I've decided I'm going to throw in the towel and stop responding to all of the over sensationalized stories about Florida taking money away from public schools and giving it to private and homeschool students. The story's blowing up, again, today because a journalist whom I previously respected doesn't really write fully factual stuff. I figured this out a couple months ago when he wrote an article that gained a lot of traction about the county school district I live in and know a lot about the inner workings of. When I pointed out that his story wasn't exactly correct, and gave fully sourced information explaining the full and true story I was blocked. This journalist's stories are based in fact, but then go off the rails.

Beyond that, the anti-homeschool hate on this platform is absolutely wild. Let me tell you something else. I once posted Department of Education data showing that religious homeschoolers are making up a smaller and smaller portion of homeschooled students, and non-white student numbers had been going up since pre-pandemic and I got called a "Koch shill" and blocked by over a dozen people. For posting federal government data...

https://www.laschoolreport.com/the-new-face-of-homeschooling-less-religious-and-conservative-more-focused-on-quality/

https://nces.ed.gov/nhes/homeschooling.asp

I knew this years ago, long before I decided to homeschool my own kids during the early days of the pandemic. My wife, still a public school teacher, had a side hustle as a tutor outside of school hours. A LOT of those kids were homeschool kids who needed a little more help. Very few of them were conservative at all. In fact, more often than not, they were non-white students from liberal families who felt safer outside of the public school system.

So, onto today's problematic reporting. Homeschoolers buying Disney passes and 55" TV's is bound to cross your timeline today. Outrageous, right?!? How dare they! But, it's not as bad as that, and I'm struggling as to why people need to keep blowing it up into this. The truth is bad enough. This is a money grab for rich private school families from their local public schools. That's literally what it's for.

As a slight aside, I think it's honestly because people feel the need to keep hammering away on Florida right now. To a point I really do get it. I've been telling friends from California and Oregon for a decade about how bad it is. But this has taken a really dark turn. For reasons that are really no one's business, we couldn't evacuate from Idalia recently. It was going to be uncomfortably close, at best, and a disaster at worst. We rode it out and it turned out fine for us, but I sat here, up all night watching the weather ready to grab my kids out of bed if needed, reading the great people of my personalized Mastodon timeline talk about how much Florida "deserved" it. The block button got a lot of use.

Anyway(I know....get to your damn point, no one's reading all this), the story as reported isn't *really* true. The first, and most egregious issue with it is that you literally can not be a homeschool student to participate. The first step is withdrawing from your county's homeschool program and submitting to some random organization's oversight and doing a bunch of things that aren't, actually, homeschool at all.

https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/18379/urlt/PEP-FAQ.pdf

The second question in the actual program's FAQ states:
"Will my student still be considered a home education student?

No. To be able to apply for the FTC scholarship the parent or guardian of a home education student must first file a Letter of Termination to end the home education program with their school district home education coordinator along with the annual evaluation required within 30 days of termination."

To apply there's, literally, a link(https://go.stepupforstudents.org/hubfs/Scholarship%20Info/Home%20Education%20Letter%20of%20Termination.pdf) to terminate your home school agreement with your county's school district, below a section titled "Who's Is Eligible?" that explains you must be "enrolled in full-time private or public school."

Under that section, it again states as a requirement:
"Withdraw as a full-time public or private school student or terminate a home education program with their school district and enroll as a PEP student with Step Up For Students."

The law was specifically crafted to *avoid* changing anything with Florida homeschools by creating a "personalized education program" that is *not* homeschool. The idea is that private school students can take *up to* $8000 that otherwise would have gone to their local public school and apply it to tuition or other stuff.

The program is designed to be a drain on the public school system and to give that money to private school families. Period.

But what about all of the 55" TV's, you say? Well, that's borderline correct...you see, to get something like that your documentation is regulated by the "Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities" which is a students with disabilities program(The reporting conflates a few different programs and pretends like they're the same thing). Your personalized education plan has to state the reasons why you might need such a thing. The example being for this one that you have a visually disabled student who would benefit from a large screen, and then you have to submit paperwork from a medical professional justifying the purchase.

Trips to Disney? Yes. I know all of you from outside of Florida think about the Magic Kingdom. There's a lot more to Disney and every school from hours around does a field trip there pretty much every year for one reason or another. My kids went to Animal Kingdom a few years back in school, for example.

That journalists story today shows a bunch of quotes from Facebook and whatnot. I'm sure those are legit. Do people abuse every government program across all of history? Yes, in fact they do. Is it illegal to use the funds they way some of those people are trying to? Yes, 100%. The only real question that journalists should be asking is whether the state is going to do something about it, or let them have the money to spend on whatever they want.

One of the first lines of the spending guide is the following for a reason:

As per Florida Statutes ss. 1002.394 & 1002.395 Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO) and Florida Tax Credit (FTC) Scholarship (including Personalized Education Program (PEP)) funds must be used to meet the needs of an eligible student. Using a student’s scholarship funds for other purposes is a crime.