Meet the Fla. school choice alumna invited to D.C. for Trump’s address

Denisha Merriweather

Tonight, when President Donald Trump addresses Congress, one of his invited guests will be a school choice alumna from Florida.

Denisha Merriweather has been a prominent spokeswomen for the school choice movement. Among other things, she’s testified before Congress and addressed a panel at the Republican National Convention.

She’s a political independent who grew up in Jacksonville’s Eastside neighborhood. She struggled in school and turned her academic career around with the help of a Florida tax credit scholarship. She’s now pursuing a graduate degree in social work at the University of South Florida and working as an advocate with Step Up For Students, which administers the scholarship program and publishes this blog.

She recently told her story in-depth, like never before, in The 74.

Is this a hint at the president’s agenda? Reports have indicated he’s interested in a national tax credit scholarship program — which would make stories like Merriweather’s possible in states like New York and Michigan, where private school choice faces major political and constitutional hurdles.

And his new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly cited Florida, and its tax credit scholarship program specifically, as a model for the nation. The program currently helps more than 90,000 low-income and working class students afford private school tuition.


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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.