For the 12 years Joshua Stafford has served as superintendent of the rural Vienna High School district in Illinois, he’s been dealing with insufficient resources.
Ever since state lawmakers established a formula determining whether each of its 850 school districts’ annual funding levels meet baseline “adequacy,” Stafford’s district has hovered between 52% and 70% of the adequacy baseline, which now sits at close to $17,000 per student.
As a result, he’s constantly looking for new revenue sources. He thinks he may have found one with the new federal scholarship tax-credit program.
If hundreds of families potentially donate to a new local nonprofit that supports the district, Vienna’s 330 high school students could receive scholarships and use them to pay for enhanced services from the district—including student support programs his district had to shutter following unexpected federal cuts last December.
“There has yet to be anybody to show up with a magical pot of money to close our funding gap,” Stafford said. “We immediately said, ‘well, this is certainly something that could help kids.’”
But there’s a roadblock for now, at least for 2027: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker hasn’t yet opted his state into the program, or decided whether he’s going to by the end of the year.
Stafford is one of several district leaders laying the groundwork to benefit from the new federal program even though their state’s governor hasn’t yet opted in. They’re establishing new nonprofit organizations, pondering potential targets for investment, and exploring partnerships with local employers to encourage taxpayer donations.
In the process, district leaders are grappling with how much time and resources they should invest in advance for a program they might ultimately not be able to access.
“We don’t want to waste time doing something that is of no benefit. Time is the most precious costly commodity we have,” Stafford said. “At the same time, I don’t want to be in a situation where the kids that I represent in the community I serve don’t get to have access to what kids in, right now, 31 states are going to get to have access to.”
Public schools seek to be “early adopters” in the federal choice program
Established as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Congress passed in July 2025, the new federal program supplies individual taxpayers with dollar-for-dollar tax credits when they donate up to $1,700 to organizations that provide scholarships to K-12 students—private and public alike.
The law requires each state to elect whether to participate, authorizing scholarship-granting organizations to give out funds to the state’s students. Illinois is one of 19 states that has yet to opt in to the program, for which taxpayers can begin donating on Jan. 1.
Maryland is another—Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, hasn’t decided whether to opt in. This summer, he called the program “a tax scheme that funnels public money to private schools.” But he also said in early June, “I am never going to leave money on the table when it comes to supporting kids in our public schools.”
The lack of a decision from Moore so far hasn’t deterred the 84,000-student Anne Arundel County school district from taking steps to participate if the governor does opt in.
Matthew Stanski, the district’s chief financial officer, at first assumed the program would only cover private school tuition for students receiving scholarships. When it became clear to him in April that public school expenses also qualified, he decided to connect with his 84,000-student district’s local foundation, which already gives out grants and scholarships from donations totaling $750,000 to $1 million each year.
The Education Foundation of Anne Arundel County Public Schools is working to establish its own scholarship-granting organization. The foundation’s executive director, Joe Callahan, is also in talks with other SGOs serving public schools nationwide about possible partnerships.
Stanski is holding back certain moves until an opt-in from Moore arrives. He’s not moving to set up a payroll-deduction option for employees who want their credit-eligible donations to come directly out of their paychecks.
He also hasn’t started polling fellow district leaders or school board members about priorities for spending the funds—in part because he’s waiting for the Internal Revenue Service to flesh out regulatory guidance on eligible expenses.
“At this point on the use side, it’s gone as far as we can go until we see those regs,” Stanski said.
That said, Stanski and Callahan believe the work they’ve done so far will pay dividends even if their states don’t opt in for 2027. Every governor will have to again decide whether to opt in for 2028 and every year thereafter.
Callahan also wants to have a plan in place for soliciting donations whenever the opportunity arises.
“We know that the second people build the habits around giving to other organizations or other SGOSs, it will be harder to get them to donate to ours,” he said. “We need to be early adopters as much as we can be.”
Setting up a new structure to manage scholarships
In Illinois, Stafford has set up an SGO for donations that would fuel scholarships for his district’s students. The district’s foundation contributed an in-kind donation of “a couple thousand dollars,” Stafford said, for the work necessary to launch the SGO.
In the process, he also realized other district leaders in his state and nationwide might lack the resources and wherewithal to go through the same process for their own districts.
In a survey the EdWeek Research Center conducted between August and October, close to 1 in 5 school and district leaders said neither their district nor its schools has an affiliated nonprofit organization or foundation. Those districts in particular would have a larger upfront workload for participating in the new federal program.
“We built it realizing that the vast majority of school districts will not have the ability to establish an SGO, and they shouldn’t be penalized,” Stafford said. Last week, he met with a group of Illinois district leaders and encouraged them to consider teaming up with him on setting up donations to Stafford’s Illinois-based SGO for their districts’ students in the event Pritzker opts in.
Private schools have some built-in advantages, Stafford argues—they’re already accustomed to accepting tuition, and in some states they already work with scholarship-granting organizations with similar tax-credit structures as the federal program.
A slew of public education advocates—including former district leaders, the Southern Education Foundation, and the National Association of Education Foundations—in recent months have announced SGOs of their own that will serve public school students in states where they’re permitted to award scholarships.
For district leaders in states without a formal green light to benefit from the program, figuring out what the scholarship dollars will pay for is, for now, a secondary concern.
In Anne Arundel County, Stanski and Callahan have mused about summer programming, after-school tutoring, and even technology fees as possible targets for investment.
Stafford, for his part, has dreams of reviving some community schools initiatives his district had to abruptly shutter or scale back in the last year after the U.S. Department of Education abruptly canceled tens of millions of dollars in previously awarded grant funds for Illinois schools. His district had been one of several beneficiaries of the grants that help school districts set up social service hubs for students and their families; two federal lawsuits challenging the cuts are still ongoing.
The portion of that five-year grant that the district had used before its cancellation had helped pay for upgrading the district’s theater spaces, and expanding mental health services for students.
“We are sitting on a really unique situation in that there’s already been great quality programming built, unfortunately being destroyed,” Stafford said. “The bones are there.”
