State lawmakers signed off on the new rulebook for Arkansas’ school choice program Friday, finally settling how hundreds of millions of state dollars will be spent for the 2026-27 school year.
Look, this has been a long time coming. The Arkansas Legislative Council voted to approve changes to the Educational Freedom Account program that fundamentally alter how funding can be used. The biggest shifts? You’ll see stricter limits on athletics spending and a reduction in how much funding students can roll over to the next year.
It’s been a saga to get here. The Arkansas Department of Education first tried to drop a set of draft rules back in November, but parents across the state weren’t having it. The agency withdrew that proposal after getting hit with hundreds of critical comments. The new rules approved Friday are the direct result of that pushback.
Honestly, that level of engagement is impressive. In a major city, a state agency usually pushes these kinds of administrative changes through with a generic press release and zero public input. Here, the hustle of local parents actually forced a rewrite. Arkansas Department of Education Chief of Staff Courtney Salas-Ford was right there in the fray Friday answering questions from lawmakers, including Sen. Terry Rice, R-Waldron, during the meeting at the State Capitol.
These changes are a big deal for families in Northwest Arkansas. The Educational Freedom Account program covers students statewide, but with the cost of private education and extracurriculars in Bentonville and Fayetteville, every dollar of rollover and eligibility for athletics counts. The goal is to stop misuse of funds, but for parents trying to maximize these accounts, the new guardrails change the math heading into the fall.
The vote Friday effectively ends a more-than-yearlong effort to update the regulations. With the 2026-27 school year approaching, the uncertainty is gone. Schools and families now know exactly what the state will allow, and they can plan accordingly without waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Source: NWA Democrat Gazette
