What You Need to Know About South Carolina's Neo-Voucher Bill

This piece is available in full for free from the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning.

For more information on school vouchers, or to take action, please see this information packet from a coalition of South Carolina pro-public education groups, this piece from SC-ACLU, or this piece from the South Carolina Education Association (SCEA). You can also use this form to help you contact legislators.

“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

South Carolina’s public school system’s real issues are many, undeniable, and well-documented.

The state is, perhaps not coincidentally, coming off a multi-year streak of record-breaking numbers of teachers leaving the profession, and of unfilled educator vacancies (a streak that may have only been “broken” in the sense that the state’s districts have been eliminating positions). Teacher vacancies today still outstrip pre-pandemic highs, while the average class size likely increased this year due to districts eliminating and consolidating teaching positions.

State officials have responded to divisive culture wars over academic content by deliberately inflaming them. Legislature passing a proviso several years in a row during the budget process (after failing to pass a clean bill doing the same during session) banning “tenets” which have been inaccurately tied to “Critical Race Theory,” a State Board regulation that requires the Board to consider parental challenges to books, but which doesn’t require anyone to actually read the books to find out if the challenges are merited.

In a recent state Education Committee hearing on a bill designed to use state Education Lottery to pay for private school tuition, Senate Education Chair Greg Hembree bemoaned the “worn-out narrative that we underfund public schools” i But according to the National Center for Education Statistics, South Carolina ranks roughly 35th in the country in per-pupil funding (behind Louisiana and Kentucky, which rank better in cost of living than South Carolina). Eleven years ago, the state Supreme Court ordered the General Assembly to better fund its public schools; that never happened, and in 2017 the court vacated that order, basing its ruling on an opinion by Justice Kittredge, who was one of the votes supporting South Carolina’s previous school voucher bill, which was nonetheless ruled unconstitutional.

Bill sponsor Senator Greg Hembree and bill author Donna Barton discuss S. 62 during the January 8, 2025 meeting of the Senate Education Committee (screenshot from the official live feed).

Priority: Neo-Vouchers

And yet despite these many longstanding problems facing South Carolina students, families, and educators, the Senate and House have both signaled that their number-one priority is responding to last year’s clear decision from the Supreme Court (once again) that vouchers violate the state’s constitution, with yet another attempt at finding a loophole in the clear intent of that document.

For the past several years, South Carolina, like other states, has crafted a variety of schemes to bypass both the unconstitutionality of traditional vouchers and the widespread unpopularity of vouchers with the general public (across party lines). (Here, “crafted” generally means that they have copied and pasted model legislation from organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-corporate “bill mill” responsible for controversial legislation like “Stand Your Ground” laws, and a major backer of private prisons and lax corporate oversight.)

These “neo-voucher” laws are designed to use state funds to fund private schools-- the thing the South Carolina constitution explicitly forbids-- in a way which might get past the courts on a technicality. For example, Governor Henry McMaster’s SAFE Grants attempted to use federal Covid relief money to create “scholarships” for private schools. In Adams v McMaster, the state Supreme Court wasn’t buying it; because the federal funds went into the state’s coffers, the Court said, they were state public funds, and calling the vouchers “scholarships” didn’t mean they weren’t direct aid to private schools.