South Carolina’s school choice program gave ineligible students $1.5 million. That’s bad, right? | Opinion
The South Carolina Supreme Court has twice voided a school choice program that lawmakers created to send public dollars toward private education, citing a clear ban on “direct” aid to private K-12 schools in the state Constitution in rulings in 2020 and 2024. Legislators have been working for weeks to change the law and revive the program. But it now seems clear they are not just being blasé about legal hurdles, they are being glib about problems with the approach.
New reporting last week revealed several issues with the program back before the latest state Supreme Court ruling left it in legal limbo last year, from abysmal oversight and ambiguous rules to awful communication with families looking to educate their children outside public schools.
Yet rather than taking time and care to ensure public dollars are properly spent, lawmakers are just grabbing a defibrillator. It’s as if they don’t care about safeguarding the money we are giving them when dollars don’t stretch as far as they did before inflation and tariffs sent costs soaring.
On Monday, the South Carolina Daily Gazette broke the news that up to 1,000 ineligible students had to be removed from the program last year, including one attending an out-of-state school and another eyeing the K-12 aid for college. The site reported that between 868 and 1,000 students had $1,500 deposited in bank accounts but then never left their original school district. In short, that means the state gave around $1.5 million to students who didn’t qualify.
Subsequent news reports in The State and The Post and Courier offered a bit more detail on the fiasco — but not nearly enough because the state Department of Education has decided to keep the public and, apparently, state lawmakers in the dark until an end-of-school-year report, which conveniently wouldn’t be released until after the General Assembly’s legislative session ends.
If I were a lawmaker, I’d be outraged. I’d demand audits and hearings and beseech department officials to come clean about their lapses, explain how they happened and offer assurances they wouldn’t be repeated. Then, I’d do my job and prove to the public that I would in fact safeguard both public money and public trust if this program were to be restored.
For now, questions abound about the program to offer state scholarships for private schooling.
How many students got aid? What did they spend it on? How is the state ensuring that rules, such as ones barring public money from being used on homeschooling, are followed? How much of the aid to ineligible families has been or will be recovered? Is that effort underway?
The department has declined to answer all of these questions in one media outlet or another. That’s shameful. All those questions are ones good stewards of public funds should be asking.
The state distributed the first of what it planned would be four quarterly $1,500 payments — $6,000 per individual student — to parental bank accounts in July upon assurances the students would be leaving their school district of residence. The state didn’t attempt to verify their eligibility for months, and then only after the first payment. It’s unclear if anyone in the second round of payments was ineligible. An oversight committee’s report that brought the mismanagement to light noted that data is unavailable.
When last year’s state Supreme Court ruling suddenly curtailed the state-sponsored scholarship program, donors stepped in to assist families left in the lurch after the start of the school year through no fault of their own. It’s understandable why politicians would want to help them, but it’s incomprehensible that they would do so when so much money was mismanaged so much.
As of mid-January, only $3.1 million of $6.6 million in distributed state aid had been spent: $1.5 million was used for computers and other technological devices, nearly $1 million was paid directly to schools, $230,000 was spent on tutors and $138,000 went to instructional materials.
Does that much money subsidizing laptops for a relative few South Carolina families sound like a great use of government money? That’s another question lawmakers should be asking now.
There are so many fundamental questions about the program that it’s absolutely mind-boggling that the Senate didn’t hold a single public hearing before passing a bill to let lottery revenue be used for new educational savings accounts in hopes that the court would find that constitutional.
It’s nearly as mind-boggling that a House committee would limit public speaking and that some members would be hostile to public speakers before voting to empower a trustee with doling out the new scholarships, in hopes that change would satisfy the state Supreme Court following any inevitable challenge. The Senate will evaluate the competing versions, and then it’s likely that a panel of Senate and House members would seek a consensus and send a plan to the governor.
Beyond that, things are unclear. The court could rule that any approach is unconstitutional.
Some of the state’s politicians think their peers are wasting everyone’s time because the only definite way to clear the constitutional hurdle would be to change the constitution to allow the public dollars to be used for the “direct benefit” of private schools, as is currently prohibited.
Short of that, it may start to feel like Groundhog Day at the South Carolina Statehouse.
“The only way to stop this issue from continuing to come up is to give the power back to the people, allow them to decide, and for them to decide whether or not we should vote for this,” Rep. David Martin, R-York, said in opposition to the House bill before its passage last month.
He said the General Assembly has asked the public to amend the constitution more than 100 times, including twice in 2022. Asking it anew would eliminate guesswork and uncertainty on this issue. The public may reject it, but then lawmakers would know what the public really wants.
Even if lawmakers choose not to put a constitutional amendment before voters at the next election, they should immediately begin asking tougher questions and demanding basic answers about a program that taxpayers just learned is more troubled than previously known.
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "South Carolina’s school choice program gave ineligible students $1.5 million. That’s bad, right? | Opinion."