Mississippi families will soon be able to enroll their children in private schools or homeschool programs, including those with religious curricula, using federal tax dollars. Gov. Tate Reeves opted Mississippi into the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which became law last year as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That part of the law, known as the Educational Choice for Children Act, allows families whose household incomes do not exceed 300% of the median gross income for their area to receive voucher funds to pay for private school costs.
In a Monday press release, Reeves thanked Trump and his administration for “continuing to put parents and students first” with school-choice legislation.
“Mississippi believes that parents—not government—know what’s best for their children’s education,” the governor said on Jan. 19. “The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program will help Mississippi continue its historic performance in classrooms across the state and further empower parents to do what’s best for their children.”
The federal government will fund the program through a novel federal tax incentive scheme that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to individuals and corporations that donate up to $1,700 to certified scholarship-granting organizations.
The legislation requires a governor or state agency to formally approve the program to opt in. It also says that states must approve and identify in-state scholarship-granting organizations that meet federal requirements.
Since Mississippi has opted into the scholarship program, the State will need to develop a process for vetting scholarship-granting organizations and design the voucher system. Reeves’ press release said his office would select eligible scholarship-granting organizations to participate in Mississippi’s program.
Project 2025 Co-Author Pushed for Tax Credits
Lindsey Burke, the author of the section in Project 2025 on overhauling the American education system, endorsed the tax credit scholarship program when speaking to the Mississippi House Education Committee during an Aug. 25 hearing.
“Every single child in Mississippi from day one should get an ESA to enroll in a private school that suits their needs or pay for private education options, hire tutors (or) direct it to whatever works well for them,” she told lawmakers.
In January 2027, Mississippi taxpayers could begin making donations to those entities Reeves’ office selected to serve as scholarship-granting organizations and claim their tax-credit scholarships. Donors do not have to use the scholarship on themselves or their own children; they can designate their tax-credit scholarship to someone else.
Those scholarship funds can pay for private-school tuition, school materials, textbooks, room and board, transportation, computers and exam fees. Families may also use funds for homeschool costs, speech and occupational therapy for students with disabilities, as well as fees for dual-enrollment programs with colleges and universities.
“Parents should decide where their kids go to school. This bill helps them do that,” its author, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said in July 2025.
Like much of the South, “school choice” laws, particularly those involving vouchers for private schools, have a sordid history in Mississippi. During a 1964 special legislative session, the all-white Mississippi Legislature passed a tuition grant law that allowed public funds to pay for private schools so that white people could send their children to private schools using taxpayer dollars. In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan attempted to make segregation academies tax-exempt again in Mississippi and elsewhere, as they had been before a 1971 federal court ruling, but failed.
“Education freedom, school choice have never really been freedom in the state of Mississippi,” Rep. Jeffrey Hulum, a Black Democratic lawmaker from Gulfport, told Lindsey Burke during the Aug. 25, 2025, hearing.
Three private school voucher programs are already available in Mississippi: the Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs Program, the Mississippi Dyslexia Therapy Scholarship for Students with Dyslexia Program and the Nate Rogers (Speech-Language) Scholarship for Students with Disabilities Program.
The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review’s December 2024 report shows that 515 students in 109 schools were involved in the education savings account programs from 2023 to 2024; 82% of the schools that students attended using educational savings account scholarships were not specialized or special purpose schools for children with disabilities.
Legislature Considers Expanding State-Level Vouchers
The Republican-led Mississippi Legislature is currently considering efforts to expand educational savings accounts, also known as private school vouchers, through House Bill 2. Students whose families make up to 300% of the average median household income would have the first chance at obtaining Magnolia Student Accounts in the 2027 to 2028 school year.
Under H.B. 2, the state would have 12,500 Magnolia Student Account slots available to fund private education using public dollars. Half of those slots would go to students who attended a public school the previous school year, and the other half would go to any student in the state in grades K-12 for the upcoming school year. The State would deposit the student base cost amount for the year into the Magnolia Student Account for the participating student. The bill would cap the Transfer Student Fund at $5 million.
The Mississippi House passed H.B. 2 by a 61-59 vote on Jan. 15. The legislation is now in the hands of the Senate Education Committee for members to discuss.
The State does not hold private schools, homeschool programs and non-accredited schools to the same accountability standards as public schools, so the State should not give public funding to those schools, Mississippi Parents’ Campaign Director Nancy Loome, who lobbies for public school teachers, told the Mississippi Free Press.
“We are absolutely opposed—as the Constitution lays out—opposed to any state funding being used for private school education,” she said in a Jan. 9 interview with the Mississippi Free Press. “It is absolutely absurd that our Legislature would propose two separate state-funded, very unequal systems of education in Mississippi.”