The New Frontier Of School Choice: Zoning (2025)

Florida has made itself the epicenter of private school choice in America. This year, more than 500,000 students will participate in one of the state’s private school choice programs, according to Step Up For Students. Given that there are around 1.2 million students in the nation utilizing a school choice program total, Florida’s place is a prominent one.

But lurking under the surface are local restrictions that make it much harder for new schools to open to serve the growing population of private school students. This is the conclusion from a paper published by the Teach Coalition earlier this year.

As one of the authors of the report, Danny Aqua, told me, “The most shocking thing we discovered in our zoning research was that private schools are more restricted than almost any other use. It’s significantly easier to open a restaurant, grocery store, or even a smoke shop than to open a private school.”

The researchers found that local zoning restrictions limit where schools can open. Their findings claim that the zoning rules discriminate against nonpublic schools, impose extra requirements on new schools, and are impossible to understand. It’s worth breaking down each in turn.

Limiting Where Schools Can Open

In the majority of locations that the researchers examined, private schools need to obtain a special permit from the government in order to open. The process to achieve a “special exception,” as it is known, is onerous, time consuming, and expensive.

Zoning boards have wide discretion in both what they can require of those seeking a permit and in the reasons that applicants can be denied. Whether it is architectural renderings, traffic studies, or engineering reports, requests can be expensive and time consuming. And, what’s more, most of these permits require a public hearing where neighbors have a chance to voice opposition, even if the applicant has done everything that the board asked for.

While zoning fights are normal for property developers who see both preparing for these decisions and losing a handful of them as the cost of doing business, educators don’t have the 12 to 18 months and six-figure dollar amounts that such compliance requires. And, when schools are operating on strict timelines to be open for back-to-school time, it makes it all the more challenging.

Zoning Inconsistencies with Nonpublic Schools

The researchers also found inconsistencies in zoning requirements for public and nonpublic schools operating in the same municipality.

Some cities, for example, require private schools to get a special exception in order to open but allow public schools to open by right (that is, without all of this lengthy process). If new schools cause issues with traffic, or risk ruining the architectural character of the neighborhood, or are hazardous in one way or another, one would think that would be equally true if the school was public or private. When only one sector needs to jump through all of the hoops, it suggests that those hoops are not serving the purpose they purport to.

Imposing Additional Requirements On Schools

Many of the requirements placed on private schools by zoning boards or other municipal authorities are arguably onerous, unnecessary, expensive, or some combination of the three.

The researchers fill the report with examples like requiring freestanding buildings instead of allowing schools to operate in shared facilities, prohibiting schools on major roadways, placing all classrooms on the ground floor, having minimum lot sizes, or, perhaps most inappropriately “ensuring that the curriculum is ‘substantially similar’ to that of a public school.” — a determination members of a zoning board would unlikely be qualified to make. And as for lot sizes, the researchers found requirements as large as 45 acres. That is a square nearly five football fields by five football fields.

There don’t seem to be any educational reasons why schools could not co-locate with other entities, or sit on an arterial road; or why schools have to fit these size and distance requirements. What we’re seemingly talking about here is aesthetics, and there have to be easier ways to work with educators to get pretty buildings that fit into the neighborhood.

Creating Confusing Webs Of Regulations

Talking to school leaders and potential school leaders, you hear the same story over and over again with respect to zoning: They talk with one person representing a locality who tells them one thing and then talk with someone else who tells them something completely different.

Different departments, different people, and even the same people on different days have different interpretations of rules and regulations. Educators working in good faith to try and stay in compliance with the law find themselves frustrated over and over with contradictory and incompatible instructions.

The researchers found multiple examples of this, with different elements of different city codes contradicting each other. For example, one municipality has a series of regulations for private schools hoping to operate in a section of its city only to have different regulations banning private schools in that area. So which is it? Others have conflicting requirements for conditional use permits versus by right operation, and it isn’t clear if someone were to open a new school whether or not they could just do it or if they needed to go through the expansive permitting process.

As more and more states adopt private school choice programs and those programs expand to serve more and more students, issues around zoning and new school construction will only become more important.