SC Senate Committee’s #1 Priority: Vouchers

They aren’t letting the recent state Supreme Court decision stop them

You’re basically taking it out of that pocket and putting it in this pocket.

-Senate Education Chair Greg Hembree

No money shall be paid from public funds nor shall the credit of the State or any of its political subdivisions be used for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.

-South Carolina State Constitution

Vouchers are a top priority for the education subcommittee.

A subcommittee of the South Carolina Senate Education committee met this morning for its last time this year, to discuss what is apparently its main priority for the new session: passing another school voucher bill.

Tellingly, while two senators who sit on the subcommittee (Senators Brad Hutto and Ross Turner) were absent due to other Senate obligations, Representative Shannon Erickson (a longtime voucher supporter) had made it over from the House to attend, as had Oran Smith (who recently overcame objections about his history editing a neo-Confederate magazine to be appointed to the Commission on Higher Education) and Wendy Damron, president of Palmetto Promise Institute (a position formerly held by Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver).

Oran Smith (middle) and Shannon Erickson chat before the subcommittee hearing.

The meeting centered around a summary of a bill which will be pre-filed tomorrow, according to Senate Education Chair Greg Hembree. He also said the subcommittee’s first meeting of 2025 will center on debate around this legislation, suggesting that school vouchers are, for whatever reason, a major priority in the legislature.

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What will the pre-filed bill actually do?

Most of the short meeting was devoted to a presentation by Donna Barton.

Barton started by referencing the elephant in the room: the recent Supreme Court decision which predictably found the parts last “Education Scholarship Trust Fund” bill that directed public money to private schools unconstitutional. Barton repeatedly indicated that the new bill to be pre-filed, the “K-12 Education Lottery Scholarship,” was drafted in light of that court decision.

While the new bill isn’t yet available to the public, Barton said it will expand eligibility requirements to families making 600% of the federal poverty income level (up from 400% of the federal poverty level), and will remove all other eligibility criteria except a state residency requirement. (According to an expert present at the meeting, 600% of the federal poverty level is $ 187,200 for a family of 4 in 2024.)

The bill will also expand the list of eligible expenses to cover uniforms and transportation, and will implement a “rolling” application approach instead of requiring families to apply during specific windows (a requirement of the old bill which was presumably included to avoid the chaos of schools making funding decisions based on constantly-changing enrollment throughout the year).

A shift to using Education Lottery Funds to pay for vouchers.

But the most significant change would be the pre-filed bill’s new source of funding: South Carolina Education Lottery funds. The South Carolina Education Lottery raises money through ticket sales to benefit public K-12 public schools, to provide scholarships for higher education, and to repair state school buses, among other education-related expenditures.

Hembree and Barton indicated that the Lottery funds would not be used at the expense of existing programs funded by the lottery, because these other programs would be moved over to general appropriations (thereby possibly creating a loophole because the Lottery funds are described as being separate from general funds). But they didn’t explain how they could promise that future legislative sessions would continue to appropriate that funding. (In effect, they can’t promise that, because current legislators can’t constrain future legislative sessions when it comes to the budget.)

The bill would also change the amount families receive for private educational services from around $6,000 to around $8,000. The Department of Education would also be required create a “model inter-district policy” (essentially adding an open enrollment clause that allows students to use vouchers for schools outside of their home districts).

Would this new bill be constitutional?

That still seems doubtful, based on Barton’s description.

Barton pointed out that the last Education Savings Trust Fund bill used the language of the state Supreme Court decision in Adams v McMaster, the case that determined a COVID-era scheme by the governor to use federal CARES Act funding for private school tuition was unconstitutional (Weaver’s Palmetto Promise Institute, which was to be somehow involved in administering the funds, was also named in that suit). That bill passed, and was then, itself, deemed unconstitutional.

Barton herself, in a possibly unplanned moment, suggested the court may have “pierced the veil” of the bill (illuminating the true mechanisms hidden behind claims that it didn’t violate the constitution). And she acknowledged that whatever they did, it was always possible that a future Court would strike the bill down.

How much would this cost?

Hembree and Barton suggested the cost would be lower than experience in other experience suggests it would be. While the pre-filed bill, like the unconstitutional previous version, still caps participation (first at 10,000 students, then at 15,000), neither addressed the fact that before the last bill could even take effect, a “universal” voucher bill passed the House.

And in states like Arizona and North Carolina, these universal bills have had catastrophic impacts on state budgets. As I wrote then,

As The State Gazette pointed out when the bill passed the House, “Do the math, and the cost [in South Carolina] could top $1.4 billion annually” (incidentally, the same price tag already seen in Arizona). To put it in context, that’s more than a fifth of the total SC Department of Education budget this year.

Members of the subcommittee mainly relied on highly hypothetical numbers. For example, Barton said prior to Court’s rejection of portions of the previous billion, there were 2,633 students enrolled in the ESTF program. Multiple members of the committee drew on this relatively low number to make projections about what the new bill might cost, but it’s doubtful that first-year participation in any program— particularly one the public knows may be struck down as unconstitutional— is a good indicator of how many families would seek the vouchers long-term.

A member of the subcommittee also guessed that money implicated by the current number of allowed eligible students is “about $20 million” (based on about $8,000 per student, and the 2,633 students Barton had mentioned). Barton then said the program had cost closer to $2 million in its abortive first year, because families may not have used the entire $6,000, before acknowledging that the General Assembly actually appropriated about $30 million to pay for the bill.

And Barton acknowledged that the Department believed the new rolling enrollment period would help increase participation numbers (since families could presumably apply throughout the calendar year, instead of being restricted to before school starts).

Hembree even used the 2,633 number to argue that people who see vouchers as an “existential threat” to public schools are ignoring the fact that the number of vouchers is a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of students in public schools. But, again, this argument is based on two major assumptions: that 2,633 vouchers is a representative number, and that future legislation won’t lift the cap on families altogether (as the primary models cited by South Carolina voucher proponents, Florida and Arizona, have already done, and as the SC House voted to do just a few months ago).

Hembree also made a somewhat confusing claim that by incentivizing families to move students from public schools to private schools, they would somehow be saving money for public schools, saying, “You’re basically taking it out of this pocket and putting in this pocket”. He said children leaving are a “net gain” for the public school because it could still keep its local funds (an argument which relies on another assumption: that a scale of a school’s programs— class size, facilities, number of staff members— isn’t impacted by a loss of state funding).

It’s unlikely that there is any research to support Hembree’s claim, and even if school districts don’t directly pay costs associated with vouchers (and even if declining enrollment somehow doesn’t result in a net loss of funding), in real life if you take money out of “this pocket” and put it into “that pocket,” it’s gone. Unless the General Assembly plans to raise taxes or cut other programs, it’s hard to see how taking funding from the Lottery— which is supposed to go to public schools— and taking other funding from the general fund— part of which is supposed to go to public schools— won’t result in a loss to public schools.

Voucher programs in other states have, again and again, hurt state funding, created mixed-to-negative impacts on student achievement, and undermined the mission and function of public schools.

Why now?
Hembree said the “urgency” in pre-filing and presumably fast-tracking the bill comes from the fact that students whose families received the funds were “caught in the middle” because of the Court’s decision. Of course, that Court decision was arguably completely predictable in light of the previous Adams v McMaster decision, and because the state’s constitution is incredibly clear on prohibiting public funds being used for the direct benefit of private schools.

One member of the subcommittee also said he had received a “handful of letters” from parents whose students were going to use the money, and now couldn’t.

But the subcommittee members never made it clear why the legislature ever believed it could promise money to families when the state constitution so explicitly and clearly prohibited it.