Nick West, a part-time computer science teacher, spends a lot of time in the carpool line of his Mobile private school, fielding question after question about scholarships and financial aid.

For local parents, he’s a go-to guy for tips about affording a private school education. Between classes, he’s an evangelist for Alabama’s new CHOOSE Act, which, starting this summer, gives eligible families up to $7,000 in tax credits to spend on private education.

As the program kicks off its first year, an estimated $124 million will support families – an effort that West says will help many of the students he teaches.

“I had a lot of families coming to me just this year, saying if we didn’t get them a scholarship, I’m not going to be able to send my son or my daughter here,” he said.

The program, lawmakers say, is intended to help students who come from low- to middle-income families and those who may be zoned for struggling public schools. By the end of the school year, West said he’d helped as many as 60 families apply for the credits. About 10 of them recently transferred from local public schools, he said, in search of smaller class sizes and better services for their children with disabilities.

“A parent is not going to let their kid just sit there and fail year after year after year,” West said. “You can’t blame them for wanting to use their tax-funded dollars to send their child to private school, because they have no other option.”

Since its opening in January, the CHOOSE program has garnered intense demand – enough to push lawmakers to nearly double its initial funding.

But as the program kicks off, there are still many unknowns. There’s no clear picture of the quality of schools chosen, or of the ultimate cost to taxpayers and public school systems. And it remains unclear how Alabama, among other states, will sustain funding as a new national school voucher program takes effect.

“Any time you move outside of a public space that has public oversight, it’s kind of a, ‘Trust me, bro,’” said Jameson Brewer, an associate professor at the University of North Georgia who studies school choice programs. “There’s no way to challenge that.”

AL.com examined more than 200 private schools and dozens of homeschool vendors participating in the program. We discovered a vast range of offerings that differ widely in price, curricula and admissions requirements. Some schools hire experienced teachers and use high-quality curriculum. Others do not follow recommended practices for reading, math or science instruction.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Kay Ivey told AL.com she looks forward to the “continuous growth and success” of the state’s new school choice expansion. But so far, the state has no plans to take stock of the program’s outcomes – or how accessible the offerings are to the students it aims to serve.

“When we first started, we didn’t know who was going to participate, how many students were going to participate, or what the uptake would be,” Sen. Arthur Orr, one of the legislation’s sponsors, told AL.com in a recent interview. “There were just a lot of unknowns.”

“Now, just based on the first few months of history, we have a better idea of the universe of students, schools that are participating. I think in the subsequent years, we’ll be revisiting the question of accountability to make sure that the money’s being spent appropriately, the educational experience is substantive, and that discussion will need to be had at some point.”

Who is using the program?

Nearly three quarters of the program’s 23,429 participants already attend private school or are homeschooled.

That’s typical of most school choice programs, especially when they first start out, research shows.

“Everyone likes free money, so if you offer free money to everybody, then the first people who are going to take it for private school are the ones who already have kids in private school,” Liz Cohen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said at a recent panel discussion.

Advocates like David Goodwin, who heads the Association of Classical Christian Schools, say Alabama’s program will help a “vast middle” class of families afford private education.

As more people learn about it, there will be more social, economic and racial diversity, supporters argue.

That’s playing out in Arizona right now: Public school participation in the state’s universal choice program more than doubled from 21% to 48% in one year, according to a recent study from FutureEd.

“I think the story of it being something that is taken advantage of by people who could already go to private school is really short selling the tens of thousands of families in Alabama who can and will benefit from this program,” said Elizabeth BeShears, a leading school choice advocate with the American Federation for Children.

Some private schools told AL.com they expect to enroll several new students from local public schools. But some said they don’t have the capacity to serve all eligible families, or students with specific needs.

Kyoung Tae Kim, an associate professor at the University of Alabama, said the credits alone are unlikely to put private schools in reach for all families. Fees for meals, supplies and extracurriculars can also add up, he said, and families should think about a “long-term strategy” for managing expenses.

There’s also a gap in Alabama’s program: Public school families can’t use the money if their school doesn’t charge tuition.

Beth Dotson, who owns Huntington Learning Center franchises in Montgomery and Daphne, said several of her public school clients had hoped that they could use the funds for extra help at her tutoring centers, but were turned away due to their enrollment status.

Many of them can’t afford private school tuition, even with a $7,000 tax credit, she said.

“This is just our state once again taking away from our poorest and most academically challenged students and not giving them anything,” she said.

This year, just over 3,000 public school students plan to use the credits to enroll in private school.

As the program reaches more families, some public school leaders worry it will strain their local systems. Students already are leaving for other schools with flexible schedules and custom curricula – offerings that they, by law, can’t always provide.

“We’re all in the same fight, and you get to use both hands, but I’ve got to fight it with both arms tied behind my back,” Lyman Woodfin, the superintendent of Autauga County Schools, told AL.com. “That’s the rub for me. We’ve lost families to private school. We’ve lost families to a local charter school. We’re seeing some come back, but it’s only going to get worse when the guardrails are off.”

Will tax credits make private school more accessible?

West credits the state’s original school choice program, called the Alabama Accountability Act, for helping his single mom afford to send him and his siblings to Catholic school. After getting his cyber security degree, he returned to Mobile to teach STEM classes at two local private schools, Heart of Mary and Little Flower.

For much of the spring, West was fielding calls about application issues and even managing email accounts for some families who had hoped to enroll in the program. He encouraged as many parents as he could to apply for the savings accounts, even if they didn’t think they qualified.

Several families have told him they were approved.

“I have their kids in class, and I can see the impact that it has on them,” he said.

Others are still holding out hope that they can participate one day. Many schools offer various discounts, but it can still be challenging to find a seat that meets a student’s educational, geographical and financial needs. AL.com compiled a dataset of private school tuition rates and found a wide range across the state.

Andrea Portis, who has two children at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile, found out in May that the application she filed for her youngest daughter had been denied.

Her husband, a federal worker, isn’t making the salary he used to now that pandemic-era demands have slowed. But the family wasn’t able to reflect the change in their application, which only counts income and tax statements from the prior year.

“When I tell you it has been a struggle, it has been a struggle financially,” Portis said.

Her youngest was able to get some financial assistance from McGill, but it didn’t cover all the costs.

Tuition at the school is also going up, she said; records show the cost to enroll one child went from $12,420 last year to $13,600 for the 2025-26 school year, a jump of 9.5%.

While lots of private schools are keeping tuition the same this fall, AL.com found that some raised prices by thousands of dollars. Tuition increases are normal, but at several schools, this year’s bump was larger than the previous year. Can’t see the chart? View it here.

“I kept thinking that if I get in [the program] it will be a miracle,” Portis said. “But I’m just going to have to figure it out.”

Is private education better?

Advocates say the program will bolster competition between public and private schools. And research backs up that school choice can shock public schools into improving – at least to some degree. But public school leaders say it’s not that simple.

In Autauga County, Woodfin said he’s already losing families to Ivy Classical Academy, a charter school that teaches a classical curriculum. Now, private schools in the area are also using their flexibility as a marketing tool, he said.

But what worries him most, he said, is that there’s no way to tell whether the families who are leaving are making the best academic choice for their kids.

He wants to see private schools that voluntarily accept ESAs held to the same standards as local public schools. He believes they should take the same state tests and submit data to the same state and federal report cards every year.

“Our frustration has nothing to do with the concept of a choice,” he said. “The argument is, do parents really know what they’re choosing? We’re going to bat every day for our teachers and our parents because we have some of the same frustrations, but we don’t have a way to counter that.”

Some vendors and private schools agree with Woodfin’s view that the legislature should focus more on student outcomes. Others, however, say testing is meaningless if it’s not aligned to the lessons that are taught in a classroom.

While West would like the program to expand, he says parents deserve access to good data. His schools use the national IOWA test, which he says can be compared fairly easily to state assessments.

He would, however, like to see students’ growth taken into account.

“It’s not that simple,” he said. “Some of these kids who are coming from these schools, parents transfer them because they’ve been failing the last two or three years. So of course when they get in there and they take a standardized test, they’re going to have low test scores.”

In the end, he believes, the program’s success will depend on buy-in from local families.

“If a parent doesn’t like what they’re seeing they’re not going to apply again,” he said. “They’re either going to put them in another private school and the money is going to move there, or they’re going to pull them out of a private school altogether. And so I think the system will work itself out. The whole purpose of this is to give parents choice.”

Can the state sustain the program?

State officials estimate it will cost about $124 million to serve the first round of participating families in 2025.

The legislature originally budgeted $100 million for the program’s launch, but in the final days of the session, lawmakers set in place plans to spend up to $530 million over three years, according to reporting from Alabama Daily News.

A portion of current funding comes from a reserve account, which Orr said will help alleviate future budget shortfalls. But any allocations made after 2027 will depend on “what the budgets will bear,” he told AL.com.

“That’s going to be a balancing act,” he said. “Because once we make that commitment… we cannot retreat or go backwards and yo-yo families that are putting their children from one school to the other.”

“So for those that may be pounding the table wanting more and more and more on either one of those programs – the public schools for the RAISE Act, or private or home school or whatever for the CHOOSE Act – we have just got to be very, very cautious and deliberate.”