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The Louisiana Legislature has agreed to let the state school board create a program that lets families spend money intended for public schools on private education, but lawmakers deferred deciding for at least a year just how much they want to shell out.
The state Senate provided the last legislative approval needed Thursday for the LA GATOR Scholarship Program, sending it to Gov. Jeff Landry for his anticipated signature.
“I made a pledge to enact bold change that improves our education system. Today, with the legislature’s help, we did just that,” Landry said in a news release after the Senate’s 23-14 vote. “The LA Gator Program puts parents in the driver’s seat and gives every child the opportunity for a great education,” the governor said. “When parents are committed to the value of their child’s education, government should never get in the way.”
Parents are stuck in neutral for the time being, however, because there is no state money set aside yet for the LA GATOR program. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has to first create the structure for education savings accounts, then the governor and lawmakers have to agree on how much to allocate toward them. The soonest that could happen is in next year’s legislative session ahead of the 2025-26 school year.
The program is expected to be launched in phases, starting with students who already receive private school vouchers from the state. They come from low-income families and attend poor-performing schools. As originally conceived, the program in Senate Bill 313 would have provided education savings accounts, or ESAs, to all students by 2028-29.
The potential high cost of a universal education savings account program led some legislators to back away from fast-tracking a program that would have been available to all families, regardless of income, by the 2028-29 school year. Legislative staff calculations put the price at $280 million annually, but the good-government Public Affairs Research Council’s estimate placed the figure closer to $520 million.
Louisiana lawmakers have implied that Arizona provides a cautionary tale for hasty ESA program adoption. The 2023-24 school year was the first in which the accounts were made available to families in any income bracket. Its cost has crept close to $1 billion, a 1,400% increase from original projections.
ESA opponents in the Louisiana Legislature tried to add accountability measures to Senate Bill 313, authored by Sen. Rick Edmonds, R-Baton Rouge. They argued the state needed a tool to measure the progress of private schools that accept state resources.
Amendments that would have required ESA holders in private schools to take the same year-end learning assessments as their public school counterparts failed to gain traction.
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