New beginnings are exciting. They can also be tough, which is why new initiatives don’t need any extra obstacles placed in their path.
The pattern for new school choice programs around the country has been to ramp up slowly at first. Families may not know about them. Parents might want to wait and see how they’re working out for friends and neighbors before enrolling their own child.
Georgia’s Promise Scholarship has faced plenty of headwinds. The agency running the program had mere months to stand it up (which it has done rather successfully). Because lawmakers limited student eligibility based on public school attendance zones – rather than allowing universal eligibility, like all of our neighboring states – education officials had to produce a list of schools in the state’s bottom quartile. The list was delayed by 2.5 months, arriving just two weeks before applications opened.
Despite all of that, interest in the Promise Scholarship is strong. Through the first 12 days in which families could apply for a 2025-26 Promise Scholarship, some 7,000 of them had done so, according to Lynne Riley, president of the Georgia Student Finance Commission. That represents about one-third of the 22,000 scholarships available under the program’s budget cap. Applications are open through April 15, then will reopen for June and September, so the process has only just begun.
Yet, that 7,000 figure is sadly relevant. Although Gov. Brian Kemp’s budget proposal would fund the maximum number of scholarships, the state House’s budget cut almost $100 million from the program and would limit it to … fewer than 7,000 students.
House appropriators have offered rationales for their decision – we’ll get to those – but let’s start with the optics. This year’s budget set a record, spending more than $40 billion of state funds. Next year’s budget, the first to fund the Promise Scholarship, isn’t far behind at $37.7 billion, lacking only some one-time funds in the current budget. K-12 education alone is due to receive $16 billion, more than one dollar for every penny originally budgeted for the Promise Scholarship.
The House cut that penny in three, then spent two of the pieces on other things.
The consequence is that 15,000 students who could’ve gotten a Promise Scholarship are left out under that budget.
We are told these cuts don’t actually matter. One reason given is that, based on experience in other states, the Promise Scholarship is unlikely to serve 22,000 students in the first year anyway. While it’s true that the take-up rate for similar programs was slow at first, Georgia families appear to be bucking the trend, given the 7,000 applications already received.
Will some of those 7,000 students be deemed ineligible due to the law’s restrictions? Certainly. But again, those 7,000 applications arrived in just 12 days, with weeks still to go – and before many private schools have offered admission to their own applicants. So it’s quite plausible that applications will continue to roll in and perhaps even accelerate.
In any event, the initial application period will still be running when this legislative session ends – not to mention those open windows in June and September. Lawmakers will have no way of knowing the true demand before passing the budget.
Another reason offered is that the funds can be added later. This appears to be a misunderstanding, because Riley made clear to Senate appropriators crafting their own budget proposal that a $100 million cut would mean the program was “capped at 7,000.” That’s just common sense; it would be irresponsible of her agency to accept more students than that, gambling that more funds would be added before the fiscal year ends.
Fortunately, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones issued a press release saying the Senate will restore the program to full funding. That’s welcome news. But after a decade of work to create the Promise Scholarship, it’s disheartening to see how tenuous the support for educational freedom remains in some quarters.