The CERES (Community-Engaged Research and Evaluation Sciences) Institute for Children and Youth at Boston University has initiated a family-centered inquiry into the experiences of families who receive McKay and Gardiner scholarships in Florida.

In a project brief, the study organizers note that these scholarship programs, which provide vouchers for students with disabilities and allow parents to “customize their child’s education,” were introduced to help families “access such supports they believed would help resolve these disparities.” They gave families a choice between staying in current public schools, transferring to a different public school, or to use funds to pay for private school. The programs serve nearly 40,000 students in the state.

Beginning in late September and extending through October, the CERES team, which includes Shannon Varga and Jonathan Zaff, will be in Florida collecting parent surveys and conducting interviews. Their scope includes current and past scholarship participants as well as eligible nonparticipants. The team intends to gather information about how families of students with disabilities choose schools and whether or not they feel those schools are providing appropriate accommodations to their students. They’ll also examine how parents feel about the support their children have received and gather their suggestions about improving access and use of the scholarship programs.

Once gathered, this information can then speak to the effectiveness of the scholarships, which were designed to empower families to take education decisions into their own hands and combat the disparities students with disabilities often face, such as disproportionate rates of disciplinary actions and victimization. Such assessment can reveal the characteristics of families who do or do not use the programs, the types of services families seek out for their children, and parental satisfaction with the programs.

This project connects with the CERES Institute’s focus on youth growing up in economically disadvantaged and historically disenfranchised communities, and draws on the team members’ experience with past projects that sought to better understand how youth and their families navigate the opportunities and barriers present in their schools and communities.