Step Up: The Florida Scholarship That Pays for Therapy

What it actually is

It is not insurance, and it is not a school scholarship in the usual sense.

It is an education savings account. The state deposits money into an account in your child’s name each quarter, and you decide how it gets spent from a list of approved uses: therapies, private school tuition, homeschool materials, curriculum.

The difference from insurance is complete. There is no copay, no deductible, no prior authorization, and no provider network in the traditional sense. There is an amount of money and a list of what it can be used for. You manage it.

Who qualifies

Two requirements.

Age and residency. Florida residents from age 3 through 12th grade, which in practice means up to age 22.

A qualifying diagnosis. The list includes autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, speech and language impairment, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and several other conditions.

And here is the part that opens the door for a lot of families who assume they are out: the documentation can be an IEP from a Florida school district, or a diagnosis directly from a physician or psychologist licensed in Florida. You do not have to go through the school.

It does not depend on your family’s income.

How much it is

It depends on the level of need assigned to your child, known as the services matrix level, and also on your district and the school year.

As a general sense of scale: most scholarships are around $10,000 a year. At the higher levels of need it rises considerably, to somewhere around $22,000 or $34,000.

These figures are approximate and they change every school year. The official amounts are published by district on the Step Up For Students website.

For context: ten thousand dollars a year pays for a substantial amount of weekly therapy.

What it can be spent on

The uses that matter here:

• ABA therapy delivered by a board certified behavior analyst (BCBA)
• Speech therapy delivered by a Florida-licensed therapist
• Occupational therapy delivered by a Florida-licensed therapist
• Physical therapy

It also covers private school tuition, homeschool materials and curriculum, assistive technology, and contributions to a college savings account.

The provider has to be approved. Payment happens one of two ways: direct payment to the provider, or reimbursement to the family after you have paid out of pocket. Direct payment is easier and means you are not fronting the money.

The trade-off to understand before you apply

This is the part that rarely appears in information about Step Up, because most of that information is written by private schools that want the tuition.

A student on FES-UA cannot be enrolled full time in a public school. The state does not fund both at once.

And there is a legal consequence attached to that. By accepting the scholarship, your child becomes a parentally placed student in private education or homeschool. Under federal special education law, that means the school district is no longer obligated to provide a free appropriate public education, known as FAPE.

In plain terms: you may be trading the services the public school would provide under an IEP for an amount of money that you manage yourself.

Two things soften this:

• A student on FES-UA can still use individual services from the public school, a class or an activity, but by contracting and paying for them, with the scholarship or out of pocket.
• Your child may still be entitled to some district special education services if they keep a current IEP identifying the need. That is not the same as full FAPE.

Families it tends to work well for:

Families already in private school or homeschooling. Families already paying for therapy out of pocket. Families with a three or four year old who is not yet in the public school system. And families receiving considerably less from the district than their child needs.

Families who should think hard about it:

Families with a solid IEP, real services, and a school that is working. Trading that for ten thousand dollars can go badly.

No clinic should make this decision for you, and certainly not us. But you should make it knowing the trade-off exists, because a lot of families make it without knowing.

How to apply

1. Gather your documentation: proof of age, proof of Florida residency, and the diagnosis or the IEP.
2. Apply at stepupforstudents.org. The whole process is online, and the site is available in Spanish.
3. Wait for the eligibility determination.
4. If you are approved, the money arrives in the account quarterly.
5. Choose approved providers and pay through the platform.

Apply as soon as the window opens for the school year. Funds and spots are not unlimited, and applying late has real consequences.

It can be combined with insurance

Almost nobody knows this one either.

Having the scholarship does not mean giving up your health insurance. Many families use insurance for what insurance covers, and the scholarship for what it does not: the sessions beyond the authorized cap, the discipline their plan does not include, or the stretch of time while an authorization is pending.

If you have both, tell the clinic from the start so billing is set up properly and you are not spending scholarship money on something insurance would have paid for.