About 80% of Utah’s school voucher recipients are homeschoolers, a much higher share than in other states with similar programs, according to state officials.
That’s made the more than $80 million “Utah Fits All” program especially complicated to manage, since instead of covering private school tuition, homeschool families are often paying out of pocket for a wider range of items and services and then requesting state reimbursement.
“It has been a nightmare,” Chair of the Utah State Board of Education Matt Hymas said during a regular board meeting in May about the volume of reimbursements.
A Tribune analysis of voucher expense data obtained through a public records request shows that collectively, families over the course of the program’s first eight months submitted 148,002 reimbursement requests, amounting to nearly $30 million in reimbursement payouts.
An initial roughly 10,000 students received an $8,000 scholarship for the 2024-25 school year through the program. The money could be spent on a broad range of educational expenses — including homeschooling supplies, private school tuition and extracurricular activities — with few limitations.
While reimbursement requests made up about half of the $61.5 million in expenses analyzed by The Tribune (spanning August 2024 to March 2025), they accounted for about 80% of all individual transactions. Not all of the Utah Fits All program’s more than $80 million budget had been spent by the time The Tribune first received the records in March.
Reimbursements ranged from smaller purchases — like $55 for Spanish language tutoring — to larger ones, like $3,610.80 spent at Red Rock Bicycle Co., The Tribune found.
“In other states, 80% of these reimbursements are payments to a private school,” USBE Member Cindy Davis said during the May board meeting. “Well, in this state, 80% of the reimbursements are thousands of little reimbursements that you have to vet and evaluate.”
That vetting was done by ACE Scholarships, the organization first hired by the state to oversee and manage the voucher program. ACE previously told The Tribune they required families to specify their purchases with receipts, invoices or both, so they could adequately review their payment and reimbursement requests.
Despite ACE’s precautions, lawmakers this year overhauled Utah Fits All, citing concerns over expenses they believed didn’t align with the law’s intent.
Those changes took effect May 7, imposing new expense restrictions and introducing smaller scholarship amounts for homeschoolers, rather than the original $8,000 allocated to all recipients last school year.
The same month, ACE was also replaced by a company called Odyssey. Odyssey said it’s imposing its own procedural changes aimed at reducing the volume of reimbursement requests next school year – that’s if Utah Fits All can continue after a judge in April ruled it unconstitutional but allowed it to keep operating while the state appeals.
Few direct payments
In addition to reimbursements, families could spend their $8,000 scholarships in two other ways:
Reimbursement requests were also managed on the ClassWallet application.
Of the 182,966 transactions analyzed by The Tribune, direct payments made up about 8% (or $25.6 million) and marketplace purchases accounted for 11% (around $6 million). The remaining 148,002 transactions — roughly $30 million — were reimbursements.
While reimbursements were the most common transaction type, the biggest categorical expense was private schools, The Tribune found. A total of 114 different private schools received a combined $24.2 million, including nearly 2,200 payments that comprised a recipient’s entire $8,000 scholarship.
How vouchers are changing for Utah homeschoolers
Unlike last year, Utah voucher recipients now face limits on how much voucher money can be used on specific extracurricular and physical education activities.
The new law, HB455, caps extracurricular and physical education expenses at 20% each of a student’s total scholarship amount. And that scholarship amount will now vary, too, depending on a student’s age and if they are homeschooled.
Homeschoolers ages 5-11 will receive a $4,000 scholarship, for instance, while those aged 12-18 will qualify for $6,000. Students attending private schools will still receive the full $8,000.
Fewer dollars for homeschoolers is typically what’s seen in other states with similar programs, said Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University. Watson’s research specialty is homeschooling.
These programs are also called “education savings accounts,” or ESAs, where funds aren’t limited to private school tuition and families can spend them on a variety of educational needs.
“[Utah] is different from many other states with ESAs in that... Utah ESA homeschoolers get the full amount,” Watson said of the program’s first year. “If you’re getting $8,000 per student, your incentives to homeschool — or if you’re already homeschooling, to jump over and take that ESA — are different than they would be in Texas or some of these states where you get a discounted rate.”
Texas’ program allocates up to $2,000 to homeschoolers while offering up to $30,000 to students with disabilities and $10,000 to students attending private schools, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has reported.
“On the other hand, it does remove barriers to people who couldn’t have done it otherwise,” Watson said. “Now they have more resources that they can look at, and maybe it helps them enter into homeschooling whereas they couldn’t have before.”
In its first year, the program prioritized students with a family income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, amounting to about $60,000 for a family of four. Now that’s been changed to 300% of the federal poverty level, or about $96,000 for a family of four.
How will Odyssey enforce new spending restrictions?
Odyssey will need to track each student’s spending to ensure they don’t exceed those 20% caps, while also factoring in that under the new law, extracurriculars aligned with Utah Core Standards — such as art, music and foreign languages — are exempt from that limit.
To do this, Odyssey officials said it runs its own, fully-automated digital wallet.
“We are able to put limits on purchasing with technology,” Odyssey Spokesperson Lauren Bender said. “We can do this for quantity, price, age limitations and more.”
Bender added that purchases are automatically categorized to account for the spending limits and that Odyssey does not allow parents to self-select categories as they had previously been doing under ACE.
Odyssey’s platform also offers a marketplace which Bender compared to Amazon or Etsy.
“We can house thousands of unique vendors in our marketplace that we pre-approve and deem eligible before pushing offerings live,” Bender said. “Therefore, when a parent checks out in our marketplace — which they can do for multiple students at once in a single household (where they designate a product to a given student at checkout) — it goes directly to fulfillment.”
Bender said Odyssey expects to see a “significantly diminished volume” of reimbursement requests due to its expansive marketplace, but all transaction types are “ledgered on a per student basis.”
Odyssey recently announced that it’s restarting the Utah Fits All application process, which had initially closed May 1. It also temporarily halted more 2024-25 voucher spending, which was supposed to continue until June 30, in order to review and reconcile balances for families with pending reimbursements, receipts and transactions.
The decision, Odyssey’s website stated, stemmed from “incomplete” and “inconsistent” information provided by the program’s former manager, ACE Scholarships.
The new application portal is expected to launch July 31 and the marketplace on August 21, according to Odyssey’s website.
Families with any unspent funds from the 2024-25 school year will be given a “designated period of time” to spend those funds after the marketplace opens in August, the website states.
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