NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s private school voucher program has grown to about 35,000 students this school year, and new records show the awards are bunched in a small number of mostly affluent communities while large parts of the state see few or none.
The General Assembly approved 35,000 Education Freedom Scholarships for 2026-27, an increase of 20,000 over the program’s first year. The scholarships use public money to help families pay private school tuition. State Department of Education data put the reported total at 34,901, with counts under 10 in a county withheld by law.
Just 20 ZIP codes account for 12,217 recipients, or 34.9 percent of the program. Many of the places with the highest shares of students using a scholarship are prosperous suburbs and exurbs ringing the big cities. In one east Memphis ZIP code, 38120, close to one in four students has a voucher, the highest rate anywhere in Tennessee, and the median household income there is $119,309, roughly double the Shelby County figure. Germantown, a city of about 40,000, has more than 1,000 recipients.
Elsewhere the picture is thin. Around a third of the state’s ZIP codes, close to 200, have no recipients at all. The Tri-Cities region of Northeast Tennessee drew just over 1,000 awards, about 2.9 percent of the statewide total, even though Census figures place roughly 7.3 percent of Tennesseans in those counties. The region has only nine private schools signed up with the program, with Sullivan County home to five of them and Washington County the other four.
Gov. Bill Lee first proposed education savings accounts in 2019 as a narrow option for low-income students in a few struggling urban districts. The current version is open statewide, and Republican leaders now describe it as school choice for every family. Opponents argue the ZIP code numbers cut against the original case for the program.
The distribution is likely to come up again when lawmakers return in January and weigh how many scholarships to fund next.
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