When John Kirtley started Step Up for Students, he only had enough funds to serve 700 students. Within the first four months, he had 12,000 applicants.
That was 1998. Now in 2026, the state’s school voucher program, the Family Empowerment Scholarship, which Step Up for Students helps administer, receives about $4.5 billion per year.
The News Service of Florida spoke to Kirtley about Step Up for Students, how much has changed and growing pains within the scholarship funding organization as it has rapidly expanded in the past few years.
This sponsored 5 Questions interview with Kirtley has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Step Up for Students started over 25 years ago, did you ever think it would get this big?
I started it in 1998, and it was just myself trying to help poor kids in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, to give them a chance to go to a different school with some financial assistance. I managed to get a national non-profit that was just formed after I started mine to match my funds, but even then we were only able to help 700 kids. We didn't really give them too much money, I think it was like $1,500 per kid, and it was just myself walking around the churches and housing projects talking about it on Sundays and on Wednesday nights. In four months, with no advertising, we got 12,000 applications for the 700 scholarships, so I knew then that we had sort of tapped into something big, which was parents of limited means wanting the same empowerment that families of greater means had. My phone was listed at that time, and my phone rang for months with parents calling me saying, “You got to have just one more, just one more.”
Back then, before the late ‘90s, there were a handful of magnet schools around the state, really no charter schools until the late 1990s and no scholarship programs, so the only people that had choice were those who could afford to buy a house in the school zone that they wanted or who could pay for tuition to a private school. Everybody else was out of luck, so that was the impetus, that was the beginning, and no, I never thought it would be the size of it today. That's thanks to a lot of people, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people that have worked on this over the years.
Critics on both sides of the aisle say the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program needs to be its own silo within the Florida Education Finance Program. What do you think?
I'm open to all solutions. The thing that matters most to me is that no family who wants to have the empowerment to choose and curate the right environment for their child is shut out, and so as long as whatever solution never allows that to happen, I would be good with it. What's always on the forefront of my mind is every single family, every single parent, needs to be able to find the right, and it's not necessarily even at right place because sometimes we have 150,000 students on scholarship who do not attend a school full-time, if at all, and many of them are taking one or two classes at a school, and the rest of it is online or homeschooled. Parents are really getting creative at finding the right environment that will maximize their kid’s potential.
How are parents customizing the educational environment of their children?
Districts are working with us at Step Up. We went to them and said, hey, we have these 150,000 kids, many of them want to take your classes, maybe not full-time and be there physically full-time, but maybe they're homeschooling their kid, and they don't know how to teach calculus, but the district has an amazing calculus teacher with a class that has space in it or they have an online offering. Those parents wanted to buy those classes and services from the districts, and we now have 55 of the 67 districts that are offering classes and services on Step Up's platform and so they're a part of the creativity that we're now seeing in the state.
The bottom line is whatever works best for the state and for the taxpayers, but most importantly for the families.
The number of students enrolled in FES has boomed over the past couple years and a state audit found millions of dollars of mismanagement with scholarships. As you know, there were legislative attempts to add guardrails, but none of it was passed. Step Up, however, made some changes on their own. What were those changes?
Our challenge in Florida is that the systems available at the state level to track students in the district schools, they're not like some other states. Some of the states like Texas and Arizona that have scholarship programs, they can track attendance in the public schools on a daily basis. In fact, that's how they fund the districts on average daily attendance.
In Florida, we fund districts based on two physical counts, one in October and one in February. And if the student is physically there in the district school those two weeks, the district receives funding from the state budget for the whole semester for that student. Now, imagine that you're a mom with a child with learning disabilities and you decide that your assigned district school for your kid is not the best place for them. It's no one's fault, it's just what you believe is best. You apply for a scholarship with Step Up in February, and he's eligible. Now, you begin to homeschool him in March. Now, you don't have a scholarship yet, but you decide to take him out. You don't have any funds from us yet, but because he was there for the February count, the district received funding for him for the whole second semester, even though he wasn't there for much of it. Now, if you're a new scholarship student, you get your first quarterly scholarship payment the first week in September, and so that parent gets the first quarter's payment from us by the first week in September.
But by Oct. 1, she realizes homeschooling is just not working. She puts him back in his district assigned school. He's present for the October count, and the district receives, again, the full semester payment for him. So we've essentially “double funded” this student for the first quarter, even though no one has done anything wrong, and no one has had any ill will. So until the state develops tracking systems that are more like these other states, we are always going to have these inefficiencies.
The Department of Education, the districts, Step Up and families have taken measures to reduce these inefficiencies.
For example, the districts do a preliminary attendance count in late August when the kids first show up. Then DOE sends the districts a list of all the scholarship students that we have sent them and asks them to match our students up with their kids in their count. If a student appears on both lists, Step Up freezes or doesn't fund the kid's account at all, and the parent has to go to the district and get a form signed by the district before we can fund their account.
Now, that's not a perfect system, and sometimes we see students on district rolls, who are actually not enrolled in the school, because maybe they were automatically transferred on the rolls from kindergarten to first grade. Again, no ill intent, but it's the best system that we have for now, and until we get a new system like the other states.
What do you think the next big step for Family Empowerment Scholarships will be?
I think Florida will continue to lead the nation in empowering families and customizing K-12 education, just like we've been leading for the last 25 years. Just two weeks ago, I read about Orange County creating a baseball and softball magnet school for kids who are interested in that sport. You have in Polk County, an incredible example of the district and a private sector educator working together. There are these two teachers, who used to be public school teachers, award-winning in the Polk County system, and they left and started their own Montessori-based micro school. Very successful. Well, they're now in a partnership with the Polk County School District, creating this micro school in one of the district locations in Polk County.
This is the kind of thing that I think we're going to see more of, where there's less of a “us versus them,” and more of a cooperative, more fluid, more creative atmosphere, where all parties are all focused on what's best for the students.
