School vouchers could be coming to SC, but off-session talks will determine details
South Carolina lawmakers will meet over the coming months in hopes of finding a compromise on competing school voucher bills after the Senate Thursday rejected changes the House made to its legislation.
Both bills are intended to provide opportunities for children whose needs are not being met by public schools, but whose parents cannot afford private education options.
The majority of state lawmakers support using public money to fund scholarships that low-income students can use to pay for school-related expenses at private schools, but the chambers disagree on precisely how to do that.
The House Tuesday passed its version of the voucher plan and sent it back to the Senate, giving the upper chamber the option to accept the House plan or reject it and send the bill to conference.
Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree, R-Horry, asked Senators Thursday to reject the House bill so the chambers could meet and try to hash out their differences.
“The House has taken an entirely different approach,” said Hembree, whose call to reject the House’s changes was heeded by senators in a 39-4 vote.
Lawmakers aren’t expected to set conference dates to discuss the voucher bills for at least a couple weeks.
Each chamber has, however, selected three members to work out the differences in a conference committee.
The House will send Reps. Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, Bill Whitmire, R-Oconee, and Jackie “Coach” Hayes, D-Dillon, while the Senate has tapped Hembree, Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, and Darrell Jackson, D-Richland.
Different approaches to school vouchers
The Senate favors creating a permanent program whereby a limited number of students who are Medicaid-eligible or have an individualized education program would be eligible for annual $6,000 scholarships to pay for a variety of educational expenses.
Under the Senate plan, money earmarked for K-12 public schools would be transferred to education scholarship accounts that parents can access to pay for private educational costs.
The House prefers a three-year pilot program that would take $75 million from the state’s contingency reserve fund to provide $5,000 annual scholarships to 5,000 low-income elementary-age students each year.
In addition to low-income students, the House pilot sets aside up to 500 vouchers each for children of active duty military members and children entering kindergarten who had been enrolled in the South Carolina Early Reading Development and Education program in the previous school year.
Hembree said Thursday that he opposes the House plan because it’s a pilot rather than a permanent program; it assigns management of the program to the Education Oversight Committee rather than the state Department of Education; and it transfers education scholarship money directly to private schools rather than a trust fund set up for families.
The Senate version, Hembree said, is more likely to pass legal muster because it does not send public money directly to private schools.
In 2020, the state Supreme Court knocked down Gov. Henry McMaster’s attempt to use $32 million in federal COVID-109 relief funds on tuition grants for K-12 private school students.
“We spent a lot of time in subcommittee and full committee working on that specific issue,” Hembree said. “The key to it is if the money doesn’t flow directly to the private school, if there’s another place where you park it, hold it for the benefit of the student, we believe, legal counsel believes that that is a system that will sustain a constitutional challenge.”
House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, said earlier this year he didn’t think the state Supreme Court’s ruling was binding on a future school voucher program and believed the House bill would survive a legal challenge.
“I think there are differences here that allow this to go forward,” he said in February, adding that he’s confident the bill will be declared constitutional.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 3:20 PM.