Florida FES-EO,
built into the dashboard.

How Florida's FES-EO program works

The Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO) is Florida's flexible-spending scholarship: families receive an education savings account they can direct toward private school tuition, instructional materials, tutoring, and other approved categories. The first word is Family, not Florida, a detail that matters when you search statutes and program rules.

Two scholarship funding organizations (SFOs) are authorized to administer FES-EO accounts: Step Up For Students, by far the larger of the two, and AAA Scholarship Foundation. Step Up runs family accounts on its EMA platform (Education Market Assistant). MyScholarShop is the curated materials marketplace inside that system, one spending channel among several, not the account itself. The Florida Department of Education oversees the program.

For a microschool, the practical flow is: the family directs tuition from their EMA account to your school, Step Up processes the payment, and the deposit lands in your business bank account. Your job is to be an approved provider, keep your tuition schedule current, and meet the reporting cadence.

Becoming a Step Up approved provider

Florida microschools register through the Step Up For Students provider application. Expect to provide your business entity registration, a W-9 matching the legal name, Level 2 background screening for staff who work with students, and your published tuition and fee schedule. Processing time varies with application volume; the document set above is what removes the common delays.

CohortLedger's vendor wizard pre-loads these steps for Florida, tracks which document covers which requirement, and reminds you before screenings or registrations lapse.

The quarterly reporting cadence

Florida expects attendance records and periodic progress documentation for scholarship students. Operators who treat this as an afterthought discover the catch at renewal time: the receipt trail in EMA is separate from the attendance trail your school keeps, and a scholarship review wants both to agree.

CohortLedger keeps the two in one place: daily attendance marks per student, quarterly invoice records showing the scholarship and family-paid portions, and a one-click audit packet that joins them with dated entries.

What CohortLedger does for Florida operators

The dashboard tracks each FES-EO student's expected scholarship amount against what actually arrived, flags variances on the bank reconciliation page, and fires reminders before each quarterly reporting deadline. The compliance checklist ships with Florida's provider renewal and quarterly cadence already loaded.

For schools serving families across programs (a Florida household splitting the year with Texas is in our seeded demo), each program keeps its own rules and platform while the school sees one consolidated dashboard.