The Georgia Promise Scholarship in Plain English: $6,500, Who Gets It, How It Works

Georgia has an education savings account program. It is called the Georgia Promise Scholarship. If your child qualifies and you leave public school for a private school or home study, the state puts up to $6,500 a year into an account you can spend on approved education costs. That is the program in two sentences.

The hard part is the word "qualifies." Most of the confusion in Georgia homeschool groups comes from people skipping that part. So let's go through it in order.

Where it came from and who runs it

The Legislature created the program in 2024 with Senate Bill 233. It lives in Title 20, Chapter 2B of the Georgia Code. The program is run by the Georgia Education Savings Authority, usually called GESA. GESA is a companion agency to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, the same state agency that runs HOPE. GESA contracts with a company called Odyssey to run the online applications, the accounts and the marketplace where the money gets spent.

The program's official home is mygeorgiapromise.org. The regulations that govern it were approved in May 2026 and took effect July 1, 2026. When someone in a Facebook group tells you how it works, ask whether they are quoting those regulations or remembering last year.

What it pays

For the 2026-27 school year the program's website lists up to $6,500 per eligible student, paid in quarterly installments. Two things shave that number:

• GESA may hold back up to 5 percent for administration.
• When you apply matters. Students approved from the first two application windows of a year are funded for the full year. Students approved from the last two windows are funded only for the second half, starting on or around January 1.

The amount can change. The statute set $6,500 for the first year and ties later years to the state's school funding formula. The family handbook says plainly that the figure may go up or down.

Who qualifies

A student has to clear all of these:

• Public school history. The student is currently enrolled in a Georgia public school and was enrolled for the prior two consecutive semesters, or is entering kindergarten. Active-duty military families stationed in Georgia within the past year get an exception.
• Attendance zone. The family lives in the attendance zone of at least one public school on the state's list of lower-performing schools, the bottom 25 percent, published by the Governor's Office of Student Achievement. Your child does not have to attend that school. You just have to be zoned to it.
• Residency. The parent has lived in Georgia for at least one year.
• No stacking. The student is not using the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship or a tax-credit scholarship from a student scholarship organization.

Families at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level get priority. Families above that line can only be considered in the spring windows.

A family checking the boxes

The Okafors in Clayton County have a fourth grader in their neighborhood elementary school and a rising kindergartner. They checked the eligible zone list in October and found their middle school on it. The fourth grader has three straight semesters of public school, so she clears the enrollment test. The kindergartner clears it by being a rising kindergartner. Their cousins two counties over, who have homeschooled since the start, do not qualify at all, no matter what school they are zoned to.

(A composite example — names and details are illustrative, drawn from situations homeschool families commonly describe.)

How the money moves

You do not get a check. Here is the sequence the handbook describes:

• You apply through Odyssey during an open window.
• After the window closes, eligible applications are reviewed and awards are made. Decisions are not first-come, first-served.
• If approved, you opt in, confirm your child is leaving public school, and choose private school or home study.
• GESA funds the account each quarter through the Odyssey portal.
• You spend it in the Odyssey marketplace, where Odyssey pays approved schools, tutors, therapists and vendors directly.

Reimbursement is not how this program works. The handbook says families will not be reimbursed for purchases made outside the marketplace, with one exception: eligible transportation, which is capped at $500 a year.

What it can pay for

The qualified expenses in the regulations are tuition, fees and required textbooks for core and career-technical courses at a participating private school, an accredited college or a nonpublic online program; tutoring by an educator certified by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission; curriculum approved by GESA; services from licensed physicians and therapists, including occupational, behavioral, physical and speech-language therapy; and up to $500 a year for fee-for-service transportation. Anything billed by a family member is out. We cover the details in our Georgia Promise Scholarship guide.

The strings

This is public money, and it comes with obligations most families don't think about until they are in. When you accept an account, you sign an attestation agreeing to teach at least reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science, not to enroll your child in a public or charter school while participating, and to spend the money only on qualified expenses. Then there is the ongoing list:

• Annual testing. Every participating student takes a GESA-approved nationally norm-referenced test or a state-wide assessment every year, and home study families upload the results themselves. The upload deadline is June 30.
• Annual recertification by May 31. Miss it and your child loses participating status and has to reapply as a new applicant.
• No return to public school. Enrolling back in a public school ends eligibility.
• Audits. GESA runs random audits of accounts every year and can remove families who misuse funds.

The calendar right now

The 2026 student windows were March, May, August and November. The last one runs November 1 through 30, 2026, and it funds the spring 2027 semester. GESA must publish the 2027 windows by December 15. Put both dates on your education calendar.

Bottom line

If your child is in public school today and you are zoned to a school on the list, this is real money worth a serious look. If your child has been home educated all along, the program is not built for you. Start with the official pre-screen tool on mygeorgiapromise.org, then look at who is approved to take the money on our vendor directory.

My Learning Source is an independent marketplace and is not affiliated with the Georgia Education Savings Authority, the Georgia Student Finance Commission, Odyssey or the Georgia Promise Scholarship Program. Program rules and amounts are set by the state and can change — confirm details on the official program pages before making financial decisions. Family examples are composites, not real individuals.