Editor’s Note: a guest post by Ethan Estis, Chairman of the Louisiana Young Republicans Federation.

I grew up in Richland Parish in rural northeast Louisiana. My parish had five public schools and one private school, and for most families I knew, that private school might as well have been in another state. The tuition was out of reach, there was no lifeline to bridge the gap, and if the school down the road wasn’t working for your child, you accepted it or you left. Most families stayed and most of the kids I knew made do. That is not a Louisiana any parent should have to accept, and it is exactly the Louisiana that the LA GATOR Scholarship Program was designed to change.

My fiancée and I are getting married soon and we are already talking about the family we want to build here, because Louisiana is not just where we grew up, it is where we intend to stay. That makes the question of what kind of opportunities our kids will have a pretty personal one. I also serve as chairman of the Louisiana Young Republican Federation, and when I travel across the state and talk to families in north and south Louisiana, in rural parishes and urban ones, I hear the same thing. Our membership is a decent cross-section of young Louisiana, members with kids already in school, couples who are newly married or engaged and thinking seriously about what comes next, and young people who are just trying to figure out whether this state is somewhere they can plant roots. Even beyond our membership, the questions are the same. They want their children to have real options, and they are counting on their Legislature to make that possible.

As a law student at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, one of the things I have come to love most about Louisiana is the way we govern ourselves. Louisiana’s civil law tradition places the power to make law with the people, expressed through the legislators they elect, and that is how it should be. It is also why I believe the Legislature has both the authority and the obligation to get this right. Louisiana’s own Constitution commits the state to provide learning environments designed to promote excellence so that every individual may develop to his full potential, and LA GATOR is the Legislature’s own vehicle for meeting that commitment. A child in Richland Parish ought to have the same opportunities as a child in East Baton Rouge Parish, and right now, without full funding, that simply is not the case.

Before passing judgment on the program, it is worth understanding what it actually is. LA GATOR is not an unaccountable voucher with no strings attached, it is a structured education scholarship account that places state funds into managed accounts parents can use only for approved expenses like tuition, tutoring, school uniforms, and the like. Every expenditure is subject to audit, and participating students are required to sit for approved academic assessments, so the accountability is already built into the law and the oversight concerns raised by critics simply do not hold up against the actual text of the statute.

That makes the Legislature’s response genuinely hard to understand. Governor Landry proposed $93 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year, nearly 40,000 families applied, and state education leaders determined 35,000 were eligible. The Legislature appropriated $43.5 million, less than half of what the Governor requested, and of those 35,000 newly eligible applicants, only 685 new students actually received a scholarship. The state invited tens of thousands of families to apply, deemed them eligible, and then turned the overwhelming majority away, and Louisiana families deserved better than that. This is happening even as Louisiana’s students are making real gains, having improved from 49th in the nation in 2019 to 32nd in 2024 on the Nation’s Report Card, the highest ranking in state history. Our kids are proving they can compete, and fully funding LA GATOR is how we make sure that progress reaches every child in every parish.

Louisiana has always been a state that does things its own way, and at its best, that means a government that listens to its people and follows through on what it promises. The Legislature created this program, the Governor signed it into law, and nearly 35,000 Louisiana families showed up and made clear they believe in it. All that is left is for the Legislature to match that belief with full funding, for the families in Richland Parish and every parish across this state who have waited long enough, and for the Louisiana we all want to leave behind for our kids.