Early disability programs became launchpad for universal school choice
When Angela Johnson, a physical therapist outside Pensacola, Florida, comes home from work, her 12-year-old daughter Amelia is at the house with a nurse trained to care for medically fragile children. Amelia, born with a rare genetic anomaly, has endured many surgeries and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube. The nurse starts caring for Amelia as soon as a bus from the public school drops her off. Johnson loves much about the school, but as a physical therapist she also recognizes its limitations: the district’s physical and occupational therapists have to travel from school to school, and the classroom teacher can become overburdened. For all of Amelia’s life, Johnson said, she has had to fight for the education and the school resources her daughter is entitled to receive under federal law.
Two years ago, she thought she had found a better option for Amelia when she learned Florida has a state-funded voucher program for children with disabilities — the largest of its kind in the country — that channels taxpayer dollars into accounts parents can use to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses. She jumped at the promise of “school choice.” Johnson envisioned a private school with smaller classes and more one-on-one time with trained staff, a place where she didn’t have to battle for every minute of therapy her child required. She imagined Amelia learning to cut a straight line and to write her name.
In 2024, Amelia was awarded about $10,500 from the program. Johnson embarked on a weekslong hunt for a private school. She scoured school websites, most of which said nothing about services for children with disabilities. She started calling schools, first an upscale Christian one nearby with a strong reputation. It had no nurse trained to care for medically fragile children, so she reached out to several others. At first, some said they could help, until Johnson explained that her daughter had a feeding tube, that she couldn’t yet hold a pencil correctly and needed assistance toileting. Then they all said no.
Johnson couldn’t find a single one that provided nurses equipped to care for her daughter’s medical needs, or teachers trained to educate nonverbal children, or even a bus ride home. Unlike public schools, private ones generally aren’t required to educate students with disabilities, and they often don’t. The choice wasn’t hers, Johnson realized. It was the schools’. “The vouchers are basically designed to make you go to private school,” Johnson said, “but my kid can’t access private school.” Johnson returned the money to the state, along with a very stern email.
Voucher programs and the private schools they increasingly fund have proliferated across the country. Yet those schools often reject children with disabilities — the very kids who were used to help sell early voucher programs to lawmakers and the public — for having needs that are too costly, complex or disruptive. That leaves those children with few options beyond the public schools. And as public schools lose enrollment as a result of more voucher use, they lose resources that would benefit children who remain, including those with disabilities. About 3 million school-age children with disabilities live in states with universal voucher eligibility, and Florida illustrates how the promise of school choice can be empty for these children.
When children are approved for education savings accounts, the voucher-style program Florida uses, states put public money into accounts parents can use to pay expenses like tuition. If families can’t find a private school and don’t use the money, it may roll over to another year or, depending on the state, get returned.
About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its disability voucher program was returned. Families return money for multiple reasons, but many have indicated they did so because recipients — kids like Amelia — were enrolled in public school instead of finding suitable private schools, according to data from the nonprofit that disburses most of the funds. By comparison, just 1% of money in the state’s program open to all students was returned for the same reason. Florida is one of three states where ProPublica obtained data allowing such a comparison. Louisiana, which launched an education savings account program in the 2025-26 school year, delivered $43.1 million to parent-controlled accounts. State data show 6% was returned overall because families didn’t spend the money, but among students with disabilities the return rate reached 30%. In Texas, data is still coming in for the first year of the state’s $1 billion voucher program, but students with disabilities are opting out at slightly higher rates than all other students.
“Families are at the mercy of the schools — and schools choosing their kid — versus the other way around,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national association working on behalf of children with disabilities.
Today, at least 18 states have voucher-style programs with universal eligibility or are phasing them in. Florida eclipses them all: more than a half-million Florida schoolchildren — roughly 1 in 6 — use a voucher today. When lawmakers opened the state’s voucher program to all children in 2023, two-thirds of the newly enrolled students were already attending private schools. Yet private schooling often remains out of reach for children like Amelia. Even in Florida, with its urban centers and roughly $5 billion in voucher programs, ProPublica found that more than a dozen counties have no private schools that serve kids with disabilities or have only one school with limited offerings, and the outlet’s analysis of state data shows that more than half of Florida’s private schools say they do not serve students with any type of disability. More than half of Utah’s counties have no private schools that take its vouchers for students with disabilities. In Georgia, 71% of counties have none. In Louisiana last year, among about 350 private schools, only 14 reported enrolling a single child with a disability; eight of those admitted five or fewer such students.
“It’s touted that this program is an equalizer, and then people have choice,” said Jinny Kim, managing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a national civil rights and policy nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. “But then if you really look at the details, it’s not actually how it happens.”
The disability-targeted voucher programs began in 1999, when Florida state Sen. John McKay, a Republican, stood before his colleagues in the Florida Senate to champion a bill that would change the trajectory of American education. McKay pointed to his own family’s experience: public schools had failed to meet the needs of his daughter, who had significant learning disabilities. He and his wife could afford to send their daughter to a private boarding school, but not all parents had that option. “We’re alienating parents,” McKay argued. “I’ve been alienated by the public system when I was told I didn’t have any choices with regard to my children.”
The McKay Scholarships began as a pilot program — the nation’s first voucher system specifically for students with disabilities. Lawmakers soon expanded it, creating the nation’s first statewide voucher program for this group. Ohio followed Florida’s lead, then Utah and Arizona and Georgia and, later, Louisiana and Oklahoma and others. Across the statehouses, politicians stressed one sentiment: choice. Georgia’s sponsor said he sought “to give any disabled student whose parents are dissatisfied with their assigned public school the ability to attend the public or private school that best fits their needs.” “They can just take the scholarship and go to private school,” an Oklahoma lawmaker pledged.
As politicians debated those first programs, a common refrain echoed across statehouse chambers: the plans were just small programs for a specific group of students. “It’s a very limited scholarship,” a Utah representative assured colleagues in 2004. “This really is about special needs.” “It’s not, as I heard some of you say to me, the beginning of vouchers. No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a program to help a group of students that need our help,” a Georgia House member told colleagues in 2007.
Behind the political scenes, advocates described a different strategy. As Arizona adopted its first program for children with disabilities in 2006, Clint Bolick wrote an essay entitled “Toe-Hold Strategies.” Bolick, who was then president of the advocacy group Alliance for School Choice and is now a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, wrote that voucher advocates were “acting smarter.” Rather than take on powerful teachers’ unions directly, they were pushing smaller programs geared toward specific students whose needs were harder for politicians to oppose. “The strategy makes sense from a moral perspective, for it focuses assistance on the neediest schoolchildren,” Bolick added. “It also works politically, because choice begets choice: Once the Rubicon is crossed and legislators vote to adopt a school choice program — no matter how small or targeted — it becomes easier to support a new one, or expand the old one, the next time around.”
By 2011, a half-dozen states had launched disability-targeted programs. At a “school choice” conference that year, Howie Beigelman, then deputy director of public policy for the advocacy arm of the Orthodox Union, sat on a panel that discussed the strategy. “Special needs is a very easy way to get into this business,” Beigelman said. “Anyone, no matter how partisan they are, it’s very hard to say special needs is not where people need ‘special’ education.” Beigelman recently told ProPublica via email that this was his opinion and he had “never seen anything ‘intentional’ about using special needs scholarships for anything more than what they are plainly for: helping educate children with special needs.”
Shortly after vouchers for disabled children spread to Arkansas in 2016, the University of Arkansas posted an essay by Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the college’s Office for Education Policy. “Special education private school choice programs are often seen as a ‘foot in the door’ for school choice laws,” McKenzie wrote. “Once some success has been shown to the public, more laws can be passed to expand these programs.”
The programs have since helped thousands of children with disabilities move to private schools, including those designed to meet their unique needs. But for many children, especially those with more severe disabilities or who live in areas where few if any private schools operate, the promises of choice were never realistic. Some legislators backing those early programs said they recognized this problem but argued that any children helped by the new options made the effort worthwhile, and they hoped that competition fueled by money flowing into private schools would create a more robust school marketplace that would accommodate students with special needs.
In 2021, West Virginia lawmakers adopted their first and only foray into vouchers, an education savings program they have since opened to all students. To get the bill passed, some legislators made familiar promises to disabled children, even though the state has only a handful of schools that specifically say they will serve even the least-intensive of children’s needs. “Our kids can’t go to a private school,” said Christy Black, an advocate for Disability Rights of West Virginia who has a daughter with Down syndrome. “I called every private school from Huntington to Charleston because that’s as far as we could drive her and work. But no one would accept her because she has a cognitive disability.”
Today, two-thirds of states have some kind of voucher-style program on the books. These programs mostly serve a very different population of students than the early ones did: most current voucher recipients don’t have disabilities, nor do they need to hunt for a private school that will enroll them. They were already in private schools when they tapped this new windfall.
Two decades after states began adopting disability vouchers, lawmakers have done little to improve access to private schools for these children, even as they have expanded programs to all comers, ProPublica found. Most legislatures haven’t required private schools that take this public money to accept even a few kids with such needs, nor have they created effective incentives to help operators open more specialized private schools, which can be costly to run. That’s largely because one of the driving forces behind vouchers is the goal of keeping rules to a minimum so private schools will take the public money.
It’s not that private schools haven’t opened to take advantage of the voucher windfall. They have in fact been proliferating in recent years, and some of these new schools specifically welcome children with disabilities, but most of them do not.
Former West Virginia Delegate Amy Summers, a Republican who played a central role in creating her state’s universal voucher-like program, thinks competition for students will prompt private and public schools to better serve children with disabilities. “Getting the government involved in private schools isn’t the answer,” Summers said.
Another key advocate in West Virginia was Republican state Sen. Patricia Puertas Rucker, who homeschooled her two children with disabilities, including a now-adult daughter who she said came home from public school with bite marks and bruises. Rucker said she hoped the state’s voucher program will give more families a way to foot tuition bills or band together to create small schools called microschools. But she regrets that her colleagues approved the payments without additional money for students with disabilities, as some states offer — extra money that could help families afford the higher tuition often charged by specialized schools and make it more viable for operators to open them. “It is very expensive to have all this special equipment and to even build the buildings for children that have very specialized special needs,” Rucker said. Beyond raising those payments, Rucker said she doesn’t think the state should do anything to cajole or require private schools to enroll children with disabilities. “The minute you start doing that, you are basically disincentivizing private schools from participating, and then you’re denying parents,” she said. “I do not want to do that.”
Some private schools post their rejection policies in writing. One small Baptist academy in rural Georgia invites applicants to “join our family” but declares in its handbook that it isn’t equipped to educate children with learning disabilities or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. “If such students are accepted in our school, it is up to the parents to provide extra services other than what the classroom teachers would do in the confines of the classroom,” the handbook reads. In 2023, Taylor Cordes, a former special education teacher, dug into every handbook she could find for 660 schools in North Carolina and found that only about a third of them indicated they would accept students with even limited disabilities. More than 1 in 10 declared they would not serve such students, she said.
Parents described private school rejections as “insulting” and “heartbreaking,” especially when school personnel have met the children. But families don’t always need to apply or even call the schools to get a denial; some websites or handbooks make it clear.
Anxious about her daughter’s upcoming transition to middle school, Atlanta-area mother Marguerite Lane decided to explore private schools that take the state’s voucher. Her daughter, who has autism, does well academically but can be very sensitive and struggle in bigger classrooms without enough behavioral support. Lane applied to and visited several private schools and found a small, arts-infused one that said it would accept some children with learning challenges. She thought it would serve her daughter well, but then she opened an email from the enrollment director. “We don’t believe we can support her needs and help her thrive in this class,” it read, “and we also don’t want to compromise the educational experience of the other students.” The last part hurt most. Lane thought, “God forbid the other children learn empathy.”
North Carolina state Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer who advocates for people with disabilities and opposes her state’s voucher system, which is now open to all students, said: “The thing that genuinely infuriates me is when people with disabilities are used as pawns.”
Private schools typically decide who to enroll after meeting parents and their children, as Diavonni Jordan, an Atlanta-area mother, learned. Her now-8-year-old son, Jamir Souders, has ADHD. When he was suspended multiple times from his public school and started to get into fights, she searched for an option with smaller class sizes where she thought he would focus and learn better. A single mother of two, Jordan applied to a local Christian school, then took time off work to visit it. She filled with hope as she toured the well-kept campus and spoke to its friendly staff. But within a week, she opened an email from the school: “The support that we could give in our 1st grade would not be enough for him this year,” it read. The school’s program was small, ill-equipped to provide for his needs, it added.
Jordan expanded her search to other traditional private schools, even when they would mean longer drives for her. She applied to five and toured two, but the verdicts never changed. “Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family,” another Christian school wrote. Jordan wondered what child constituted a “good fit” for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son. Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future, but for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.
For Johnson in Pensacola, the search collapsed the same way. After she returned the voucher money to the state along with a very stern email, the choice, she said, was not hers. It was the schools’.