The state’s largest-ever school voucher program launched at the start of the 2024-25 school year, making more than $80 million in taxpayer dollars available to about 10,000 students and their families.
The Salt Lake Tribune wanted to know: How was the money spent?
It took two reporters more than two months to analyze around eight months of spending data and make sense of how recipients actually used their $8,000 vouchers.
Here’s how we did it.
Requesting the data
The Tribune first asked for the spending data in mid-February, after state lawmakers at the time expressed concern that some Utah Fits All purchases did not seem to line up with the original intent of the law that created the voucher program.
The Tribune sent its request to the Utah State Board of Education, because the state school board has the authority to request spending data from the program manager. At the time of the request, that manager was ACE Scholarships.
We specifically asked for all voucher spending data, with details including:
On March 21, USBE records officer Ben Rasmussen emailed The Tribune the requested data in the form of a Google Sheet.
He noted the data was anonymized — with any “personally identifiable information and income data for scholarship recipients” redacted — because of an exemption in Utah Code allowing the state to protect private information.
The provided spreadsheet had seven different tabs, organized by record type as requested by The Tribune.
The Tribune’s analysis focused on a tab labeled “Expenditures by expense category,” which offered the most comprehensive breakdown of individual voucher expenses.
The spreadsheet contained nearly 183,000 rows of data, with columns that included:
The transactions amounted to roughly $61.5 million, or about 77% of the program’s allocated budget, over eight months from August 2024 to March 2025.
It did not capture the entirety of the program’s $80 million budget because voucher recipients were supposed to have until June 30 to spend their awards. (The program’s new manager, Odyssey, announced in late May that it had temporarily halted more 2024-25 voucher spending in order to review and reconcile balances for families with pending reimbursements, receipts and transactions.)
All transactions The Tribune examined were approved by ACE Scholarships.
The data in its initial form, however, required weeks of “cleaning” — fixing typos or correcting formatting, for example — because of the different ways families could spend the scholarship.
Making sense of the data
All the expense data The Tribune received was derived through ClassWallet, an online platform that ACE used to distribute scholarship funds to families and track their spending, according to USBE.
Families could spend their $8,000 scholarship in three ways:
When families made direct payments or used ClassWallet to shop the internal marketplace, vendor information was populated into the data automatically.
But for reimbursement requests, which comprised 81% of all transactions, families had to input the vendor name manually and self-select one or more applicable expense category. Options included “extracurriculars,” “classroom environment” and “electronics and technology.”
That self-selection process introduced apparent inconsistencies. For instance, a vendor called “The Dance Academy” was categorized as an “extracurricular” in one entry and “tuition and fees” in another. This occurred across hundreds of vendors.
Misspellings – like “acadamy” – were also common, along with naming variations – like entries for the outdoor gear company “Level Nine Sports,” but also “Level 9 Sports.” Cleaning these made The Tribune’s analysis smoother.
To address inconsistent categorizations, The Tribune researched every vendor, determined common categories based on available information and sorted transactions accordingly.
There wasn’t enough information about several vendors, including hundreds of individual people, to categorize certain spending. In those instances, The Tribune lumped individuals together into one vendor titled “Individual” to make for a smoother analysis.
There were also thousands of transactions in which families shopped at major retailers like Amazon or Best Buy — either through ClassWallet or directly — but the expense records provided to The Tribune did not specify what was purchased.
The program manager used receipts and invoices to approve all expenses, but without access to those, The Tribune categorized that spending as “Unknown.”
After ending up with dozens of different expense subcategories, The Tribune condensed those into 11 main categories, then again into six final categories:
Reviewing and analyzing the data
Although ACE is no longer the program’s manager, The Tribune shared a rough summary of its data analysis with the organization.
After reviewing The Tribune’s initial 11 expense categories, ACE officials offered context that helped better group the expenses.
The Tribune had already planned to further condense the categories, but the news organization took ACE’s recommendations into account when narrowing it down to the final six.
The Tribune then used Microsoft Excel and pivot tables to analyze the data. You can read the full analysis here.
