After Juliet Sanomi came to the realization that traditional public school wasn’t the right setting for her son, who has autism, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She started a school where he and others like him would thrive.

She began that mission 12 years ago in Plantation. The K-12 private school mostly serves students with special needs — about 85% have intellectual disabilities — with a model focused on strategies that specifically help students with disabilities succeed.

“ This is a program to change the life of a child who the system says is impossible,” said Juliet Sanomi, the school’s founder and principal. “They’re now over there doing what the world says they could not do,” Sanomi told WLRN. “This is home to children.”

But the school’s future is at risk.

Private school owners, like Sanomi, began facing financial struggles after the state dramatically expanded the school voucher program in 2023 and struggled to pay them in timely fashion.

A months-long WLRN investigation revealed the state mismanaged school vouchers and was unable to accurately track student enrollment, resulting in delayed and missing funds to families and private school leaders. The program wasn’t prepared to take on hundreds of thousands of new students at the time of the expansion. Now, more than 500,000 students depend on public money to pay for private schooling.

Sanomi told WLRN she’s had to borrow about $300,000 in loans to keep the school open since the problems began. The voucher payments she’s received this school year are being used to patch the previous financial holes caused by inconsistent payments, she said.

“We have rent to pay, we have programs to run. We had to reduce staff because we didn’t know where the next funds were coming,” Sanomi said.

Facing eviction, she is being forced to relocate the school.

Parent Tamara Takacs has two kids with autism in Sanomi’s school. Her son is in third grade, her daughter is in kindergarten.

“I can’t imagine my kids going to another school. They’re nonverbal and they suffer like tantrums all the time,” Takacs, a single mom, told WLRN. “ If this school doesn’t exist, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. It’ll be devastating to us.”

The Florida Auditor General reported in November that the state Department of Education’s management of vouchers was riddled with problems, including a shortfall of millions of dollars in the 2024-25 school year.

Nearly $17 million from this year’s funds were released to pay families and schools affected by state mismanagement. Lawmakers are also looking to take legislative action that would change how education funding in the state is handled to prevent future chaos and mismanagement.

Sanomi said these efforts are appreciated, but they don’t “erase the mistakes of the past.”

“I don’t have to lose the school for somebody else’s mistake,” she told WLRN.

‘A myriad of accountability challenges’

Following the expansion of school vouchers in 2023, the state and funding organizations had about 60 days to prepare ahead of a heightened application season and school year. Step Up For Students, the largest voucher administrator in the state, went from servicing 258,000 students to 420,000 in four months. Today, it manages more than 500,000.

Last fall, a state audit laid out the scope of the problem.

Matthew Tracy, deputy auditor general, presented findings to the Senate’s Appropriations Committee for PreK-12 education in November examining how the Florida Department of Education handled voucher funding in the 2024-25 school year.

The “autopsy” he performed on the department’s voucher handling, Tracy said, “found that the administration and oversight of state education funding was met with a myriad of accountability challenges that left the statewide funding shortfall…”

Voucher funding organizations received $398 million more than what was originally allocated to them.

Tracy listed 16 accountability challenges last school year. Among them: unexpected funding demand, missed opportunities for enrollment verification and delays in funding processing.

The DOE sends the voucher money to non-profit voucher funding organizations, who then disperse it to schools and students.

Tracy also gave a run-down to the PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee in the House of Representatives. At one of the multiple meetings in October, Step Up For Students CEO Gretchen Shoenhaar said the organization works very closely with the DOE.

“We have both a regularly scheduled meeting with them and we also speak to them frequently on an ad hoc basis when we need to,” she said. “We also send a great deal of communications to the families and to the schools.”

Money follows where the student goes. The state tracks students by checking enrollment status. If a student’s name appears in both district and private school enrollment, state law requires the student’s funding be frozen to prevent duplication.

“So what we are doing right now is we’re working much more collaboratively with school districts than we have previously when it comes to the crosscheck process,” said Adam Emerson, executive director of the Office of School of Choice, at the Nov. Senate committee meeting. “We’ve basically asked school districts to take a peek under the hood, as it were, and go into our school of choice database. They can see who is about ready to receive a scholarship payment in their district” (vouchers are also known as scholarships).

In the 2024-25 school year, the flawed cross-check process resulted in nearly 24,000 students with frozen accounts. Of those eligible for vouchers, about 80% were on the type of voucher meant for students with disabilities.

Republican state Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, chair of the PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee, said officials were able to resolve around 4,000 of those frozen accounts. Nearly $17 million from this year’s funds were released to the voucher funding organizations to pay those accounts.

In an email to WLRN, Scott Kent, a spokesperson for Step Up For Students, said all of the voucher accounts frozen due to cross-checks in the first and second quarter of the current school year and all frozen accounts from the 2024-25 school year have been resolved.

“The students who provided documentation to prove that they were not attending public school have been cleared by the FL DOE and funded, and the remainder of the funding for the population that was not cleared has been returned to the FL DOE,” Kent wrote. The organization will also continue to collaborate with the department “to ensure that students who appear in public schools are not funded. Step Up continues to look for improvement opportunities to deliver the best possible experiences for our families, schools and providers.”

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Over the various meetings in the House and Senate, legislators were surprised to learn that part of the issue with tracking students is that not every one has a unique ID number, as required by Florida law, making it harder to track applications.

Today, taxpayers are funding about 30,000 students the state can’t accurately track — representing about $270 million.

“In this committee I often just kinda bang my head against the wall,” said state Rep. Toby Overdorf, R-Palm City. “We’re out millions of dollars. Schools and parents and students are getting frustrated — we’re all getting frustrated,” said state Rep. Alex Rizo, R-Hialeah.

Before the state knew how many students would use vouchers, DOE sent out $655 million to voucher funding organizations. In some cases, accounts shouldn’t have been funded. In others, they were overfunded.

The audit also found hundreds of voucher accounts for students with disabilities exceeded the maximum legal amount per year — totaling over $2.3 million by the end of the year.

Patching up, moving forward

The department is also working to ‘backpay’ families and educators who suffered delayed or missing payments last school year.

Persons-Mulicka said millions of dollars have been released to about 85% of students missing funds from last year, as the organizations and state have worked together to pay back eligible students.

But the audit said that DOE didn’t have evidence that the money voucher funding organizations returned to the state is the actual amount owed. And, at times, the department would withhold the outstanding amount from future payments.

Lawmakers seem determined to get the money back. However, some may have already spent it.

“ We’re not sure how much a family spent that they weren’t entitled to for last year,” Persons-Mulicka told WLRN.

The toll of mismanaged money has also been sizable for school districts. The Legislature released $47 million to make them whole for last year’s deficits. Public schools have been confronting a drastic drop in enrollment that has resulted in less funding this school year. And the enrollment plunges are largely attributed to competition posed by the private schools, which have become more affordable to families through vouchers.

The problem is the law, said Republican state Sen. Don Gaetz.

“We have met the enemy and it’s us,” Gaetz told WLRN. “The Legislature passed this law, the Legislature engineered this law. It was done with all the best of intentions. However, now that we’re a couple of years in, now we realize that we’ve got to change the way that the system functions in order to be more timely, more accurate and better stewards.”

Gaetz has introduced legislation based on the auditor’s recommendations to bring more efficiency and transparency to the biggest voucher program in the country by proposing the separation of school voucher funds from public school funds.

“By mixing it all together and then trying to unscramble it, there is a system which is designed to work, but turns out to fail simply because it’s hard to unscramble an egg,” Gaetz said.

“…The good news is we now know that happened so we can address it so it doesn’t happen again,” said Persons-Mulicka said.

Florida Education Department Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas acknowledged the faults of the voucher program, but remains a staunch supporter of the state’s ambitious school choice expansion.

“No state in the nation has implemented a school choice or scholarship program on the scale of Florida’s,” he wrote in an op-ed published in the Tampa Bay Times. “This isn’t a flaw in the concept of school choice; it’s a natural result of what the program was designed to encourage: student mobility.”

Gaetz’s bill also proposes to give DOE access to records and data kept by voucher funding organizations and would require an annual end-of-year audit of voucher programs. Plus, a return of funds to the state from inactive voucher accounts after one year.

The 2026 regular legislative session will start Jan. 13.

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