BATON ROUGE — The Louisiana "Giving All True Opportunity to Rise" or LA Gator Scholarship Program—passed in the 2024 legislative session—is a school choice voucher program that allows parents to send their children to private school using public dollars for the tuition.

Last year, Governor Jeff Landry requested $93 million for the LA Gator scholarship program.

"We are asking the legislature this year to just fund it based upon the promises and the commitment that we made," Governor Jeff Landry said during an LA Gator rally last year.

But state lawmakers only approved $43 million, the Louisiana Department of Education says. Despite around 35,000 eligible applicants in 2025, the funding only covered about 6,000 students.

Now, Landry is looking to double the funding total to $87 million, which some lawmakers say they cannot support.

"It's outrageous to me for us to be spending those types of dollars on that funding," Rep. C. Denise Marcelle said.

She says she was not in favor of the LA Gator program initially because she feared it was unsustainable.

"We have a projected loss in early childhood in 2027, so why are we spending additional dollars on this program, and we can't even fund the early childhood program?" Marcelle said.

Marcelle believes that if the state continues down this road, the cost will continue to increase. She says the state is already facing deficits in the coming fiscal years.

"We are still trying to figure out in this state, how to pay our school teachers a raise rather than a stipend, right, guaranteed dollars, and we haven't even been able to figure that out, so I don't think we should be expanding off into paying for private schools," Marcelle said.