Georgia
Georgia moves forward in creating voucher program for private and home schools
ATLANTA (AP) — A new Georgia program that will give up to $6,500 a year to some families to pay for private school tuition or home-schooling expenses will begin accepting applications in early 2025, but lawmakers must still determine how many vouchers the state will pay for.
The Georgia Education Savings Authority voted Monday to approve rules setting up the program, called the Georgia Promise Scholarship.
The education savings account program will begin for the 2025-2026 school year. After a long struggle, Republicans pushed the law through earlier this year, part of a nationwide GOP wave favoring education savings accounts. Supporters say parents should take the lead in deciding how children learn. Opponents argue the voucher program will subtract resources from public schools, even as other students remain behind.
The law provides $6,500 education savings accounts to students zoned for any public school in Georgia’s bottom 25% for academic achievement. That money could be spent on private school tuition, textbooks, transportation, home-schooling supplies, therapy, tutoring or even early college courses for high school students.
Students who qualify must either have attended a public school for two consecutive semesters or must be a kindergartner about to enroll. Parents must have been Georgia residents for at least a year, unless they are on active military duty.
Lawmakers must decide next year how much to appropriate, but the law creating the program limits spending to 1% of the $14.1 billion that Georgia spends on its K-12 school funding formula, or $141 million. That could provide more than 21,000 scholarships.
The authority announced the launch of the mygeorgiapromise.org website and the hiring of a company to run that site. Parents will be able to use the website to pay tuition or buy goods and services.
The state will begin accepting applications from private schools that want to take the vouchers beginning Wednesday. The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement is supposed to announce the list of the bottom 25% of schools on Dec. 1. The authority says it will accept applications from parents in early 2025.
If more people apply than there are vouchers available, students from households with incomes of less than four times the federal poverty level would be prioritized. Four times the federal poverty level is about $100,000 for a family of three. If there are still too many applications for the available money, recipients will be determined in a random drawing.
Georgia already gives vouchers for special education students in private schools and $120 million a year in income tax credits for donors to private school scholarship funds. Students can’t combine the new Georgia Promise program with those programs.
Private schools must be located in Georgia and must be accredited or seeking accreditation from an approved organization. Private schools will have to administer an approved standardized test and report students’ test results.
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Kirk Fordice-like Rick Jackson is sounding a whole lot like Daniel Kirkwood Fordice as he tries to be elected Georgia’s next governor.
Fordice came out of nowhere — actually, Vicksburg is somewhere but you know what I mean — in 1991 to become a two-term Mississippi governor.
He had money but nothing like Jackson, a billionaire businessman who’s also trying to emerge from nowhere politically to win Georgia’s top office.
“The establishment hated Trump, because they couldn’t control him. They are going to hate me,” Jackson says in an ad for Georgia’s Republican Primary on May 19, sounding like one of my favorite Mississippi governors — Fordice, because of his unpredictable personality (he could vilify or charm you, all in one sentence), not his politics. He died in 2004 of cancer.
I stood by a cafe entrance one morning, waiting to cover a Fordice speech. When he appeared, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m not shaking your damn hand. You’re part of the problem down there (referring to the newspaper),” he told me, smiling and moving on.
Jackson rose to become one of economic giant-Georgia’s wealthiest people. He came from Atlanta’s rough midtown area, ending up in the foster care system. He left college due to poor financial circumstances.
The 71-year-old Jackson wormed his way into the dynamic city’s business scene in the late 1970s, mostly of the healthcare variety with mixed success before starting a workforce staffing and services company and later an antibiotics manufacturing plant. He turned those businesses into billion-dollar enterprises.
“It’s God’s money,” he said in rural Blakely, and he’s been charitable with it.
Jackson doesn’t try to hide his vast wealth. His family lives in a 48,000-square-foot mansion at Cumming, a place of nearly 100,000 people near Atlanta in Forsyth County, which once promoted its almost all-white population as a virtue.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy recently wrote that Jackson will spend a ton of his own money in seeking another mansion, the one occupied by Georgia’s governor. Torpy noted that present Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was once heavily favored to win the primary race, but he’s fallen behind Jackson’s bold money bid.
“The one-time front-runner in the Republican primary (Jones) has been relegated to No. 2, the result of a $100 million Mack truck running him over.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare tycoon, a man with a sly smile and reptilian gaze, is the guy driving that truck,” Torpy wrote.
The GOP field includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who spurned Trump’s demand to find 11,780 votes that would’ve allowed him to win Georgia in 2020.
Fordice was effective with some bombastic rhetoric during his run for governor, but I don’t remember it reaching the histrionic level employed by Jackson. In a major ad blitz, often referencing (Georgia college student) Laken Riley’s murderer, Jackson promises that unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes will be “deported or departed … any questions?”
In another ad, Jackson growled, “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians.”
Fordice spent only $1 million to get himself elected Mississippi’s governor. He somewhat sneaked up on the establishment, riding no escalator to the first floor of his Vicksburg concrete river mats-contracting office to declare his intentions. Who could ever forget his announcement seeking the governorship that ran on page 5 of the Clarion Ledger?
Recent polling ahead of Georgia’s May primaries for governor shows the eventual Republican nominee faces a strong Democrat in the November general election, most likely former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That’ll require another whole pot of money.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired Mississippi newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
Gulfstream recently announced a $5 million investment in Georgia education, welcoming students and leaders to its Savannah headquarters.
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