Special education tutoring for Savannah and coastal Georgia families

Promise students on the coast, 2026-27

No official county or district count of Georgia Promise students has been published. The only county figures we have found come from a news report. On September 30, 2026, The Current GA reported the figures below; the article credits the county figures to the Georgia Education Savings Authority (GESA):

• about 13,500 students statewide started the 2026-27 school year with the scholarship, up from about 8,700 the year before;
• about 800 of them came from Chatham County and about 200 from Liberty County;
• fewer than two dozen each came from Bryan, Glynn and McIntosh counties.

Treat these as reported estimates, not official figures. GESA’s annual report to the General Assembly, which must include the numbers and demographics of participating students, is due by December 1 each year and covers the previous school year.

Listed schools by district

Each of the four counties is served by one countywide school district (federal NCES files call Savannah-Chatham the “Chatham County School District”). Fort Stewart’s on-post schools are separate federal schools, covered below.

Listed schools: our count of GOSA’s 2026-27 list and the February 14, 2025 list. Special education: GOSA’s fall 2024-25 K-12 counts (full-time-equivalent), with each district’s share of K-12 enrollment in brackets; they show public-school services, not unmet need or Promise eligibility. Communities from Census Bureau place estimates.

Elsewhere on the coast, McIntosh County’s district has 3 listed schools and Glynn County’s has 1, both new this year, while Camden County’s has none on either list. Your home must be in the attendance zone of at least one listed school; attending one isn’t enough. Our address check explains the steps, and a student who was already accepted stays eligible even if the zoned school later drops off the list.

Growing counties around Savannah

Children aged 5 to 17 changed very differently across the four counties between April 2020 and July 2025 (Census Bureau estimates): Chatham −3.1%, Bryan +8.9%, Effingham +10.6% and Liberty +11.9%. Among Georgia counties with more than 50,000 residents, only Jackson County’s school-age population grew faster than Liberty’s. Growth doesn’t change the Promise list, which is based on school scores: Effingham is growing and has no listed school, while Liberty is growing and has nine.

Military families: Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield

• On-post schools are federal. Federal NCES boundary files list a Fort Stewart School District covering about 36% of Liberty County’s land. These Department of Defense Education Activity schools are not in GOSA’s data and are not on the Promise list. Whether an on-post address is zoned to any public school is a question for the School Liaison Office.
• School Liaison: the Army’s Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield MWR site lists School Support Services, including “Special Education Supports” and “Homeschool Connections,” and the Exceptional Family Member Program.
• Promise rules: Odyssey’s eligibility guidance exempts students in active-duty military families from the two-semester public-school rule and the one-year Georgia residency rule. It doesn’t name an exemption from the attendance-zone rule.
• Free online tutoring: Tutor.com for U.S. Military Families, funded by the Department of Defense, is free for eligible military families.

Local options to know about

Checked October 2, 2026. These are separate organizations, not partners of ours, and we don’t know their current openings.

• Georgia Southern RiteCare Center for Communication Disorders (Armstrong Campus, Savannah): a university clinic whose listed services include language and literacy delays or disorders. Its page listed evaluations at $20 to $60 when we checked in October 2026. It is a speech-language clinic, not a tutoring program.
• Live Oak Public Libraries: free online homework help through Tutor.com.
• The Royce School (Savannah): a private school that describes itself as “Savannah’s only K-12 school dedicated exclusively to neurodiverse learners,” with Orton-Gillingham literacy instruction. It appears on the Georgia Department of Education’s 2026-27 list of private schools participating in the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship. It is a school, not a tutoring service.
• Regional help: in the Georgia Department of Education’s last published directory of its regional Georgia Learning Resources System programs (2021, now archived), Bryan, Chatham, Effingham, Glynn, Liberty, Long and McIntosh were served by Coastal Area GLRS, now presented on First District RESA’s GLRS page.

How we differ: our tutoring is private, online and one-to-one with a teacher certified in special education, and it covers reading, math, writing and executive-function skills.

Online sessions from a coastal Georgia home

Your child joins a live video session from home and works one-to-one with the teacher. Share any IEP or 504 academic goals you want us to focus on, and the teacher plans around them. Broadband ranges from 87.3% of households in the Effingham County school district area to 93.0% in the Liberty County school district area (American Community Survey 2020–2024), so if your connection is patchy, tell us in the consultation.

We tutor reading and dyslexia, math, ADHD and executive function and academic skills for autistic learners. We provide academic tutoring only, not therapy, speech services, evaluations or diagnosis. Your school district handles evaluations and IEPs; the Georgia Department of Education’s parent mentor list by county and school system, Parent to Parent of Georgia and our Georgia IEP help page can help. We confirm a teacher and times with you rather than promising a slot up front.

Paying with Georgia Promise

Special Ed Resource is an approved provider in the Georgia Promise Scholarship Odyssey Marketplace. Families apply through mygeorgiapromise.org and spend Promise funds only in the Odyssey Marketplace; the program’s guidance says not to pay invoices out of pocket for anything you plan to buy with Promise funds. We are not GESA, Odyssey or the State of Georgia.

Promise-funded tutoring must be in a core subject and, in the program regulations’ words, “provided by an educator certified by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission,” and each Marketplace tutoring offering names its certified tutor; we explain which teacher would lead Promise-funded sessions in the consultation. For the 2026-27 school year the scholarship is up to $6,500, paid in four quarterly payments of $1,625, and GESA may withhold up to 5% for administration. Families approved in the August or November 2026 application window receive only the second half of the year’s payments. See paying for tutoring with Georgia Promise and Georgia Promise for homeschool families.

Court status: In August 2026, families filed a lawsuit in DeKalb County Superior Court (Sands v. Green) challenging the rule that students must first attend public school, according to the families’ lawyers and news reports. As of October 2, 2026, we have found no report of a ruling, and the program is operating for the 2026-27 school year. More on the court case.

Sources

• The Current GA: report on the Georgia Promise Scholarship’s second year (September 30, 2026), citing GESA
• GOSA: 2025 Georgia Promise Scholarship Public School List for the 2026-27 academic year
• GOSA: Georgia Promise Scholarship Public School List, February 14, 2025 (2025-26)
• GOSA: Enrollment by Subgroup Metrics, 2024-25 (special education K-12 counts)
• Odyssey: Who is eligible to apply for the Georgia Promise Scholarship? (updated April 30, 2026)
• U.S. Census Bureau: Vintage 2025 population estimates (county by age; incorporated places)
• National Center for Education Statistics: School District Geographic Relationship Files (GRF25)
• U.S. Census Bureau: American Community Survey 2020–2024 5-year estimates, table B28002

Local figures and links checked October 2, 2026.