Less than a year after rolling out Utah’s largest school voucher program, lawmakers are proposing new restrictions on how families can spend their $8,000 taxpayer-funded scholarships.
Right now, students and families can broadly use the Utah Fits All scholarship on “educational expenses,” which includes private school tuition, homeschooling expenses and other extracurricular activities.
While airfare and theme parks are prohibited, families could, for instance, still spend the entire $8,000 on approved extracurriculars like swim lessons.
HB455, however, seeks to impose a cap on any extracurricular spending.
“Overwhelmingly, the majority of scholarship funds are being used on tuition and curriculum,” Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Riverton, the bill’s sponsor, said before members of the House Education Committee last week.
“There were [some purchases] that were not in line with the original intent of the bill,” she continued, “and, so, I think it is very fair to have a cap in place.”
The goal, she said, is to make sure extracurriculars and physical education don’t “consume the entirety of someone’s $8,000 scholarship.”
The bill would limit both extracurricular and physical education expenses to 20% — or $1,600 each — of the total scholarship awarded, allowing a maximum of $3,200 to be spent on those categories combined.
Pierucci clarified that curriculum-based extracurriculars like art, music and foreign languages would not count toward the cap so long as they align with Utah Core Standards.
According to the Utah Fits All website, an extracurricular expense refers to “costs associated with activities outside the regular academic curriculum” and includes “fees for sports teams.”
The website doesn’t define “physical education” expenses but lists rock-climbing gyms and golf club centers as approved costs under that category.
HB455 would also explicitly ban vouchers from covering:
Chaperone expenses.
Season tickets or subscriptions to entertainment venues.
Ski passes or lift tickets (which are currently approved expenses).
Access to recreational facilities, unless for physical education purposes.
Playground equipment.
Furniture.
Clothing.
The push for increased accountability
The Republican-led voucher program was approved in just 10 days during the 2023 legislative session. It became the largest school voucher program in state history, with an initial allocation of $42.5 million. But that allocation was nearly doubled last year to $82 million in a move that lawmakers said was meant to accommodate additional interest.
Lawmakers are now looking to double that amount again, which would increase the total to $162 million — enough to give vouchers to 20,000 Utah students.
Currently, 80% of voucher recipients are “home-based learners,” or homeschooled, Pierucci said Thursday. The other 20% use their scholarship on private school tuition, she said.
“We are unique and are the only program in the country with this level of home-based participation,” Pierucci said.
In addition to spending limits, HB455 would also require applicants to verify their residency annually and toughen income verification requirements.
The law currently requires that the Alliance for Choice in Education (ACE) — the organization selected to manage the voucher program — must prioritize low-income families when awarding scholarships. That amounts to families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, or earning about $60,000 in collective earnings for a family of four.
The new bill would mandate that applicants who choose to report their income must report their “household” income, not their individual income. Applicants aren’t legally required to share their income information to apply, but those who don’t are sent to the back of a lengthy waitlist, ACE officials have said.
The bill would also require that ACE set a deadline for families to accept or decline the scholarship. ACE would also need to communicate with those who fail to respond by that deadline, informing them that their scholarship has been automatically forfeited.
Failure to decline the scholarship with ACE led, in part, to at least 177 recently discovered enrollment discrepancies, where voucher recipients appeared to still be enrolled in public schools — a violation of state law. The Utah State Board of Education began addressing those cases last month.
State school board officials previously told The Salt Lake Tribune that many of the discrepancies likely stemmed from two scenarios: In one, a student may have received a scholarship but chose not to use it, then proceeded with public school enrollment without touching the voucher funds and without notifying ACE.
In the other, a student’s family may have used some or all of the Utah Fits All scholarship before later withdrawing from the program and enrolling the child in public school without notifying ACE.
HB455 would address the second scenario. It proposes adding a line to the program’s scholarship acknowledgement form, requiring that parents notify ACE within five business days if their child “returns to a public school.”
Pierucci said the legislation also aims to improve financial accountability by allowing “random” audits of voucher spending.
Under current Utah law, ACE — which refers to the voucher program as an “education savings account” — is required to submit an annual report to the Legislature’s Education Interim Committee by Sept. 1. It must include:
The total amount of tuition and fees that qualifying providers charged for the current year (and the previous two years, when applicable.)
The total amount of goods paid for with scholarship funds in the previous year — and a general characterization of the types of goods.
Administrative costs of the program.
HB455 would add several other required data points to that report, including:
A summary of the income verification process — and the number of households verified.
The total amount spent on extracurricular and physical education expenses — and the percentage of funds spent on these activities.
The number of students who reached the 20% limit in both categories.
As of Tuesday, the bill was awaiting consideration on the House Floor.
