General Assembly approve private school vouchers
The General Assembly approved millions in additional funding for private schools vouchers. File photo
Last week the North Carolina General Assembly passed a conference report, also referred to as a mini budget that includes $463 million to clear the waitlist of families that have applied for the Opportunity Scholarship Grant Program and provide voucher money for those attending private schools.
In addition to the millions for private school vouchers, the bill also includes $64 million for enrollment growth across the North Carolina Community College System and $95 million recurring funds for K-12 enrollment increases.
Last year, the General Assembly removed the income eligibility requirements, as well as the requirement that recipients must have previously attended public schools, for the Opportunity Scholarship Grant Program — a system that reimburses families with children attending private schools to help pay the cost of tuition and fees. (The vouchers cannot be used for homeschooling.) This led to some 70,000 new applications for private school vouchers for the current 2024-25 school year, a more than 100% increase over the 2023-24 school year.
The North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority was able to offer vouchers to 15,805 new students but still had about 55,000 on the waitlist. The bill passed last week provides enough funding to clear that waitlist at the cost of $463 million. It also increases the amount of funding the program will have in the future.
The amount will increase each year from $625 million for the upcoming 2025-26 school year to $825 million for the 2032-33 school year. It will continue to be funded at that $825 million annual level thereafter.
The max scholarship award from the grant program is $7,468 for Tier 1 families, which occupy the lowest income bracket. This is 100% of the average per pupil allocation for state funds to public schools. However, not all private schools accept Opportunity Scholarship funds.
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In a press release before the bill’s passage, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said that the voucher system “disproportionately impacts rural North Carolina counties where access to private education is limited and public schools serve as the backbone of communities.”
According to data from the North Carolina Department of Administration, as of the 2024-25 school year, there are 881 private schools in the state that enroll a total of about 130,000 students. Of those, 308 are independent schools and 573 are religious schools.
Mecklenburg county alone is home to 96 private schools and the triangle — Wake, Durham and Orange counties — are home to another 139. Of those, 66 private schools in Mecklenburg County and 108 schools in the triangle counties accept opportunity scholarships.
In Western North Carolina, Haywood County is home to five private schools that enroll 240 students, Jackson County has two private schools that enroll 186 students, Macon has two private schools that enroll 85 students and Swain County has two private schools that enroll 69 students.
So, while in Mecklenburg County private school students make up about 13% of the combined public/private K-12 population, in Haywood County that percentage is 3.5%, in Jackson it is 5%, in Swain it is 3.4% and in Macon it is just 1.87%.
These numbers do not account for students enrolled in Cherokee Central Schools on the Qualla Boundary.
This summer the Jackson County Board of Education signed a resolution in opposition to expanding funding for the Opportunity Scholarship Grant Program.
“We don’t believe that public school money should go to private sectors,” Jackson County Schools Superintendent Dana Ayers said at the time.
The resolution asked the General Assembly to prioritize public education by “substantially increasing teacher salaries to pay teachers as the professionals they are and to attract and retain qualified educators,” as well as “allocating significant funding for early childhood education, quality childcare and pre-K programs to ensure all children have access to a strong education foundation.”
“I 100% disagree with the General Assembly’s vote to provide that funding to the private school voucher program,” School Board Chairman Wes Jamison told The Smoky Mountain News. “If someone is financially capable of sending their child to a private school then the taxpayers of North Carolina shouldn’t have to help fund it. North Carolina ranks 48th in the Nation in per-student funding in public schools. This seems less about providing more options for school choice and more about starving public schools to the point where they are unable to perform.”
The bill passed the House on Wednesday, Sept. 11, with WNC Reps. Mike Clampitt (R-Swain) and Karl Gillespie (R-Macon) voting in favor. Pless was absent for the vote. Senator Kevin Corbin also voted in favor of the bill when it passed in the Senate.
Passage of the bill came just a week after the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management released an analysis that predicts expanding the Opportunity Scholarship and clearing the waitlist could decrease state funding for public schools.
The analysis estimates that under the new legislation, annual K-12 state spending would increase by a total of about $185 million. This represents a decrease of approximately $75 million to public schools and an increase to private schools of approximately $260 million.
According to the OSMB, Haywood, Macon and Jackson counties can each expect a decrease of about 0.2% to 0.3% in state public school funding annually.
