods of communication, and the idiosyncrasies familiar to their culture.
Attending classes with students from Europe will give him a head start.
“I want the experience of studying abroad,” he said. “It's really helpful to be able to experience living in another culture. It really helps you integrate and maybe connect yourself with the world in a way that you can't get by going to school in a place that has a similar culture to you.”
He will be able to communicate with most of his classmates, since there is a chance he speaks their language. He is fluent in Spanish (his mom’s native language), and he’s becoming more conversational in Italian, Japanese, and Korean.
Noah’s dream is to live in Japan and practice global law. That’s where he said he sees himself in five years.
As for Josie, she sees her son doing whatever he puts his mind and heart into.
“He’s going to be a justice-seeker,” she said. “He’s going to bring changes. He’s going to help people. There’s no doubt in my mind that’s going to happen.”
Less than two months after the application season began, record-breaking interest continues with more than 500,000 students applying for Florida’s K-12 education choice scholarships.
Step Up For Students, the nonprofit organization that administers 98% of the state’s scholarships, opened applications for the 2026-27 school year on Feb. 1. A record 200,000 applied during the first three days.
By midday Feb. 10, a total of 300,106 students had applied for scholarships, which represents an 11.7% increase over the same 10-day period last year. By Friday morning, Feb. 27, a total of 401,507 students had applied.
Applications reached the 500,000 mark on March 30, which was 22 days earlier than in 2025.
Step Up For Students CEO Gretchen Schoenhaar said last week that the organization’s team and systems were ready for the surge of interest. Step Up’s technology systems processed 15% more applications on the first day this year than at the same time last year. Of the families who called for assistance, more than 90% reported being “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the support they received.
“Florida continues to set the pace for the nation in education choice,” Schoenhaar said. “Families have become accustomed to seeking options in their children’s education and Step Up For Students is proud to support them every step of the way.”
Since its inception in 2002, Step Up has administered more than 3 million scholarships.
During the 25-26 school year, more than 525,000 students have been funded on Florida’s K-12 scholarship programs to access learning options of their choice. If these students were counted as a single school district, it would be the largest in the state and the third largest in the country. That makes Florida the national leader in education options.
However, not all families end up using their scholarships. Top reasons include: Their preferred private school lacked capacity; they were on a waitlist for a charter school and were accepted; they chose to attend a district school, etc.
Step Up is on track this school year to have 2.75 million transactions on MyScholarShop, its online marketplace, for over $425 million. Step Up is on track to process over 4.5 million reimbursement requests this year, worth over $595 million, four times what it had just two years ago.
Current scholarship families have until April 30 to renew their scholarships for the next school year. All families who want a PEP scholarship must also apply by April 30.
Applications and more details are available here.
We will continue to update the numbers in this post until applications close.
By Lauren May and Ron Matus
Florida continues to be a standout in Catholic school growth. But the latest national data from the National Catholic Educational Association, released Tuesday, shows other states with expansive new school choice programs are gaining steam.
In fact, Florida is no longer the only state in the Top 10 states for Catholic school enrollment to show a net gain over the past decade. This year it’s joined by Indiana. The Hoosier State is now in the plus column thanks to this year’s jump of nearly 4,000 students.
(Indiana, by the way, replaced Missouri in the Top 10. Missouri’s enrollment has been relatively stable for the past five years, but it dipped just enough for Indiana to pull ahead.)
No state had a bigger one-year increase than Indiana, the new report shows. Plenty of others, though, are seeing significant growth, including Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire, all states with choice programs that encompass universal eligibility.
Check out the data for yourself in the chart we put together at the bottom of this post. It includes the NCEA’s year-by-year numbers for all 50 states, going back a decade.
The report isn’t just good news for individual states. Nationally, enrollment stayed pretty steady for a fifth straight year. After decades of falling numbers, that’s encouraging – and supporters of Catholic education, and education pluralism more broadly, should feel the wind at their backs.
Meanwhile, don’t forget about Florida just yet.
Catholic school enrollment down here is up 12% over the past decade, while total K-12 growth ran about 10% over that span.
The Sunshine State’s been the outlier for years, buoyed by the most robust school choice programs in America. It’s for that reason that we issued a special report, “Why Catholic Schools in Florida Are Growing: 5 Things to Know,” in 2023, and followed it up with update briefs in 2024 and 2025.
Stay tuned for the 2026 update soon.
About the authors
Lauren May is Vice President and Head of the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Program at Step Up For Students and a former Senior Director of Advocacy at Step Up For Students. As a proud graduate of the University of Florida, she received her bachelor’s degree in special education and her master's degree in early childhood education. She then completed another master's degree in educational leadership from Saint Leo University. A former Catholic school teacher, early childhood director, and principal, she was honored with the University of Florida’s “Outstanding Young Alumni” award in 2018. As a believer
that parents are the first and best educators of their children, Lauren loves working with families across the state and beyond to ensure they can find and make use of the best educational options for their children.
Ron Matus is Director, Research & Special Projects, at Step Up For Students. He earned a bachelor's degree in history and English/creative writing from Florida State University and a master's degree in Florida Studies from the University of South Florida. He joined Step Up in 2012 after more than 20 years as an award-winning journalist, including eight years as the state education reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, the state’s biggest and most influential newspaper.
TAMPA, Fla. – Shuli Goldenberg didn’t need to see Tampa Torah Academy to know it would be just right for her now 12-year-old son, Yanky. After talking on the phone with a rabbi who co-founded the school, she was sure it was “perfection.”
Still, she had persuaded her husband, Yisroel Aron, to move 1,200 miles from the Catskills in upstate New York; to leave family behind; to start life anew in the Sunshine State – all for a school they’d never seen.
So, when she finally got to see it in person, a few days after the family moved down …
“I stood there with tears in my eyes thinking, ‘I’m home,’ ” Mrs. Goldenberg said. “It was like magic. It was exactly the school I wanted and exactly the school I knew my son would thrive in.”
The Goldenbergs are yet another example of a family drawn to Florida by educational opportunity (see others here, here, and here).
In their case, they represent what is likely the biggest group of “school choice transplants.” Hundreds if not thousands of Jewish families have moved to Florida in recent years, motivated at least in part by booming Jewish schools and the universal availability of state school choice scholarships.
The result: Between 2007-08 and 2022-23, the number of students in Florida’s Jewish schools grew 58%, to 13,379, and the number of Jewish day schools and yeshivas nearly doubled, from 40 to 74.
The Destination Florida pipeline is especially strong from New York to South Florida. But there are growing pockets of Jewish schools emerging in other parts of Florida too, like Tampa.
The why is obvious, said Rabbi Ariel Wohlfarth, co-founder of Tampa Torah Academy.
“School vouchers, no income tax, nice weather; why would you be any place else?” he said.
Tampa Torah Academy occupies a former preschool in a polished suburb. The school and its dormer windows and wraparound porch are framed by stately oaks and towering palms, next to a pond with a fountain whose streams arc outward in a circle, like the petals of a giant aquatic flower. An aerial view is the first thing people see when they visit the school website, along with the words, “Experience the Warmth of a Jewish Connection.”
Tampa Torah Academy opened in 2022 with 10 families, eight of whom relocated from New York. In the three years since, it’s tripled in size, from 33 students in grades K-7 to nearly 100 in K-12.
Every student uses a choice scholarship, which averages $8,000 or $10,000 a year, depending on the scholarship type. As of 2023, they’re available to every student in the state.
In New York, Yanky attended Jewish schools before Mrs. Goldenberg pulled him after a bullying incident.
She tried to homeschool him, but it wasn’t easy. She worried he wasn’t proficient enough in some subjects, like math, because of her own academic shortcomings, and that he wasn’t hanging out enough with other kids.
There were a few other Jewish schools in the area. But they were too expensive, too far away, or too big. Yanky, she said, “would have been lost and miserable.”
Thankfully, in the summer of 2022, Mrs. Goldenberg said, a miracle happened.
As word spread about a wave of Orthodox Jewish people leaving New York for schools in Florida, Mrs. Goldenberg got a fundraising pitch for Tampa Torah Academy. She donated, then called, then had a long conversation with one of the co-founders, Rabbi Yirmiyahu Rubenstein.
She was amazed by what she heard. The school promised solid instruction in both secular and religious studies; small class sizes; and teachers who would know each student’s strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly.
Everything “was like perfection,” Mrs. Goldenberg said. “I hung up the phone, I went across the house to my husband, and I said, ‘We’re moving to Tampa.’ “
Mr. Goldenberg is a retired businessman who worked in real estate. Mrs. Goldenberg is a former English teacher. Both had familiarity with Florida, having lived near Miami before things, for them, got too congested and hectic.
Neither knew the Tampa Bay area. But seven months after the call with Rabbi Rubenstein, they settled in Wimauma, a suburb 30 miles south of Tampa where a Jewish community is growing and former pastures are sprouting subdivisions.
“I thought Florida had flamingos, but we have cows next door,” Mrs. Goldenberg said.
Odds are high that more out-of-state families will be joining the Goldenbergs soon.
Tampa Torah Academy has room for 170 students – and it’s actively informing families in other states about what’s available in sunny Florida. Families in New York, New Jersey, and California, all states without private school choice programs, are among them.
As one indicator of the interest level, Rabbi Wohlfarth pointed to a recent, online “community fair” that connected Jewish communities nationwide to Jewish families interested in moving. Nearly 150 families visited the Tampa booth; more than 30 indicated serious interest.
The choice scholarships, Rabbi Wohlfarth said, are a powerful draw.
Jewish families are generally familiar with private school choice programs, “but they don’t know the amounts,” Rabbi Wohlfarth continued. When they hear what Florida provides, their ears perk up, he said. “They’re like, ‘I didn’t realize it was that much.’ “
Even without the scholarships, tuition at Tampa Torah Academy was more reasonable than similar schools up North, Mrs. Goldenberg said. The scholarship made it better still.
Without it, she said, paying for the school “would have been an enormous amount of stress.”
Tampa Torah Academy provides Yanky everything he needs to be successful, she said. It’s strong in both general academic subjects, what Orthodox families call “English,” and Jewish religious studies, often called “Judaics.”
“I wanted him to have both. That’s very important,” Mrs. Goldenberg said. “At Tampa Torah Academy, they also have a high school division now, so they can prepare to send the kids to the best colleges.”
Yanky said he’s happy with his new school and state. For top Florida amenities, he listed 1) “It’s not cold,” 2) theme parks, 3) Top Golf.
Mrs. Goldenberg said the only downside is the family’s two older children – a son and a daughter and their four grandchildren – are still in New York.
Otherwise? The people of Tampa Bay are “lovely,” she said, and the pace of life just right: “not as rush-y” as South Florida but more energizing than the Catskills. “There’s always something to do,” she said.
The cherry on top is the school, and the tight-knit community that revolves around it.
“Oh my God I love it. I feel like all of us are thriving,” she said. Meanwhile, friends up North are “buried under 27 inches of snow.”
Greater collaboration is being credited for a dramatic decrease this year in the number of Florida K-12 scholarship students experiencing scholarship funding delays because their names were also found on public school rolls.
According to the latest state figures, the rate of matched students in the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options was less than 1%, while the rate of students applying for the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities Scholarship was about 5%. Officials attributed the higher match percentage for FES-UA to that group’s greater mobility, given the various services available through the public school system.
In the latest quarter, fewer than 6,000 scholarship students were reported in public schools compared with 27,000 in the quarter that included the start of the 2025-26 school year.
The improvements occurred after officials at the Florida Department of Education worked with the state’s 67 school districts and Step Up For Students to improve the crosscheck process and pinpoint more students who were being double counted.
During the 25-26 school year, there are six crosschecks where the Florida DOE compares Step Up’s list of students who are on scholarship with school districts’ lists of students who were reported as attending a public school. If a student appears on both lists, Step Up For Students immediately freezes the student’s funds to ensure that public tax dollars are spent properly.
Step Up then contacts the families of these students and requests documentation showing that they were not enrolled in a district school, which is sent to the DOE. These students are funded on the scholarship only after the DOE clears them.
All scholarship accounts that were frozen from 2024-25 and the first two quarters of 2025-26 due to students appearing in a public school crosscheck have been resolved.
DADE CITY, Fla. – A friend told Sarah Jones a few years ago she should open her new petting zoo to homeschool groups, but Sarah didn’t think that would go over too well. She didn’t know much about homeschoolers, and the stereotypes in her head told her their parents wouldn’t warm to a tattoo-covered building contractor with a salty vocabulary.
But then the friend persuaded Sarah to bring her animals to a fundraiser for mental health programs. Homeschoolers with special needs were in attendance. One little girl, autistic and nonverbal, was smitten by a pony dressed up like a unicorn. She brushed it for hours. And when she got home, according to a note her mother sent to event organizers, she spoke her first words, telling Mom, “I love you.”
Sarah saw it as another flashing sign in what had become an undeniable string of signs. Her life was headed in a different direction.
Now she runs Florida Farm School, an à la carte learning provider rooted in land and livestock that serves about 50 homeschool students.
Once a week, on Mondays or Thursdays, families bring their pre-school- to middle-school-aged kids to Sarah’s 20-acre spread in the sand hills 45 minutes north of Tampa. Over the course of four hours, they learn how to grow their own food, make their own medicine, build things with their hands, and, more than anything, interact and care for more than 100 animals.
In the process, they learn even deeper lessons. Responsibility. Resilience. Compassion. Curiosity. The value of hard work. The value of teamwork.
Maybe even how to pause and evaluate what really matters.
“When you live in the city, it’s constant noise,” said Sarah, who grew up 60 miles away, in Florida’s most densely populated county. “Go to one of these (Tampa Bay) neighborhoods and tell me if you can hear the birds sing. No wonder we’re all so full of anxiety.”
“Here,” she continued, “the innocence of pure joy every day is infectious.”
Homeschooling on steroids
Florida Farm School is a sweet, quirky story unto itself. But it also represents another big shift in public education in America, with Florida again leading the way.
More than 150,000 students in Florida are now using state support to learn completely outside of full-time schools, up from 8,000 five years ago. Think of it as homeschooling on steroids. Their parents are using flexible state scholarships, aka education savings accounts, to customize their educational programming by mixing and matching from an ever-growing menu of providers. This “à la carte education” is taking shape in more and more states as ESAs gain traction, but nothing on Florida’s scale is happening anywhere else in America.
Sarah Jones would seem to be an unlikely pioneer, except that now, in a state where education choice is the new normal, anybody with a good idea can give it a shot in an education marketplace that gets more vibrant by the day. The number of à la carte providers that aren’t schools now tops 7,000, nearly four times as many as two years ago. Tutors and therapists are the biggest categories, but untold numbers of unconventional providers like Florida Farm School are entering the mix, too.
‘A wildfire of positivity’
Sarah’s background is in business, not education.
She owned a moving company. Then, a residential cleaning company. Then, a construction company. The latter installed cabinets and counters for thousands of new homes all around the Tampa Bay area.
After COVID-19 hit in 2020, things began to change in Sarah’s world. First, little by little. Then, in a revelation.
The way Sarah sees it, “this was my fate,” she said. “I never planned this.”
One day at the baseball field, watching her youngest son play, Sarah spied somebody’s renegade pet rabbit roaming next to the field. She caught it … and took it to a farm she had recently visited … which led to more visits … and to riding horses …
Next thing you know, Sarah and the owner were discussing the possibility of opening an indoor livestock petting zoo, and Sarah began acquiring animals at auction. Ultimately, she decided to go it alone on her land in Dade City, which she had originally bought to develop into ranchettes.
That’s when things started taking a more dramatic turn.
“It’s magic out here,” Sarah said. “I heard the leaves in the trees and birds singing, and it changed me. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that. I asked myself, ‘How much of this have I missed?’”
Other incidents besides the girl and the pony/unicorn began leaving a deeper impression. Sarah recalled two elderly women who visited the farm, giggling and reminiscing as they sat with baby goats in their laps. Another time, after the farm began serving homeschoolers in 2023, the kids learned how to build herb walls. Then, on their own initiative, some of them went home and taught their neighbors.
What Sarah thought was a simple lesson turned out to be “a wildfire of positivity,” she said.
'No kid is forgotten'
The farm is a multi-dimensional enterprise.
Sarah occasionally takes in farm animals that have been neglected or abandoned. She plans to breed “minis,” little versions of cows, donkeys, and other farm animals that are in growing demand as novelty pets. She also hopes to sell a few acres to a group that wants to cultivate a food forest, a forest-like garden full of edible plants.
A handful of parents help with the learning activities, and in some cases, lead them. As a team, they’ve taught the kids how to make everything from laying boxes for chickens to candles, soap, and ice cream.
Farm chores are central. The kids muck pens, scrub water buckets, gather eggs. They watch live births and bottle-feed babies. Some of them have taken piglets home and fostered them.
The menagerie in their midst is growing. It now includes at least 50 chickens, 15 turkeys, 15 ducks, 15 cows, 13 pigs, six dogs (not counting a litter of puppies), five donkeys, two goats, two raccoons, and a mule.
The school, though, is the farm’s heart.
The educational offerings are expanding, too. Science activities just kicked off on Fridays, anchored by another à la carte provider, a mobile STEM academy.
Sarah said many of the families served by Florida Farm School are of modest means. They wouldn’t be able to access the school without the choice scholarships.
Andreea Barron said her family is one of them. She’s a former public school teacher. Her husband is in the military.
She said that in six months, the school has been life-changing for her 6-year-old son, Beckham, who uses a scholarship for students with special needs.
Beckham was enrolled in one of the area’s highest rated public schools. Andreea was a teacher there. But while he was excelling academically, he was struggling socially. Andreea decided to homeschool and eventually heard about the farm school.
“He’s blossomed so much,” she said. “The animals are his therapy. The people here and the animals teach him confidence. They make sure no kid is forgotten.”
“You know it in your heart that this is home,” she continued. “I’ll never let go of this.”
Sarah said she won’t either. Once you realize what’s possible when you have “the freedom to explore, and to breathe, and to be you,” she said, you don’t go back.
Maybe public education is learning the same lesson.
New research by the American Federation for Children found that scaling Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program over 15 years improved public school student achievement.
The report published March 4 by AFC senior fellow Patrick Graff, a former Florida Catholic school teacher, compared two leading peer-reviewed studies of each approach that used Florida data: a 2023 study of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program over 15 years and a 2024 analysis of the effects of additional school spending on student achievement.
Key findings
Not a zero-sum game: Florida’s experience shows that school choice can benefit students, no matter where they learn, families, and taxpayers at the same time. Florida now enrolls over half a million students in private school choice programs, and its public school students still outperform students in most states while spending less.
Read the full report here.
