One of the dirty little secrets about school choice in Florida is that students with disabilities often don’t actually have many choices.

That’s because, while public school districts are required to serve all children, Florida allows private schools to refuse them.

Most people already know that Florida allows discrimination against LGBTQ students. Many faith-based schools refuse to admit gay students or even kids who have same-sex parents. And for the most part, the Republican leaders who’ve backed and expanded Florida’s universal-voucher system are fine with that particular brand of discrimination.

However, they’re less comfortable talking about the educational opportunities denied to kids with disabilities — schools that refuse to enroll or educate children with autism, cerebral palsy or who rely on wheelchairs.

The Orlando Sentinel has documented all this for years, even finding written policies at some schools that spell it all out. One school said it would only enroll students who are “ambulatory” and have “no emotional disorders or limited intellectual functions (such as Autism, Asperger’s, Down’s syndrome, etc.).”

Well, now the rest of America is learning about it, too.

The national nonprofit news site ProPublica recently published an exposé on the rejection students with disabilities face from publicly funded voucher schools, using Florida as a focal point.

The piece was entitled: “Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality.”

The story started with a Pensacola mom who said she was thrilled to hear state leaders claim that their expanded voucher program would be a godsend for families with disabilities … until she learned that wasn’t the case for her family.

Most of the schools Angela Johnson checked out refused to admit her daughter, who was born with a rare genetic anomaly and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube.

“Then they all said no,” the piece reported. “Therein lies the catch in ‘school choice’ for children like Amelia. Unlike public schools, private ones generally aren’t required to educate students with disabilities. And they often don’t.”

The news organization said its research showed that more than half the voucher schools in Florida “do not serve students with any type of disability.”

You might be wondering: How is this legal? This country, after all, has the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Well, there’s a big catch. Churches and other faith-based groups are often exempt from having to follow the rules.

That wasn’t a big deal — at least as it pertains to schools and public funding — back when George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into law in 1990. Back then, most faith-based schools ran on private money.

But Florida helped pioneer the policy that now steers more than $5 billion to private schools, most of which are faith-based.

The result: We now have a taxpayer-funded network of schools that’s allowed to refuse to serve many taxpaying families.

And parents have no legal standing to complain — a point disability-rights attorney Kimberley Spire-Oh stressed to me the first time I wrote about this issue seven years ago. “Parents planning to use the voucher programs need to keep in mind that they are losing most of their legal protections and all of the civil rights protections,” she said.

In a somewhat twisted way, this discrimination isn’t all bad. If a school is incapable of properly educating a student with special needs, it shouldn’t try.

But I think that, if you want to run your school on public money, you should accept all of the public.

Many voucher schools that deny admission to students with disabilities do so for a simple reason: Money. It can be costly to properly educate students with special needs.

So they leave much of that costly, heavy lifting to the public schools — even as public schools are facing funding cuts and even school closures, ironically enough, because of the massive voucher expansion.

In a perfect world, the state would offer to properly and robustly fund special-needs education and offer specialized choices to boot.

Now, some traditional public and public charter schools do stellar jobs. UCP of Central Florida is a local one that comes to mind. Similarly, some private schools have delivered precisely the kind of specialized schooling and “choice” that parents of special-needs students craved.

Still, the harsh reality is that choice isn’t enjoyed by everyone. Discrimination is still allowed. And a handful of leaders have admitted it’s ugly.

While Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP leaders in the House and Senate have refused to answer questions in the past about all this, former Senate President Bill Galvano, also a Republican, once told the Sentinel: “I believe that any type of discrimination is not acceptable.” Galvano said he wanted to make changes. But that was seven years ago. And the discrimination is still allowed.

Some schools have gotten better about hiding it. A number of schools’ written discrimination policies highlighted years ago by the Sentinel have since been scrubbed from their websites.

Other schools, like Trinity Christian Academy — which had the policy that said students must be “ambulatory” — said they subsequently changed their policies or never actually enforced them that way.

But the discrimination is still allowed. And thanks to other states following Florida’s lead, it’s spreading.

Georgia mother Diavonni Jordan told ProPublica that she was devastated to hear that the voucher schools near her wouldn’t accept her son, Jamir, who has ADHD. One school told her: “Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family.”

“Jordan wondered what child constituted a ‘good fit’ for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son,” ProPublica wrote. “Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future. But for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.”

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