A third of SC private schools that got vouchers in 2024 have anti-LGBTQ rules
At dozens of South Carolina private schools that accepted public voucher money last year, LGBTQ students and staff need not apply.
More than a third of the private schools that benefited from South Carolina’s education scholarship trust fund program last year espouse anti-LGBTQ beliefs or are affiliated with a church or association that does, an analysis by The State Media Co. found.
The schools, nearly all of them Christian, make no secret of their deeply-held convictions about sexuality and marriage. Most post their anti-LGBTQ admissions and disciplinary policies on their websites.
Calvary Christian School in Myrtle Beach, for example, considers homosexuality a “perversion of biblical sexual purity” and “does not hire nor retain faculty or staff, nor enroll or retain students who profess or practice a homosexual or transgender lifestyle,” according to the school’s handbook.
At Anderson Christian School, “acts of homosexuality” and “acts of non-heterosexual orientation” are treated as severe disciplinary infractions, akin to being arrested for a crime. Students found in violation are placed on distance learning for the remainder of the year and prohibited from attending any school-sponsored activities, the school’s handbook states.
Both Calvary and Anderson Christian, which received a combined $21,000 in taxpayer-funded voucher payments last year, are within their legal right to punish or refuse LGBTQ students.
No federal or state law protects such students from discrimination in South Carolina private schools, and state lawmakers have rejected requests to include protections for LGBTQ students in school voucher bills.
Nonetheless, critics of South Carolina’s school voucher law point to the state’s funding of schools with discriminatory policies as a major civil rights concern.
“It all comes back to public funding,” said Paul Bowers, a spokesman for the ACLU of South Carolina. “Should we be publicly funding institutions that discriminate? We say no.”
Passed in April 2023 and first implemented last school year, South Carolina’s education scholarship trust fund, or ESTF program, used tax dollars to provide $6,000 education subsidies to low- and moderate-income families that pulled their children out of local public schools and sent them to private schools or public schools outside their zoned districts.
The S.C. Supreme Court ultimately struck down the portion of the law that permitted parents to use ESTF dollars for private school tuition, but not before participants spent nearly $1 million combined at more than 100 private schools.
This year, after lawmakers expanded the ESTF law and revamped its funding mechanism to better withstand a legal challenge, private schools are in line for an even greater windfall. Whereas most enrolled only a handful of scholarship recipients last year, some private schools now have more than 100 ESTF students on the books.
While legal debates about private school vouchers often focus on the constitutionality of sending public dollars to private schools, Patrick Kelly, a public school teacher who lobbies for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, argues that South Carolina’s law suffers from an additional constitutional flaw.
By publicly bankrolling a system in which private schools can discriminate against certain students, the state’s voucher law runs afoul of the General Assembly’s mandate to support a “system of free public schools open to all children,” Kelly said.
“If all taxpayers are funding this educational system, then the children of all taxpayers should be able to benefit by selecting their school setting,” he said.
The Rev. James Wooten, pastor at Westgate Baptist Church in Spartanburg, doesn’t see it that way.
Wooten, who believes his taxpayer dollars have long been used to prop up an ideological public education system that he and many other Christians don’t support, views state-funded education scholarships as a more equitable option for all South Carolinians.
“I see (education scholarships) as a more consistent choice, because I can use those revenues to fund the education of my child to attend a school more consistent with my own views,” said Wooten, who serves as president of Westgate Christian School, the largest private school recipient of voucher dollars in South Carolina last year.
S.C. Rep. Shannon Erickson, a strong proponent of school vouchers, said it’s that sort of “choice” that’s at the heart of the state’s education scholarship law.
While South Carolina doesn’t preclude schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students from participating, the state also doesn’t require parents who oppose such policies to enroll their children at those schools, explained Erickson, a Beaufort Republican who chairs the House Education and Public Works Committee.
“I want parents to embrace choice that’s good for their children,” she said. “My hope is that we have so many choices and so many options that there will be the right school for every child.”
Religious schools were primary recipients of scholarships
Christian schools accounted for more than eight in 10 of the private schools that received public scholarship money before the state Supreme Court curtailed South Carolina’s K-12 school voucher program in September 2024, according to data obtained from the S.C. Department of Education.
Most of the rest were nonsectarian (16%), three were Islamic (2%) and two were online academies that offer optional Christian courses (1%). Eight public school districts also received voucher payments, data shows.
The private schools that got taxpayer-funded scholarship money span the Palmetto State, from Gowensville Christian in Landrum to Sea Pines Montessori Academy in Hilton Head, covering 34 counties across urban, suburban and rural areas. They run the gamut from kindergartens to high schools, and range in size from greater than 1,000 students to fewer than 10, with a median enrollment of 187, according to the website Private School Review.
In total, 149 private schools received a combined $956,000 last year before the state Supreme Court ruled taxpayer dollars could not legally fund private school tuition. At least 22 private schools received education scholarship dollars after the Sept. 11, 2024, ruling, primarily for tutoring, records show.
Fifty-one of the schools make clear on their websites or in school forms and documents that they disapprove of LGBTQ students and employees.
Eighteen are explicit on their websites that LGBTQ students and employees are not welcome; 29 say that homsexuality or the rejection of one’s biological sex is sinful, but do not explain how those views factor into admissions and hiring decisions; and four say they do not recognize transgender students.
The vast majority of schools with anti-LGBTQ views profess fundamentalist Christian beliefs, characterized by an embrace of biblical literalism, the integration of religion into all classroom subjects and the strict adherence to traditional views about marriage and sexuality, The State’s review found.
Many of them include “statements of faith” on their websites and require prospective employees and families to sign pledges acknowledging that they agree with and will abide by them.
The State’s findings were gleaned from nearly 1,000 ESTF transactions at private schools between July 30, 2024, and Jan. 17, 2025, as well as a review of the websites and social media pages of all private schools that received scholarship dollars. The findings offer the first detailed picture of where voucher participants spent their $6,000 scholarships and which private schools received the greatest benefits.
They come as the S.C. Department of Education last month released the first of four $1,875 deposits to this year’s 10,000 education scholarship trust fund recipients.
A long-expected legal challenge to the state’s revamped voucher law has yet to materialize.
The president of the South Carolina Education Association, a public teachers advocacy group that sued to overturn the state’s original voucher law, said the organization was still exploring whether to challenge the new legislation.
“I do anticipate a final decision over the next couple months,” education association President Dena Crews said in a recent interview. “By the fall, we should be able to fully make a decision.”
The association was among a coalition of parents, teachers and education advocates that in October 2023 sued the S.C. Department of Education to overturn the state’s old voucher law.
In a 3-2 decision handed down last September, the S.C. Supreme Court ruled that taxpayer-funded private school tuition payments were unconstitutional, but left the remainder of the law intact.
The high court’s ruling, which came roughly six weeks after the inaugural class of ESTF recipients received their first $1,500 scholarship payments, sent private schools and state education officials scrambling to help participating families pay tuition for the remainder of the year.
The pro-voucher Palmetto Promise Institute, a conservative think tank founded by State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver and former U.S. Sen. Jim Demint, R-SC, raised at least $2.5 million from private donors in support of the cause.
What SC schools got the most voucher money?
For the most part, education scholarship recipients didn’t use their vouchers at elite preparatory schools — although Hammond School and Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in Columbia, and Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville each took at least one student.
Instead, it was the small Catholic and non-denominational Christian schools that brought in the most education scholarship dollars, data shows.
According to ESTF transaction data obtained by The State, scholarship students spent more at Catholic schools — $232,000 during the program’s first five months — than schools associated with any single Protestant denomination.
Four Catholic grade schools, all with fewer than 200 students, ranked among the top private school beneficiaries in the state, data shows.
Divine Redeemer in Hanahan ($29,920), Our Lady of Peace in North Augusta ($28,500), St. Joseph in Anderson ($27,000) and St. Martin de Porres in Columbia ($21,000) were among only eight private schools in the state that received at least $20,000 in scholarship funds, according to ESTF data.
By far the largest single private school recipient in the state, however, was Westgate Christian School.
Westgate Christian, the Spartanburg-based ministry of Westgate Baptist Church, took in $63,270 last year, or nearly 70% more than any other private school in the state, according to S.C. Department of Education data.
The PreK-12 school, whose website has an ESTF information page that encourages all eligible students to apply, has seen its enrollment surge roughly 30% since the program’s inception, from 260 to about 340.
“I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively due to ESTF, but I’d say it’s been a significant contributor,” said Wooten, Westgate Baptist’s pastor.
Wooten, an ardent parental choice supporter, attributed the school’s communication with potential applicants for its high rate of uptake.
“We were aware of it early in the process, so it was just a matter of letting people know that this was an option for them,” he said.
Locally, the three largest private school recipients of scholarship dollars were St. Martin de Porres, a PreK-6 Catholic school located in the Historic Waverly Neighborhood; Cardinal Newman School, a Catholic middle and high school located in northeast Columbia; and the Center for Learning, a nonsectarian K-5 academy in the Rochelle Heights/Victory Garden neighborhood, west of Forest Acres, according to S.C. Department of Education data.
Few public school districts got voucher money
Only a fraction of 1% of education scholarship dollars, or about $26,000, went to public schools last year, according to S.C. Department of Education data.
Florence School District 5, a three-school district in Johnsonville with just over 1,200 students, brought in nearly 40% of that money.
The low uptake among public school districts is likely due to the fact that public school students were only eligible for scholarships if they enrolled in a district they weren’t zoned for.
The 11 out-of-district students who attended Florence 5 last year on state-funded education scholarships came from Williamsburg, Marion and parts of Florence County that were not zoned for the district, data shows.
Nine of the 11 already attended Florence 5, which currently enrolls between 75 and 100 out-of-district students, Superintendent Brian Goins said.
The education scholarships afforded the students an opportunity to attend a Florence 5 school free of charge — out-of-district tuition costs $2,000 — with money left over for transportation, technology and school supplies.
Goins said the district didn’t go out of its way to market the education scholarships to prospective students, but did share information about them with current tuition-paying students.
“We’ve given them directions to the website and if people have questions we try to answer them as best we can,” he said. “But as far as doing a lot of advertising, we’ve just kind of let the program run its own course.”
This year, with intradistrict transfer students eligible for education scholarships, the amount of money going to public school districts could grow substantially.
That additional flexibility could, however, end up being overshadowed by lawmakers’ removal of the requirement that scholarship recipients previously attended public schools.
Now that existing private school students who meet the income requirements can also apply for education scholarships, schools with less affluent student bodies are likely to enroll an increasing number of voucher students.
Sumter Christian School, for example, has 122 ESTF students this year — about half of its student body — after enrolling only seven last year, pastor and school administrator Ron Davis said.
Legacy Christian, a PreK-12 school in Jasper County, has seen a similarly large spike in ESTF recipients.
After enrolling only eight such students last year, Principal Billie Kay Smith said that 79 of Legacy’s 175 students qualified for state-funded scholarships this year.
Smith said the assistance would give some breathing room to parents who have had to scrimp and save to send their children to private school, calling it a “huge blessing” for Legacy families.
“A lot of our students’ grandparents have to sponsor their tuition or their parents have to work multiple jobs to afford it,” she said. “That it is paid for means more time with their kids, families can be together, it helps pay for school supplies.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "A third of SC private schools that got vouchers in 2024 have anti-LGBTQ rules."