Dollar for dollar, taxpayers can get back up to $1,700 for donating to K through 12 scholarship funds.

As our June Lefler reports, advocates for public and private schools hope to seize this moment.

Sarah Wolff sends her son to a religious private school.

Now she's helping other families do the same.

Our focus is to help students who otherwise wouldn't be able to have that type of education.

Several nonprofits have recently formed in the state to take advantage of a new tax credit.

The U.S.

Treasury says that could eventually funnel $26 billion annually to more than 2 million students nationwide, though the credit starts on January 1st.

Wolff's group has offered scholarships to three students this year.

We don't spend any portion of the money that we don't absolutely have to.

It goes all to the kids and that's really what we care about.

And if the tax donations go to us, they know that they're going back into our local community and helping our local families that are really in need.

These nonprofits are scholarship granting organizations, or STOs.

They partner with schools for private schools.

Donations naturally pay for tuition and other fees.

But what would public school students get?

It may be offering a after school tutoring program.

It may be offering a summer tutoring program.

I will say this a lot of public schools do have fees that their local board approves.

Those fees could be, uniforms, equipment for career and technical education programs, dual credit fees.

The newly formed Kentucky Education Fund will support public and private school students.

Our model is set up to allow the the donor, the one that contributes to the Kentucky Education Fund.

They can direct their contribution to a private institution.

They can also director contribution to a public institution.

I would say the majority are public, but we have we have signed a sizable number of privates as well.

Of the more than dozen STOs registered so far, about half hour Kentucky based.

The other half are based outside the state.

And most of those groups have no online presence right now, creating a bit of a Wild West.

The risk is doing it poorly and in a less than coordinated fashion.

The Prichard Committee advocates for public schools and evidence based learning.

And where we would hope to see those donations from taxpayers go.

Is to think, is to the things that parents have indicated they don't have enough of to support their student success.

And those are things like high quality tutoring, after school programing and summer programing on the back end.

Five years from now, if done well, we should see significantly additive investment in education through donor commitment to the needs of public school families and students and be able to begin to communicate, return on investment in improved outcomes of students and improved readiness for post-high school success.

This tax credit is considered the first nationwide school choice measure.

That's an umbrella term for policies that critics say divert money from public schools to private schools.

The Christian conservative group says this moment revives the school choice debate in Kentucky.

And more families are going to be able to choose a Christian education.

I also think broader than that, this.

Is going to be a moment and opportunity for Kentuckians to see that school choice is a good thing.

That freeing up dollars and resources to follow families, and to put parents and families more in the driver's seat of this conversation is a good thing.

My hope is this this will help over time.

Open the conversation back to maybe some things that we could consider doing at the state level.

Kentucky's constitution doesn't allow tax dollars to go towards private schools.

This tax credits are convinced that rule because it impacts federal dollars, not state dollars for Kentucky.

Addition I'm June Loeffler.

Thanks, June.

More scholarship granting organizations will come online in the coming months.

Kentucky Secretary of State will send its list of goes to the federal government in December.