...the maximum contract amount for Student First Technologies, LLC to nearly $637 million over the life of its five-year contract to run an online portal where parents can apply for the funds and receive payments.

The increase for the last two years of the contract comes after the legislature added 15,000 students to the “Education Freedom Scholarship” program this year, pushing it to a total of 35,000 for the 2026-27 school year.

The Department of Education hired the Indiana-based company in May 2023 to administer the Education Savings Account program, ESA, for low-income students to attend private schools at a cost of around $40 million.

35,000 students are allowed to use the state’s two private-school voucher programs. It appears the cost to run the sign up and funds distribution for these programs is approximately $3,640 per student. This is in addition to the funding to pay for the tuition for the students to attend private schools. Is there more cost for transportation?

As a former software developer, this is a fine contract. It's kind of like paying for gold computers to program and manage the project. Of course, they could also be using AI tokens to up the cost.

Then, there is the company receiving this $637 million. They were terminated by Arkansas for failure to deliver. They are struggling to run a similar project in West Virginia, "failing to process nearly 3,000 of 9,000 student applications."