Vouchers are set to get more than half of Miami-Dade’s state per pupil funds

For the first time ever, Florida’s school finance program is set to send more state taxpayer money to private education than it does to public schools in Miami-Dade County.

The state’s per pupil calculations for public schools are a complicated calculus involving student population, property values, local and state tax contributions among other considerations. The vouchers, which average about $8000 per student, draw their funds from the same pot of state money.

This year, more than half of Miami-Dade’s $1.5 billion from the state-backed portion of the education finance program is estimated to go to about 82,470 students receiving private school vouchers, while the rest will be divided among the projected 303,506 students in traditional public and charter schools.

The voucher program’s share of funds is currently $766 million in Miami-Dade while the county’s public schools – both traditional and charter schools – are set to receive just $737 million from the state formula, according to

That imbalance is the result of a dramatic change in Florida’s education landscape: A voucher program that was once limited to certain students has exploded since becoming available to virtually all Florida families in 2023, while enrollment in Miami-Dade’s traditional public schools has fallen.

And Miami-Dade is now providing a glimpse of a problem that has already surfaced in Monroe County: As vouchers consume a growing share of the state’s education budget, the decades-old funding formulas are beginning to struggle to pay for both private and public school students. The situation could ultimately force changes to how education money “follows the student” — with some advocates pushing to separate the funding into its own silo or make local school districts pick up part of the bill for voucher funding.

The average school district gets slightly more from local taxes than state taxes, but in certain high property value communities like Miami-Dade and Monroe County, local property taxes make up the vast majority. As vouchers skyrocket, they absorb more state money than public schools in some cases.

Sue Woltanski, a school board member in Monroe County, saw first-hand how vouchers can consume a district’s state funding.

“It was sold to us that [vouchers] would be no cost because this would just be a child already funded in the formula moving over to the other place, but if a kid from the public school moves over to [take a private school voucher], there won’t be money for them over there,” she said.

But lawmakers know there’s an issue with how the state’s funding formula works as-is.

State Representative Alex Rizo, R-Hialeah — a former charter school principal and public school administrator who sits on two education committees in Tallahassee – says the state’s education finance program is due for a “revamp.”

The program was created in the early 1970s. It’s regularly tweaked, but major changes to it like the universal voucher are rare.

“It’s an old formula, and there’s been a lot that’s happened since its inception,” Rizo said.

The math doesn’t math

Though Miami-Dade is the state’s first major urban county to cross this threshold, it’s very familiar territory for some smaller, wealthy counties where funding formulas generally lean heavier on local taxes, not state funds.

In Monroe County, Woltanski said funding vouchers in her Florida Keys community has caused some budget headaches.

According to budget documents from the Department of Education during the 2025-26 school year, five school districts – Monroe along with Collier, Martin, Sarasota and Walton – saw the allocated state aid, so on paper it looked like these districts owed the state money in order to pay for the private school vouchers claimed in their counties.

Monroe didn’t necessarily have that many students using vouchers – 851 compared to 8,249 in traditional and charter schools – but the math of the formula could not withstand even that number.

“Even though our voucher numbers hadn’t gone up, the public school students had gone down, so there wasn’t enough money to pay for all the students who get the vouchers,” Woltanski recalled.

It’s partially because the formula for state and local contributions are calculated separately from the vouchers, and are based on property values in each county. The higher the property values, generally speaking, the more a district relies on local taxes as opposed to state taxes. Miami, for example, gets $2.2 billion in local taxes for education, which makes up about 75 percent of its allocation. The imbalance can cause vouchers to absorb all the state funds for public schools in districts that get fewer state dollars.

The state legislature has had to make some changes, like lowering the amount of funding that can come from local revenue so the state is on the hook for more funds and adding budget language to allow the state to send extra money to districts where state funds get absorbed by vouchers.

“It made us look like we owed the state almost a million dollars because of kids going on vouchers… They told us not to worry about it, and they did, ultimately, give us the money, which we appreciate,” Woltanski recalled.

Shifting the burden to the counties?

Across the political spectrum, Florida policymakers and observers think the state’s funding formula should change given the issue districts like Monroe have faced as well as increased political pressures around vouchers.

Woltanski suggests detaching the voucher from the state funding formula entirely. As it stands, she said the arrangement threatens to destabilize both the districts themselves and the funding stream for vouchers.

“Wouldn’t vouchers be better protected in a separate silo where they were guaranteed the money the state was giving them, and it wasn’t determined on what the population of their school district was?”

The state’s fix to what occurred last school year in Monroe County – just send more money – isn’t a long-term solution, she added.

“If the state decides to fix it by just providing more and more state funding, well then they’re just taking away more and more from what was promised of the public schools.” Woltanski said.

Danny Aqua, whose organization Teach Florida advocates for private and Jewish schools in Florida, said the program “could change and it should change.”

But he believes voucher funding should be calculated the same way as public schools’ per pupil average, which was $11,531 as of the 2024-25 — a figure that includes all state, local and federal funding.

“I think that funding every student with the same sources would be beneficial, and I think it would make it even more predictable for the district and for the scholarship program,” Aqua said.

Integrating private school teachers into the district’s referendum – which is a ballot mechanism Miami-Dade has used in 2018, 2022 and this year to increase local tax dollars to primarily fund teacher salaries and school safety – would also help, Aqua argued. He said it would benefit private schools and would shrink the gap between what private schools get from the government per-student and what entirely government-funded public schools get per-student.

“It’s always a struggle for our teachers in the Jewish day schools to see a lot of reporting of the public school teachers getting $10,000, $16,000 bonuses from the referendum dollars and being excluded from that. It also makes it much harder for our schools to compete in the marketplace… So, we’d like to see a more balanced approach between the scholarship and the public school funding,” Aqua said.

Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor specializing in education finance, said he thinks Aqua’s vision is likely to win the day.

He suggested that the price tag for vouchers will likely get so high that it’s no longer palatable for legislators to use only state funds on them.

“My guess would be that the folks in Tallahassee will eventually decide ‘Nah, we’ve got to force them to transfer the local [tax], too, because we’re not going to increase the state aid that much,’” Baker said.