President Donald Trump wants the Defense Department to look at ways it could pay for the children of military families "to attend schools of their choice" as soon as next school year.
In the executive order Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunities for Families, issued Jan. 29, Trump directed the department to "review any available mechanisms under which military-connected families may use funds from the Department of Defense" to pay for their chosen schools, "including private, faith-based or public charter schools."
Trump gave the department 90 days to "submit a plan ... describing such mechanisms and the steps that would be necessary to implement them beginning in the 2025-26 school year."
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Defense officials didn't immediately provide details in response to a request.
The executive order doesn't specify which military families might qualify to receive such an option. The potential groups affected include families of the 67,000 students who attend schools run by the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA; all school-age children of active-duty troops -- 494,499 of them ages 6-18 as of 2023, according to DoD statistics; or all military kids including those of reservists, who number 868,222 in the 6-18 age bracket.
The children of military families generally have the same school choice options as the civilian families wherever they're based, said Eileen Huck, the acting director of government relations for the National Military Family Association.
Huck acknowledged that some families want more options. She said the association will wait for details of the plan before forming an opinion but cautioned against "unintended consequences" that such a program might have.
For example, if the program didn't cover the entire cost of a private education, only the higher-income families, who could afford to pay the remainder of the cost, might use it.
One existing mechanism that provides financial assistance for school-age military kids to go to private schools is DoDEA's Non-DoD Schools Program for overseas families, but it's only available in the absence of a DoDEA option and "not authorized" in the U.S. or its territories.
A provision deleted from the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act would have provided funding for DoD students to attend private schools, specifically in Bahrain, where DoDEA operates.
But educators' unions objected to the plan over accountability and students' rights, and lawmakers struck it from the final version in favor of a study specific to circumstances in Bahrain, according to reporting in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
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