Beacon College in Leesburg s the first Florida college to accept school vouchers for students with disabilities to enroll in its precollege programs.
Students on the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities will be able to enroll for free in three precollege programs.
The Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities or FES-UA Scholarship helps students with disabilities and their families pay to attend a private school, and can be used to cover the cost of therapists, specialists, or college.
Chrystol Ingram, associate director of financial aid and enrollment at Beacon College, said the programs help students with disabilities build the skills and gain the confidence they need to enroll in and be successful at college.
She said that's crucial as students with disabilities have lower rates of college enrollment and college graduation compared with their nondisabled peers.
"Coming into a program such as Summer for Success, where students are getting three weeks on an actual college campus, they're living in the dorms and they're going about their day to day and week to week as a college student; that allows them, first of all, to break that barrier, to say, I can do this," said Ingram.
Along with Beacon's three-week full immersion college program, students can also enroll in a fully online course, which provides individualized coaching ahead of college, and a two-week in-person workshop that focuses on socioemotional development.
Ingram said students with disabilities and their families can face a number of barriers to college access, including never having seen anyone like them on a campus, which is why precollege programs have been shown to improve success rates for underserved student populations.
"They get here and they see other kids that are just like them moving about their day, and everyone's dealing with the same fears, the same anxieties or whatnot, and they're all pushing through it," said Ingram.
Ingram partnered with Step Up for Students to make it possible for families to use their Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities at the college.
She says without these vouchers, families would have to pay for the precollege programs out-of-pocket as most state and federal grants only cover credit-earning programs.
Beacon is one of eight colleges in Florida that accept vouchers, but it's the first that caters to neurodiverse students. Beacon is the first in the nation accredited to award bachelor's degrees exclusively to students with learning disabilities and ADHD.
It's the next step in the expansion of Florida's universal school voucher program, which took effect in 2023.
Here's the list of Florida colleges and universities that now accept school vouchers:
- South Florida Bible College & Theological Seminary
- Pasco-Hernando State College
- Baptist University of Florida
- Saint Leo University
- Beacon College
- State College of Florida
- University of South Florida
- South Florida State College
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