Note: This article was updated on Feb. 8.

CAPITOL HILL—Members of the Utah Legislature gave final approval on Jan. 26 to a divisive bill that will see taxpayer dollars diverted to private and home-based educational ventures, accomplishing in just 10 days what had been a consistent priority of many Utah Republicans since 2007, when voters rejected the state government’s last major attempt at voucher legislation.

Sponsors and supporters of the proposal were adamant that it is a “scholarship” and not a “voucher”—a distinction of political semantics more than practical definitions. In either case, the law permits families to apply for up to $8,000 in public funding for a broad swath of private schooling expenses, including tuition, transportation, tutoring, field trips, computers and other materials, with priority given to low-income households.

“We can’t ignore the unique needs of individual children that are misaligned with the public education system—who need something different,” Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, said during debate on the Senate floor. “The parents are not on our team, we are on their team. And we need to be on every child’s team, even if that team is outside the traditional system that works very well for most kids.”

The bill, HB215, passed with a vote of 54-20 in the House and 20-8 in the Senate, securing a two-thirds majority in each chamber and precluding the option of a voter referendum, the method used by voucher opponents to repeal the state’s prior legislation in 2007. The votes fell largely along partisan lines but in both chambers, a small number of Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in opposition.

HB215 was formally opposed by the Utah Board of Education, as well as the Utah Education Association, Utah Parent Teacher Association and United Federation of Teachers Utah. It was supported by a consortium of school choice proponents under the umbrella banner “Utah Fits All,” which filled the Capitol with private, charter and homeschool students during multiple days of debate as the bill advanced rapidly through the House and Senate. Gov Spencer Cox has since signed the legislation into law.

Speaking to reporters after the final vote, Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Draper and the bill’s Senate sponsor, said he was “ecstatic” about its passage. He said there’s always the potential for a new law to be challenged in court—a track that some voucher opponents have encouraged to fight the new program—but that he’s confident in the way the bill was drafted and believes the state’s residents will come to broadly support it in time, particularly as it is further refined.

“Implementation really doesn't even begin for another year and a half, there will be opportunities to look at this,” Cullimore said. “It’s not the existential threat to public education that it’s made out ot be sometimes.”

Lawmakers took a somewhat novel approach with HB215 in order to break the impasse that has stymied voucher efforts for the last 16 years. The “scholarship” program was paired with a significant bonus for classroom educators—$6,000 each—in an overt strategy to overcome lingering reservations and make the legislation palatable to a broader constituency both inside and outside the Capitol. That strategy hit turbulence during debate on the proposal, when audio proliferated on social media of a Utah Fits All organizer stating that her true intention—and that of unnamed lawmakers on the hill—was to “destroy” the public education system. Lawmakers publicly condemned those remarks.

Teacher salaries are broadly tied to the state’s Weighted Pupil Unit—an equalized, per-student funding formula—but the compensation in HB215 bypasses that revenue system, giving checks directly to classroom personnel in lieu of pass-through expenditures at the school district level. A final education budget has yet to be approved by lawmakers, leaving it unclear the degree to which schools will be able to rely on increases in state funding to address inflationary pressures that chip away at scheduled salary increases (known within the education community as “steps and lanes”).

In a prepared statement Alliance for a Better Utah (ABU) policy advisor Chase Thomas said that lawmakers had “robbed” neighborhood schools of $42 million that will now be spent outside the public system.

“Private school vouchers have been and continue to be opposed by Utahns, but these lawmakers are instead pursuing a national agenda to ‘destroy public education,’” Thomas said. “As a result, our children, parents and teachers will suffer as a foundational institution of our society is deprived of much-needed resources.”

Utah’s public schools have long ranked at or near the bottom of the country in terms of per-pupil funding levels, which translates directly into some of the lowest salary levels and largest classroom sizes in the nation. While efforts have been made in recent years to make teacher pay more competitive, morale has suffered under a constant barrage of restrictions and regulations from the state and increasingly vocal suspicion from parents caught up in a hysteria over poorly-understood approaches to race, gender and equity. In Utah, roughly half of all new teachers abandon the profession within five years.

Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights and a public school educator, questioned why taxpayer resources would be used to offer private options for some children rather than seeking to bolster those same options for all children within the public system.

A scholarship recipient could theoretically use taxpayer funds for transportation to a private school, she noted, while many public school families not covered by busing are required to provide transportation at personal expense or, if they can’t afford it, to walk to school.

“If we don’t have something in our schools, we should be providing it,” she said.

While the bill includes some requirements around accountability and transparency in an attempt to ensure the funds are being spent on legitimate educational services, the simple fact is that private and home schools are not required to participate in the state’s data collection processes, like graduation rates and standardized testing.

Asked how the state can determine whether the scholarship program is working—or rather, what “working” means in the context of the bill—Cullimore said he believed useful data would be generated by scholarship recipients, as well as anecdotal evidence from participating families. “We’ll see some satisfaction from parents,” he said, “and be able to gauge success based on that.”

Fillmore, who works professionally in the charter school sphere, said he was optimistic that the introduction of “market forces” into education would, over time, bolster support among his colleagues to peel back the burdensome rules and regulations imposed upon public schools, offering greater flexibility to working educators.

“I’m hopeful that the answer is yes,” he said, “but obviously we’ll have to see.”