Fundraising begins for school choice scholarship for bullying victims

Fundraising officially began Monday for the first state-supported school choice scholarship in America aimed at helping K-12 students victimized by bullying.

The Hope Scholarship gives parents of eligible students the opportunity to find a safer learning environment among private schools participating in the program. It also allows parents to transfer their child to another K-12 public school with available capacity within the school district, or to receive funding to transport the student to a public school in another school district.

The scholarship was created by the Florida Legislature last spring, signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, and will be administered by Step Up For Students, a nonprofit scholarship funding organization. (Step Up also hosts this blog.)

It will be funded by purchasers of motor vehicles who, starting today, can designate up to $105 of sales taxes on those purchases to Step Up.

Representatives from Step Up and Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, who sponsored the Hope legislation, kicked off the program Monday at De LaSalle Academy of Fort Myers, a school for students with special needs that will be participating in the Hope program.

By coincidence, October is National Bullying Prevention Month.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea. An awesome idea,” said parent Jennifer Cotrell, whose daughter, Paige, was bullied in her prior school because of her learning disability. Although she looked like a neurotypical student, Paige’s thought processing was slower than her classmates. Sometimes she would repeat sentences, or not understand questions asked by her classmates. Always trying to fit in, she was also susceptible to peer pressure which only made the bullying and teasing worse.

Now she attends De LaSalle with help from another choice scholarship, the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs. Said Cotrell, “There is nothing worse than a kid who doesn’t want to go to school because of how they are treated there.”

Bullying is an age-old problem, but some evidence suggests it’s on the rise.

For example, the percentage of middle- and high-school students who said they were bullied increased from 28 percent to 33 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to a report released last week by the non-profit group YouthTruth, based on survey responses from 160,000 students in 27 states. The rate was 39 percent for students in middle schools, 27 percent for students in high schools.

With this much bullying it is easy to see why students have already begun seeking fresh starts with the help of existing educational choice scholarship programs like the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and Gardiner Scholarship (see here, here, here, here, here and here).

Qualifying incidents for the Hope Scholarship include bullying, assault, battery, harassment, hazing, kidnapping, physical attack, robbery, threats or intimidation, sexual offenses, and fighting at school. According to state data, more than 46,000 Florida students in the 2016-17 school year were subjected to bullying, violence or harassment in their district school.

So far, more than 220 private schools have signed up to participate in the Hope Scholarship, and parents of nearly 1,700 students have put their names on an interest list.

The scholarship value depends on grade levels: $6,519 for grades K-5, $6,815 for grades 6-8, and $7,111 for grades 9-12. According to Florida TaxWatch, per-pupil spending averaged $10,308 for students in Florida school districts in 2015-16.

The transportation scholarship is worth up to $750 and can be used to attend any out-of-district public school with available space.