The Georgia Education Savings Authority voted Monday to approve rules for the state’s new school voucher program. The Georgia Promise Scholarship program offers $6,500 education savings accounts to students zoned for any public school in Georgia’s bottom 25% for academic achievement. The monies can pay for textbooks, transportation and home-schooling supplies. Plus, scholarships can pay for therapy, tutoring and early college courses.
A student must either have attended a public school for two consecutive semesters or be a kindergartner about to enroll. Parents also have been Georgia residents for at least a year. Only students in families earning no more than 400% of the federal poverty limit – currently $120,000 a year for a family of four – would qualify.
The program will start accepting applications in January 2025. However, Georgia’s General Assembly must determine how many scholarships the state will pay for. The law creating the scholarship program mandates a spending cap of 1% of the $14.1 billion that Georgia spends on its K-12 school funding formula. As a result, $141 million can be spent on the scholarship program, providing at least 21,000 scholarships.
“What you have before you is a responsible piece of legislation that will enhance the educational options we give children,” said House Speaker Pro Tempore Jan Jones, a Republican from Milton, during the debate regarding the legislation. “I have rarely encountered regular citizens who wanted fewer options.”
If a parent wants to use the money to pay for part of a private or homeschooled education, the money would be placed into a Promise Scholarship Account. Additionally, if a parent wants to draw down those funds to pay tuition for a particular school, the state must also determine that the school is authorized to participate in the program. The only caveat is that the student gains admission to the private school of his/her choice.
The state will begin accepting applications from private schools that want to take the vouchers beginning Wednesday. The program will expire at the end of June 2035.
