Utah families of all income levels can apply for school vouchers — an $8,000 taxpayer-funded scholarship able to cover private school tuition, homeschooling expenses and more.
But the law requires that the organization selected to manage the $80 million voucher program must prioritize low-income families when awarding these scholarships, or those at or below 200% of the federal poverty level. That’s about $60,000 in collective earnings for a family of four.
In the program’s inaugural year, that organization — the Alliance for Choice in Education, or “ACE” — employed specialists to verify recipients’ income manually.
That’s not how the process will typically work, said Jason Gardner, a spokesperson for the Utah Tax Commission. He called the manual verification process an “interim” solution.
The state is instead working to create a new automated income-verification system, made possible through HB259 passed this year. The law authorized the Tax Commission to share voucher applicants’ income information with ACE through a “portal,” as Gardner described it.
Once the system is online, voucher applicants will only need to provide their Social Security number and consent to share income details with ACE.
“It’ll be almost instantaneous,” Gardner said. “The second their application comes in ... their data will literally be spit right back within seconds.”
How did income verification work this spring?
Applicants aren’t legally required to share their income information to apply, but those who choose not to are sent to the back of a lengthy waitlist, ACE officials said.
Initially, the state allocated $42 million for the voucher program ahead of the 2024-25 school year — enough for about 5,000 students to each receive their allotted $8,000 share. But in late February, lawmakers injected another $40 million into the pot, raising the number of available scholarships to 10,000.
Nearly three times more applicants applied than there were scholarships available, according to ACE.
ACE is required to select applicants based on four priority “tiers.”
Tier 1: Students who used vouchers in the previous school year.
Tier 2: Students who didn’t use vouchers in the previous school year and have a family income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level.
Tier 3: Siblings of students currently using vouchers or who used them in the previous school year.
Tier 4: Students who didn’t use vouchers in the previous school year with a family income between 200% and 555% of the federal poverty level.
Since this was the program’s first year, Tiers 1 and 3 weren’t applicable, and recipients were selected based on income.
Applicants who chose to disclose their income could either manually upload their tax forms and pay stubs or use an online system to connect directly to their employer’s payroll provider, ACE officials said.
Families were also asked if their household received any nontaxable income for 2023 (Social Security or Disability Benefits) and, if so, to upload any award letters.
The documents were further vetted using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which converts images of text into machine-readable formats, and each was reviewed by a program specialist, ACE said.
Waitlisted?
Though ACE will eventually be required by law to disclose data on the number of waitlisted applicants and their priority tiers, this information isn’t due to the state until next September.
This year, most scholarships went to low-income students, while “a limited number of Tier 4 students were awarded randomly,” ACE officials said. ACE noted that all low-income applicants who provided income information received a voucher.
All others have been waitlisted, and if there is an excess of scholarships available next year, they will be doled out using the same prioritization tiers.
The number of applicants who chose not to disclose their income details is unknown, as ACE officials said they don’t track this data, citing no legal requirement to do so.
