Have a Stake in Utah Fits All? We Want to Hear From You

If Utah Fits All or the future of school choice in Utah matters to you, now is the time to share your story. Legislators are already hearing data, news coverage, and arguments about UFA, months before the next session begins, and several Utah organizations are actively collecting family experiences right now so legislators can know the real story. Whether UFA has helped your child, you’re still waiting for access, or you’ve run into problems that need to change, your experience can help shape what happens next. The stories will be told—the question is whether families like yours will be part of them.

Not every UHOPE subscriber uses Utah Fits All, and not every family wants government funding attached to their homeschool. We know that. My own family has used traditional homeschool, Carson Smith, dual enrollment and public school, and we were accepted to UFA before choosing a different route, so I know firsthand that school-choice stories are rarely simple. But if UFA matters to your family, if you care about school choice more broadly, or if you are paying attention to how Utah is building and regulating these programs, this is a good time to speak up.

It may feel early. It’s August, families are getting ready for school or trying to squeeze out the last little bit of summer, and the next legislative session still feels far away. But the conversations that shape legislation don’t begin when legislators walk into the Capitol in January. They build through audits, news stories, interim meetings, data, conversations with advocates and opponents, and the individual stories legislators hear from families.

We’ve already seen recent coverage that puts UFA spending and the future of school choice under scrutiny. If you want to see some of the conversation that is already happening, read “‘Wasteful and extravagant’: Here’s what Utah auditors found digging into the first year of school voucher spending” from The Salt Lake Tribune, and the Deseret News opinion piece “School voucher issue will soon explode”. Whether you agree with the framing or not, these are the kinds of stories and arguments legislators, advocates, opponents, and the public are reading as they decide what they think should happen next.

The storm builds a long time before we actually see it.

Legislators are going to get numbers and data about Utah Fits All, and they are going to hear stories about it, too. The question is whether those stories will include the families who are actually using the program, the families who want access and haven’t received it, and the parents who can explain what is working well and what still needs to change. If we want real progress, those voices need to be part of the information lawmakers are using to make decisions.

Several organizations working in Utah school choice have recently asked for help finding families willing to share their experiences, and importantly, they are not all looking for exactly the same thing.

Empowered Parents Utah is particularly looking for positive stories showing what families and students have been able to accomplish through UFA, homeschooling, and other educational choices. These might be children thriving after finding the right learning environment, first-time homeschoolers succeeding, or families who have been able to add tutoring, curriculum, classes, therapies, extracurriculars, or other opportunities that have made a real difference.

Share with Empowered Parents here:
https://eputah.org/share-your-story

The Sutherland Institute is collecting stories from both families currently using Utah Fits All and families who want a scholarship but have not been able to receive one because of limited funding. They want to understand what UFA has made possible and, for families without access, what receiving the scholarship could mean for their child.

Share with Sutherland here:
https://sutherlandinstitute.org/call-for-utah-fits-all-scholarship-stories/

A separate Utah school-choice project is looking for parents willing to do short interviews for a series of informational pieces. They are seeking a broad range of experiences—first-time homeschoolers, experienced homeschoolers who have been able to expand what they offer, families using unusual or nontraditional schools and programs, and other stories that help show what school choice actually looks like for Utah families.

Interested in being interviewed? Reply to this email and we’ll connect you with the project.

If you feel most comfortable sharing your story with UHOPE, you can simply reply to this email. And if you submit your story to one of these organizations, we would also love to receive a copy so we have a better understanding of what families are experiencing when we talk with legislators and work on policy.

We are not only talking about perfect success stories.

• If UFA has made something possible for your child that you could not have done otherwise, that matters.

• If you are homeschooling for the first time and it is working, that matters.

• If you have been homeschooling for years and UFA has dramatically expanded what you can offer, that matters.

• If your child finally found the right school, microschool, tutor, therapy, curriculum, class, extracurricular, or learning environment, that matters.

• If you applied and didn’t receive funding, and that changed what your family could provide, that matters too.

• And if you use UFA but have encountered barriers or problems that policymakers need to understand, those experiences are also important. Supporting school choice does not require pretending every part of every program works perfectly.

Don’t assume your story isn’t important enough. Ordinary family experiences are often exactly what policymakers need in order to understand what a program looks like outside of a spreadsheet or committee room.

Legislators will have data. They’ll have numbers. They’ll have stories. Let’s make sure some of those stories come from the families actually living it.

It is easy to think we can pay attention later, after back-to-school season settles down, when there is a bill number to follow or a committee hearing to attend. But by then legislators, organizations, reporters, advocates, and opponents may already have spent months deciding what they think the problems are and what they think the solutions should be.

The data will be there, the numbers will be there, and the stories will be there too. If UFA or the future of school choice in Utah matters to you, help make sure some of those stories come from the families who are actually living it.

Britany Sproul | Chair, UHOPE