Florida bill would let McKay scholarships support job training

Older students with special needs could use Florida’s McKay Scholarships to pay for transition programs intended to prepare them for jobs, under legislation backed unanimously by a state House panel on Tuesday.

bileca
Bileca

HB 837, by Rep. Michael Bileca, R-Miami, would allow children between the ages of 17 and 22 to use the vouchers for “transition-to-work” programs.

A growing number of private schools that accept McKay scholarships have started post-graduate programs designed to prepare recent graduates for the workforce.

This year, lawmakers have filed multiple bills, including some expected to pass this week, aimed at expanding college and job-training programs for special needs students who finish high school.

The McKay bill would give older students a way to keep their scholarships, which allow their families to afford private-school tuition, after they graduate.

“This is going to allow us to take some of those students and give them a really guided, really structured type of work experience,” Robyn Rennick, a program coordinator at Tallahassee’s Woodland Hall Academy and representative for a coalition of schools that accept McKay Scholarships, told the House Choice and Innovation Subcommittee before it approved the bill.

The change also drew praise from the Foundation for Florida’s Future, which noted it would make other adjustments to the McKay program. It would ensure the state stops docking students’ scholarships when they take online courses, an issue that sprung from a 2013 overhaul of virtual education funding. It would also allow foster children to receive the scholarships without first enrolling in public school.

A similar measure has also been filed in the Senate. See a full rundown of choice-related bills here.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.

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