Utah ESA Program

# Utah's New Frontier: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program

Section I: The Architectural Evolution of Utah's ESA Program

Utah's entry into the landscape of universal school choice is a recent and tumultuous one, marked by a unique legislative strategy, explosive public demand, and significant implementation crises. The Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, the state's first universal Education Savings Account (ESA), was not created in a policy vacuum. Its architectural design and subsequent challenges are the direct result of a specific political context, a novel legislative bundling strategy, and a rushed implementation that has left the program's future in the hands of the state's highest court. Understanding this evolution is essential to comprehending the program's current fiscal debates, administrative failures, and existential legal threat.

The Genesis (2023): A "Grand Compromise"

The Utah Fits All Scholarship Program was established in the 2023 legislative session through the passage of House Bill 215, titled "Funding for Teacher Salaries and Optional Education Opportunities".1 The bill's title reveals the core of its political strategy: it inextricably linked the creation of a universal ESA program with a historic $6,000 pay raise for every public school teacher in the state.4 This was not a coincidental pairing but a deliberate "grand compromise" designed to secure the passage of a school choice policy that had failed in previous legislative sessions.4

This structure was a masterful but high-risk political maneuver. By bundling the two initiatives, the legislation made it politically difficult for many lawmakers to vote against the popular and much-needed teacher pay raise, thereby providing political cover to vote for the more controversial voucher component.4 This strategy effectively neutralized a key line of opposition. The bill passed with referendum-proof supermajorities—54-20 in the House and 20-8 in the Senate—and was signed into law by Governor Spencer Cox on January 28, 2023\.1

However, this legislative entanglement also created a significant long-term vulnerability. The bill stipulated that the teacher pay raise was contingent on the scholarship program being "funded and in effect".5 This clause has become a central point of leverage and contention in the subsequent legal battle over the program's constitutionality. It places the Utah Education Association (UEA), the state's largest teachers' union and the primary opponent of the voucher program, in the challenging position where a successful legal challenge to the ESA could simultaneously jeopardize the largest teacher pay increase in state history.5 This dynamic reveals a key strategy for passing contentious school choice legislation—bundling it with broadly popular, pro-public-school measures—but it also creates a fragile policy structure where the failure of one component threatens the entire edifice.

Legal and Administrative Framework

The program's legal and administrative architecture reflects a model of state oversight with outsourced execution.

• Official Name and Statute: The program is officially named the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program.8 Its legal framework is codified in Utah Code Title 53F, Chapter 6, Part 4, specifically sections 401 through 415\.9
• Administering Agency: The Utah State Board of Education (USBE) is the designated state agency with ultimate oversight. However, the authorizing statute mandates that the USBE procure a third-party, non-profit "Program Manager" to handle the day-to-day administration, including processing applications, determining eligibility, and managing fund distribution.8
• Program Management: For the program's inaugural 2024-2025 school year, the USBE contracted with ACE Scholarships, a Colorado-based non-profit, to serve as the program manager.13 Parents interact with the program through a digital financial platform, often called a "digital wallet" or "marketplace," which is used to pay approved educational providers or to submit reimbursement requests for qualified expenses.16

The Legislative Response (2025): Amendments and Course Correction

The program's chaotic first year, marked by public criticism over the use of funds and administrative shortcomings, prompted a swift legislative response. In the 2025 session, the legislature passed HB 455, which introduced significant amendments designed as a course correction.20 This bill tightened the program's rules by:

• Narrowing the definition of allowable expenses and explicitly prohibiting others, such as season tickets to entertainment venues, ski passes, furniture, and apparel.20
• Imposing 20% spending caps on both extracurricular activities and physical education.20
• Establishing a tiered funding structure that provides smaller scholarship amounts for homeschool students compared to private school students.20
• Strengthening residency and income verification requirements.20
• Critically, the bill also created a new, separate role for a "financial administrator" and provided the USBE with greater flexibility to change contractors, which directly enabled the subsequent transition away from ACE Scholarships.20

This rapid legislative intervention demonstrates a "launch first, fix later" approach, where the initial program design proved inadequate for the realities of implementation, forcing lawmakers to retroactively add guardrails and administrative controls.

Section II: Financial Architecture and the Flow of Funds

The financial structure of the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program dictates its value to families, its overall cost to the state, and the rules of engagement for spending public funds. Initially designed with a simple, flat-rate award, the program's financial architecture was significantly altered after its first year in a direct legislative response to unexpected utilization patterns and public criticism, reflecting a policy in rapid evolution.

The Funding Formula and Award Amounts

The program is funded through a direct legislative appropriation from the state's Income Tax Fund, a detail that has become a central issue in the constitutional challenge against the program.6 The value of an individual student's scholarship has changed significantly since the program's inception.

For its inaugural 2024-2025 school year, the program offered a simple, flat-rate scholarship of $8,000 for every eligible K-12 student, regardless of their chosen educational setting.27 This amount was calculated to be approximately 84% of the state's total per-pupil spending in the public school system.27

However, following the 2025 legislative amendments in HB 455, the program adopted a tiered award structure for the 2025-2026 school year and beyond. This change was a direct policy reaction to the discovery that the vast majority of initial participants were homeschoolers, not private school students. The new structure differentiates the award amount based on the student's educational path 20:

• $8,000 for students enrolled full-time in a qualified private school.
• $6,000 for home-based scholarship students aged 12-18.
• $4,000 for home-based scholarship students aged 5-11.

This shift to a tiered model represents a significant structural change aimed at cost control. The legislature, upon realizing that the program was primarily subsidizing homeschooling—which may have lower average costs than private school tuition—moved to right-size the scholarship to the presumed cost of the educational choice. This change allows the program's budget to be stretched to serve more students and reduces the political criticism associated with providing a large, flat subsidy for potentially lower-cost educational paths. This reactive policymaking fundamentally alters the incentive structure for families and signals a less predictable policy environment compared to programs with more stable, long-standing funding formulas.

Total Program Cost and Scale

The program's budget has grown rapidly to meet overwhelming demand. The initial appropriation for the 2024-2025 school year was set at $82.5 million, an amount calculated to fund approximately 10,000 students at the $8,000 level.27 This figure itself represented a doubling of the originally planned $42 million budget, a change made by the legislature before the program even launched in response to a high volume of pre-applications.32

Recognizing that demand still far outstripped supply, the legislature approved an additional $40 million in ongoing funding during the 2025 session. This increase brings the total projected annual appropriation to between $120 million and $122 million for future years, with the goal of funding thousands of additional scholarships.30

Allowable and Prohibited Expenses

Parents manage their scholarship funds through a digital financial platform, currently administered by Odyssey, which functions as a marketplace for approved vendors and a system for processing reimbursement requests.16 The scope of allowable expenses is broad, designed to give parents flexibility in customizing their child's education. Approved uses include private school tuition and fees, textbooks and curriculum, online learning programs, private tutoring, educational therapies, and testing fees.27 The law also permits up to $750 per student per year to be used for transportation to and from an approved provider.27

The program's first year of operation, however, revealed that the initial broad guidelines were susceptible to uses that drew public and media scrutiny, such as spending on ski passes and other items perceived as recreational rather than educational.21 This led directly to the 2025 legislative changes in HB 455, which imposed new guardrails 20:

• A 20% cap on the scholarship amount that can be used for extracurricular activities, and a separate 20% cap for physical education expenses.24
• An explicit list of prohibited expenses, including season tickets, ski passes, recreational equipment, furniture, and apparel.20

Fund Rollover Policy

A key difference between Utah's program and more mature ESAs like Arizona's is the treatment of unused funds. The original Utah Fits All program did not permit unused funds to be rolled over from one year to the next; any remaining balance at the end of the fiscal year was recaptured by the state.38 The 2025 amendments introduced a limited rollover provision, allowing families to carry over up to $2,000 in unused funds into the following academic year, providing a modest degree of flexibility for long-term educational planning.21

Section III: Enrollment Dynamics: From Latent Demand to Market Overload

The launch of the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program was not a gradual ramp-up but an immediate and overwhelming demonstration of pent-up demand for educational alternatives. The public response far exceeded the state's initial capacity, transforming what was legislated as a universal program into a highly competitive, capped scholarship lottery for most families. The program's enrollment dynamics are further distinguished by a user base heavily skewed toward homeschoolers and a critical lack of official data on the prior enrollment status of its participants.

The Demand Explosion

The program's inaugural application window in 2024 revealed a massive, previously unquantified demand for non-public school options in Utah. For the approximately 10,000 funded slots available for the 2024-2025 school year, the program manager received a staggering 15,914 applications representing 27,270 individual students.15 This immediate "catch-up" growth phase, where a new program rapidly absorbs a large, pre-existing population of families already paying for private school or homeschooling, is a common feature of new universal ESA programs. The demand-to-supply ratio of nearly three to one underscored that the program's initial funding was wholly inadequate to meet public interest.

This trend continued into the second year. For the 2025-2026 school year, the program received over 23,000 applications, including both renewing families and new applicants, for an expanded but still limited number of scholarships.35 Independent analysts project that underlying demand for the program could eventually reach as high as 40,000 students, contingent on sufficient funding and program stability.32

Rationing Access: The Priority System

The immense gap between demand and the legislatively funded supply means the program does not function as a true universal entitlement. Instead, it operates as a capped scholarship program where access must be rationed. State law establishes a clear, tiered priority system for awarding the limited number of scholarships 9:

1. Renewing Students: Top priority is given to students who received and used a scholarship in the previous school year.

2. Low-Income Families: The next priority is for new applicants from households with an income at or below 300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL). This threshold was increased from 200% FPL by the 2025 legislative amendments to broaden the definition of low-income.25

3. Siblings: Priority is then given to siblings of current or recent scholarship recipients.

4. Lottery: If any funds remain after serving the above priority groups, the remaining scholarships are awarded to all other eligible applicants via a random lottery.21

This structure creates a fundamental tension between the program's stated goal of universal access and its operational reality as a targeted support mechanism. For low-income families, it functions as a means-tested entitlement with a high probability of acceptance. For middle- and higher-income families, it is a highly competitive lottery with a very low probability of success. This dual nature has significant political implications: proponents can accurately claim the program overwhelmingly serves the poor, while critics can argue the "universal" branding is misleading and fails to deliver on the promise of choice for all families.

The Homeschool Dominance

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Utah's program is the composition of its user base. In its first year, an estimated 80% of the 10,000 scholarship recipients were homeschool families, with only about 20% using the funds for private school tuition.39 This heavy skew toward homeschooling is unique among large-scale ESA programs and has profound administrative consequences. It shifts the primary operational task of the program manager from processing a relatively small number of large tuition payments to a few hundred private schools to the far more complex and labor-intensive job of auditing and processing tens of thousands of small, individual reimbursement requests for curriculum, supplies, and services from thousands of families.44

The "Switcher Rate" Data Vacuum

A critical deficiency in the program's design and reporting is the complete absence of official data on the "switcher rate"—the percentage of new participants who were previously enrolled in a Utah public school. While the law requires a parent to attest that their child has exited a public school if they were previously enrolled, this information is not aggregated or made publicly available by the USBE or the program manager.45 This data vacuum is the single most significant gap in the program's public accountability framework, as it makes a definitive, evidence-based calculation of the program's net fiscal impact on the state budget impossible.

Section IV: The Participant Profile: A Low-Income Majority

The question of who benefits from a universal school choice program is often the most fiercely contested aspect of the policy debate. In many states, a lack of official data fuels competing narratives of middle-income empowerment versus affluent entitlement. In Utah, however, the program's unique combination of a funding cap and a statutory priority system has produced an unambiguous and undisputed demographic profile for its inaugural cohort: the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, in its first year, overwhelmingly served low-income families.

An Unambiguous Income Profile (Year 1\)

The data from the program's first year of operation leaves no room for debate on the income level of its participants. According to a press release from the program's initial administrator, ACE Scholarships, the distribution of the first 10,000 awards for the 2024-2025 school year was starkly clear. Of the scholarships awarded, 9,890, or 98.9%, went to families with household incomes at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level.15 For a family of four in 2024, this income threshold was $62,400 per year.27

This outcome is not an accident but a direct and predictable result of the program's legislative design. With the number of applications from low-income families far exceeding the total number of available scholarships, the program effectively filled nearly all its funded slots from the highest-priority tier established in the law.15 The program, while universally available in theory, functioned as a targeted, means-tested grant in its first year of practice.

It is crucial to recognize that this demographic profile is a direct, and perhaps temporary, consequence of the program's funding cap. Should the legislature choose to fund the program to meet all demand—making it truly universal in practice—the priority system would become irrelevant. All eligible applicants, including the thousands of middle- and higher-income families who were waitlisted or rejected, would receive a scholarship. The program's demographic composition would instantly shift from being almost exclusively low-income to reflecting the broader, more affluent applicant pool. This creates a strategic dilemma for proponents: maintaining the funding cap allows them to defend the program on equity grounds, but achieving their goal of universal choice would require massive budget increases that would eliminate their most effective political defense. The program's current demographic success is an artifact of its scarcity.

The Geographic and Racial Data Vacuum

While the income data for the first cohort is exceptionally clear, the same cannot be said for other key demographic indicators. There is a complete absence of official, publicly available data from either the Utah State Board of Education or the program manager regarding the geographic or racial and ethnic distribution of scholarship recipients.

• Geographic Distribution: No reports have been published detailing the breakdown of scholarship recipients by county, ZIP code, or urban versus rural classification. This makes it impossible to assess claims made by critics that students in rural districts have limited ability to use the funds due to a scarcity of private schools and other qualified providers outside the Wasatch Front.13 Without this data, the extent to which the program provides equitable geographic access remains unknown.
• Racial and Ethnic Distribution: Similarly, no official data exists on the racial or ethnic makeup of program participants. While Utah's overall school-age population is becoming increasingly diverse, with significant growth among Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and Asian populations, there is no way to determine whether the scholarship recipients reflect this diversity or if certain groups are over- or under-represented.47 This data gap prevents any meaningful analysis of the program's impact on racial equity in educational access.

Source: ACE Scholarships, May 3, 2024 Press Release 15

Section V: The Fiscal Impact: A Nascent but Polarized Debate

The fiscal impact of the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program is the subject of a nascent but already deeply polarized debate. As the program has only completed one year of operation and lacks critical data, the discussion is more theoretical than empirical, mirroring the broader national conflict over school choice funding. Two opposing narratives have emerged, each built on different assumptions about cost savings and new expenditures. The entire debate hinges on the program's unknown "switcher rate," making any definitive conclusion about its net cost to the state premature.

Gross Program Cost (The Baseline)

There is general agreement on the program's top-line, or gross, cost, which is determined by legislative appropriation.

• Fiscal Year 2025 (2024-25 School Year): The appropriation was $82.5 million.27
• Fiscal Year 2026 (2025-26 School Year): With the additional $40 million allocated in the 2025 legislative session, the total budget is projected to be between $102.6 million and $122 million.28

The debate is not about these gross figures but about the program's net impact on the state budget after accounting for offsetting savings and new costs.

Model 1: The Net Savings Model

This model, advanced by school choice proponents and think tanks like the Common Sense Institute and EdChoice, argues that the ESA program is either revenue-neutral or generates a net savings for Utah taxpayers.32 The central premise is that the gross cost of the scholarships is substantially offset by the savings generated every time a student leaves a more expensive public school to use an ESA.

The core of the argument rests on a simple cost comparison: the $8,000 scholarship is significantly less than the average total per-pupil expenditure in Utah's public schools, which is over $9,500.32 Therefore, for every "switcher," the state saves the difference. An analysis by the Common Sense Institute (CSI) expands on this, projecting that the combination of savings from students switching to the UFA program and the broader demographic trend of slowing public school enrollment could generate annual savings of over $200 million for the state budget in the future.32 This model treats the foregone costs in the public system as a direct, dollar-for-dollar credit against the gross cost of the ESA program.

Model 2: The Deficit-Driver Model

The opposing model, championed by critics such as the Utah Education Association, Utah Children, and the Alliance for a Better Utah, portrays the program as a significant new drain on public funds.13 This analysis focuses on the new spending required for the portion of ESA participants who were never enrolled in the public system to begin with—the existing private school and homeschool students who comprise the "non-switcher" population.

From this perspective, every dollar spent on these students represents an entirely new expenditure from the state's Income Tax Fund, which is constitutionally earmarked for public education.6 Critics argue that since national data suggests most voucher recipients (70-90%) were not previously in public schools, the program primarily functions as a subsidy for private education choices that diverts hundreds of millions of dollars from the public system serving the vast majority of Utah's children.51 In this view, the program is a fiscally irresponsible policy that creates a massive, uncontrolled new entitlement and weakens the public education system by siphoning away critical resources.13

The Central Unknown: The Switcher Rate

The billion-dollar difference between these two models hinges entirely on the unknown "switcher rate." The lack of official data on how many UFA participants came from public schools prevents any definitive conclusion. Furthermore, the program's unique composition complicates the standard savings calculation. With an estimated 80% of participants being homeschoolers, the net fiscal impact is disproportionately sensitive to the prior educational status of this specific group.39 Many of these families may have been homeschooling for years at little to no direct cost to the state. For this large cohort, the scholarship represents almost entirely new state spending, not a cost transfer from the public school system. A low switcher rate among this dominant homeschool population would create a massive new cost to the state that would likely overwhelm any savings generated by the 20% of participants who may have switched to private schools. Without this granular data, any statewide fiscal impact calculation remains highly speculative.

Section VI: Administration and Accountability: A Crisis of Implementation

While public debate often focuses on the high-level fiscal and philosophical arguments surrounding school choice, the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program's first year was defined by a severe and public crisis of operational execution. The program's rapid, under-planned launch led to a cascade of administrative failures, a data integrity meltdown, and an existential constitutional challenge. These events are not separate issues but are deeply intertwined symptoms of a program that was legislatively rushed into existence without the necessary administrative or legal foundations.

The Administrative Meltdown: Transition from ACE to Odyssey

The program's administrative framework collapsed within its first year. In May 2025, the Utah State Board of Education abruptly canceled its multi-year contract with the inaugural program manager, ACE Scholarships, citing "convenience" but following widespread reports of dysfunction.23 A new program manager, Odyssey, was quickly selected to take over the embattled program.12

The transition immediately exposed the depth of the administrative failure. Upon receiving the data from ACE, Odyssey issued a public statement declaring that the information was "incomplete, inconsistent, or lacks proper verification".23 Key findings included:

• A vast number of applications for the second year lacked the legally required income verification.
• Account balances for many first-year participants could not be determined due to thousands of pending, unprocessed reimbursements and transactions from the ACE era.56

This catastrophic data failure forced Odyssey to take drastic measures. The company announced it would have to rerun the entire application cycle for the 2025-2026 school year, throwing the plans of more than 23,000 families into chaos and delaying eligibility determinations indefinitely.23 This administrative collapse fueled arguments that the program was poorly conceived and that outsourcing the management of public funds to a private entity without rigorous oversight was a critical flaw in its design.13

The Oversight Deficit and Misuse of Funds

The program's first year was also plagued by an oversight deficit regarding the use of funds. With broad initial guidelines, public and media reports soon highlighted that taxpayer dollars were being spent on items widely perceived as non-educational, such as ski passes, entertainment venues, and high-end recreational equipment.21

This lack of clear guardrails and proactive oversight created a political firestorm and led directly to the legislative intervention of HB 455 in 2025\. The bill's new spending caps and list of prohibited expenses were a direct reaction to the public outcry and an admission that the initial framework was inadequate to ensure the responsible use of public money.20 For critics, these instances of misuse were not isolated incidents but predictable outcomes of a program that lacks the financial transparency and accountability required of public schools.13

The Constitutional Challenge

The most significant threat to the program's existence is a legal one. In May 2024, the Utah Education Association (UEA) and other public education advocates filed a lawsuit asserting that the Utah Fits All program is unconstitutional.59 The lawsuit's core arguments are twofold:

1. Improper Use of Funds: It alleges that the program violates Article XIII of the Utah Constitution, which restricts the use of state income tax revenue to funding public education, higher education, and services for children and individuals with disabilities. The plaintiffs argue that funding private and home-based education does not fall within these constitutional bounds.6

2. Violation of the "Open to All" Clause: It contends that the program violates Article X of the constitution, which requires the state's public education system to be "free and open to all children of the state." Because the ESA program uses public funds to support private schools and providers that can selectively admit or reject students based on religion, ability, or other factors, it creates a publicly funded system that is not open to all.6

On April 18, 2025, Third District Court Judge Laura Scott issued a ruling that sent shockwaves through the state, siding with the plaintiffs and declaring the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program unconstitutional on both grounds.52 However, in a subsequent hearing, the judge declined to issue an injunction that would halt the program. This decision allows the program to continue operating and accepting applications while the state appeals the ruling to the Utah Supreme Court.6 The program's ultimate fate now rests entirely on the decision of the state's highest court.

Section VII: Concluding Analysis and Forward-Looking Implications

The Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, in its brief and turbulent existence, has emerged as a compelling and cautionary case study in the national school choice movement. Its trajectory offers profound lessons about the interplay of political strategy, administrative capacity, and constitutional law in the implementation of universal Education Savings Accounts. The program stands as a paradox: a policy that, by a quirk of its design, has been remarkably effective at targeting low-income families, yet has been simultaneously crippled by one of the most severe administrative failures of any recent ESA launch and now faces an existential legal threat.

Synthesis of Findings

The analysis reveals several key conclusions. First, the program's legislative origin as a "grand compromise" tied to teacher pay was a politically potent strategy for enactment but created a fragile structure where the entire edifice is threatened by a successful legal challenge to one of its components.

Second, the program's launch demonstrated a vast, untapped demand for educational alternatives in Utah, particularly among homeschool families, who became the dominant user group. This unexpected composition forced a rapid legislative pivot on the program's financial architecture, highlighting the need for policymakers to anticipate a diverse range of user profiles.

Third, the program's most notable success—serving an overwhelmingly low-income population in its first year—is an artifact of its scarcity. It is a direct result of a funding cap that forced rationing via a means-tested priority system. This success is not inherent to the universal model itself and would evaporate if the program were funded to meet all demand.

Finally, and most critically, the program's first year was defined by a crisis of implementation. The collapse of its administrative back-end, the resulting data integrity disaster, and the successful lower-court constitutional challenge are not isolated problems. They are intertwined symptoms of a policy that was rushed into existence without the robust administrative and legal scaffolding necessary to support a program of its scale and complexity.

Implications and Recommendations for Policymakers

For other states considering or implementing universal ESA programs, Utah's experience offers several critical, forward-looking lessons that can help avoid similar pitfalls:

• Build Administrative Capacity Before Launch: The Utah case is a stark warning against prioritizing a rapid political victory over the meticulous work of building a durable administrative framework. States must invest heavily in the procurement and vetting of program managers, define clear data standards and portability requirements in contracts, and ensure the administrative system is stress-tested and ready to handle a massive volume of applications and transactions from day one.
• Mandate Comprehensive Data Transparency from the Outset: The legislative "data vacuum" in Utah has made a fair and evidence-based evaluation of the program's fiscal and systemic impact impossible. Enabling legislation for any ESA program must require the administering agency or its contractor to collect and publicly report anonymized participant data, including household income, race/ethnicity, geography, disability status, and, most importantly, prior school enrollment status (the "switcher rate"). This is the only way to elevate the fiscal debate from one of competing assumptions to one of empirical evidence.
• Analyze and Plan for the Full Ecosystem of Choice: Policymakers must anticipate that a universal program may be adopted by a different population than intended. Utah's experience shows that homeschoolers can become the dominant user group, which requires a fundamentally different administrative approach (reimbursement-heavy vs. tuition-heavy) and a more complex fiscal calculation than a program primarily serving private school students.
• Address Constitutional Questions Proactively: The legal challenges that have imperiled Utah's program were predictable. States with similar constitutional language regarding the use of public funds for education must proactively design their programs to withstand these legal tests. This may involve careful consideration of funding sources, the administrative structure, and the obligations placed on participating providers to ensure the program aligns with state constitutional mandates.

In a policy environment characterized by rapid change, Utah's experience underscores the urgent need for robust data, transparent reporting, and an administrative capacity that is equal to the scale of the promises being made. The Utah Fits All Scholarship Program demonstrates that while demand for educational choice may be high, a program's long-term success and political viability depend entirely on building a foundation of constitutional resilience, fiscal responsibility, and public accountability.

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