The Office of the Utah State Auditor released a limited audit of the Utah Fits All scholarship program on July 7. It covers the program's first year, 2024-25, when 10,000 students each received $8,000 in state money to spend on education as their families saw fit.
The report found that scholarship funds were spent on season ski passes, zoo memberships, trampolines, home gym equipment, and computers, all costing several times what a school district pays. The auditors' phrase for this spending is "wasteful and extravagant."
Families spent $67,733,684 that year, according to the report. Auditors traced $10,739,583 of it to tuition, most at private schools, and $1,107,336 to electronics and hardware. The report says the majority of funds went to legitimate educational uses. It also says the transaction records kept by ACE Scholarships, the program's first administrator, were bad enough that the auditor's office built its own AI model to categorize the spending, and that even the model could confidently sort only about a fifth of the dollars.
Where the records allowed analysis, the office did some. More than half the computers reimbursed through the program cost over $1,000. In Utah's public schools, non-Chromebook devices are about 28.75 percent of the fleet. The report recommends that the Legislature and the State Board of Education consider spending caps on items such as computers, and asks the board and the program manager to monitor transactions for waste and report back to lawmakers.
Most of the families in the program homeschool. The Salt Lake Tribune reported last year that homeschoolers dominate the program and that the reimbursement process had become, in the words of one administrator, a nightmare. The program has since changed hands and changed rules. Odyssey completed its takeover of administration from ACE on October 27, 2025, and the Legislature has banned reimbursement for furniture, musical instruments, ski passes, playground equipment, and clothing. None of those rules existed in the year the audit examined. Odyssey told KSL NewsRadio that more than 18,700 students will receive scholarships for the 2026-27 school year.
The program's defenders read the audit differently from its critics. Ski Utah has run a fourth-grade ski program for over 30 years. Hogle Zoo gives free field trips to Utah schools. A bicycle is physical education when a district buys thirty of them, the school choice writer Colyn Ritter argues, so it is worth asking why it becomes an extravagance when a family buys one.
Rep. John Arthur, a Salt Lake City Democrat, teaches in a public school classroom and has crowdfunded supplies for his own students. He told Utah Political Watch that no teacher could get discretionary funds approved for purchases like those in the audit. He wants the roughly $120 million now funding the program moved back into public education, and he offers a comparison from his own experience: a $2 million bill to put certified teacher librarians in every district, which he could not get funded.
Arthur's proposal has no path through this Legislature. The constitutional question does not need one.
Third District Judge Laura Scott ruled the program unconstitutional in April 2025. Article X of the Utah Constitution requires a public education system that is open to all children and free. Article XIII earmarks income tax revenue for public education. Scott held that the Legislature cannot dodge those requirements by declining to label a program part of the public education system. She entered no injunction, with the plaintiffs' agreement, so the program continued to run. Both sides told Scott that everyone's interest lay in a fast resolution. The state filed an unopposed petition for interlocutory appeal. The Utah Supreme Court granted it on June 24, 2025, per a citation in Wyoming's parallel ESA litigation.
The case is docketed as Brown v. Labresh, No. 20250512-SC. Attorney General Derek Brown is the lead appellant; Kevin Labresh, a parent of a child with special needs who joined the Utah Education Association's suit, is the lead respondent. The state's opening brief is in. Two mothers whose children attend private schools on scholarship intervened to defend the program, represented by the Institute for Justice and EdChoice.
The Notre Dame Law Education Project and Utah Education Fits All filed a joint amicus brief for the state's side on January 20 of this year. Since then, nothing public. No argument date appears on the court's calendars through the end of this month.
While the case waited, the court changed. The Legislature passed SB134 in January, a roughly $6.5 million restructuring that added two seats to the Supreme Court, two to the Court of Appeals, and three district judgeships. Chief Justice Matthew Durrant had told lawmakers on opening day that his court had "essentially no backlog" and that the need was in the district courts. The Utah State Bar opposed adding the two justices. Every House Democrat voted no, and the caucus said it could only interpret the changes as an attempt to undermine the judiciary's independence.
Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill on January 31. Durrant then announced his retirement, and Justice Diana Hagen resigned in May amid a misconduct investigation that Republican state leaders had called for after records of a previously dismissed inquiry were released. In June, Cox appointed Jay Jorgensen and Stephen Dent, a former Walmart executive and a federal prosecutor, to the expansion seats. Neither has been a judge. When the remaining vacancies are filled, only one member of the court will not be a Cox appointee.
Republican leaders say the expansion was about capacity. Under the court's rules, the clerk gives 28 days' notice before an argument is heard. As of this writing, no notice has been issued. The program is spending its third year of state money.
