School voucher demand soared after SC expanded eligibility. Who’s really benefiting?
The percentage of South Carolina school voucher applicants who attended a public school last year has plummeted, as newly-eligible private school students flood the taxpayer-funded scholarship program.
Only 28% of this year’s applicants attended neighborhood public or charter schools last year, down from 80% in 2024, according to South Carolina Department of Education data. The majority of this year’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund applicants came from non-public schools (59%), while another 13% were entering kindergarten, data shows.
The explosion of private school applicants comes after lawmakers eliminated a provision that required participants to attend a South Carolina public school during the previous school year.
With virtually any income-qualified K-12 child who is enrolled outside their zoned public school now eligible for a $7,500 education scholarship, interest in the program has surged.
As of Monday, the S.C. Department of Education had received 21,059 applications and awarded 10,000 scholarships — the maximum currently allowed by law, Education Department spokesman Jason Raven said. More than 6,350 students — the majority of whom applied after the awards were announced — have been added to a waitlist. (Students who applied directly to the waitlist were not included in the demographic data provided by the department).
By comparison, the department awarded just 2,880 of 5,000 available taxpayer-funded scholarships last year, when only traditional public school students and incoming kindergartners were eligible. More than 1,000 of last year’s recipients ultimately withdrew or were removed from the program due to eligibility concerns, leaving just 1,693 returning participants this year.
For some lawmakers, the influx of private school applicants is an indication that the law is working as intended. Others, such as S.C. Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, see it as a sign that the neediest children are being squeezed from the program.
“The result of what we passed this last year is that it’s not so much helping children who’ve been stuck in underperforming public schools have other options,” said Massey, an Edgefield Republican and school voucher supporter. “What we’re seeing right now is that kids who were already in private schools are taking advantage of the scholarships.”
State Sen. Wes Climer, R-York, one of the loudest voices in favor of a universal voucher system, disagreed with Massey about the need for a means-tested program.
In Climer’s view, the state would be punishing private school families if it excluded them.
“School choice should be available to everyone, regardless of income, because giving every parent the same opportunity and the same resources to place their children in the school of their choice will yield better educational outcomes for everyone in South Carolina,” said Climer, who is running for Congress in the state’s Fifth Congressional District.
Private school students were prepared
Some lawmakers argue that because scholarships were limited and applications were processed on a first-come, first-served basis, highly-informed and engaged private school families had an advantage.
“(Private schools) were not only watching the process, they were advocating for the process and they were preparing their students for when the applications would be available,” state Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine, D-Richland, said.
Many private schools promoted the state’s voucher program on their social media channels and added information to their websites about eligibility and the application process.
Others identified existing students who would qualify for scholarships — families making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, or $96,450 for a family of four, were eligible this year — and encouraged them to apply.
Kim Stravolo, chief financial officer at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Greenville, said officials there alerted the entire student body about the program.
“We sent a schoolwide blurb out, and then we also were very intentional about reaching out to those families (most likely to qualify) to say this will be very impactful to you, you can almost send your student here for free if you apply for these funds,” she said.
St. Joseph’s, which had nearly 50 voucher students at the end of July, is already planning workshops to educate community members about the program ahead of next year, Stravolo said.
Public school families, Devine said, had no such guidance. They were largely on their own to track the bill’s progress and navigate the scholarship application process.
“I talked to several people who tried to apply and either were waitlisted or were told the funds had been expended,” she said. “When you look at who got (scholarships), it was the folks who had access to information, who had access to resources already.”
Devine said one public school parent she spoke to lost out on a scholarship after getting tripped up by the application.
“This is a single mom, lower income, trying to get her child into what she perceives as a better school,” the senator said. “She got no guidance on what was necessary, and when she did inquire and tried to make those corrections with no real assistance from anyone, she was told ‘Sorry, we’re out of money. Better luck next year.’ ”
State Rep. Shannon Erickson, a supporter of the education scholarship trust fund, said she hadn’t received any reports from public school families that were squeezed out of the program. In her estimation, individual families followed the voucher bill as closely, if not more closely, than private schools did.
“I did hear from a couple (public school parents) who didn’t meet the income eligibility and wanted to know what it was for the next round,” said Erickson, a Beaufort Republican who chairs the House Education and Public Works Committee. “But I did not hear from anyone who felt they had been pushed out because of another student getting in ahead of them.”
State Sen. Russell Ott, D-Calhoun, an outspoken opponent of South Carolina’s voucher law, said he isn’t surprised that private school applicants now outnumber public school applicants.
In his view, however, public school kids aren’t being squeezed out of the state’s voucher program as much as they’re disregarding it.
Many families simply can’t make private education work — even with a scholarship — due to cost and access issues, so they’re not applying in as great numbers as existing private school students, Ott said.
As he sees it, a family that’s already paying for private school tuition benefits more from a discount than a public school family that isn’t currently paying anything benefits from reduced private school tuition.
“I think we created much more of an incentive for currently enrolled private school folks to jump on this and lower their costs,” the Calhoun Democrat said.
By law, students who attended public schools last year or had a parent serving in the military were supposed to receive priority access to education scholarships. That priority, Massey said, had been the tradeoff for allowing private school students entrée to the program.
In practice, however, public school families did not receive early access to vouchers and military families got only a slight headstart on the general public.
The Department of Education opened a priority application window for military-connected families May 12, five days after the voucher bill was signed into law. The general application window opened one week later, May 19.
A department spokesman did not explain how the agency determined the dates and lengths of its application windows, or why public school students weren’t prioritized.
Change in racial makeup of applicants
The dramatic shift in the prior school environment of voucher applicants has been accompanied by an inversion in the racial makeup of scholarship recipients.
White students, who made up just 30% of recipients last year, now account for nearly 70%, according to S.C. Department of Education data. Meanwhile, the percentage of Black and Hispanic recipients, who last year represented a majority of awardees, has been cut in half.
The racial reversal among voucher recipients, who are now slightly whiter, on average, than South Carolina as a whole, likely stems from the large influx of private school students.
Roughly 84% of private school students in South Carolina are white, according to ProPublica. By comparison, 63% of all South Carolina residents are white and just 48% of public school students in the state are white.
Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, said the demographic profile of voucher recipients should ideally mirror the state’s public school system.
If it doesn’t, he said, it’s important to identify why that might be the case.
“If barriers exist that are keeping families from accessing the program or the educational setting of their choice, I think that’s problematic for a policy that was presented as opening doors and opportunities to families of all backgrounds,” Kelly said.
Kendall Deas, a professor of education policy, law and politics at the University of South Carolina, said the shift in the demographic profile of scholarship recipients brought to mind the sordid role that school vouchers played in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
“Vouchers, at one point in our state’s history, were used to allow students who were white to attend what were known as segregation academies,” Deas said. “It was a way for white families and their children to escape attending schools with Black students.”
While Devine, the Columbia Democrat, said she hadn’t necessarily made the historical connection, she nonetheless feared school vouchers were, in effect, “segregating our state and widening the educational disparities that we have.”
Supporters of the law see the numbers differently.
Climer, the Rock Hill senator, said the demographic profile of voucher recipients was “irrelevant.”
“What I care about is maximizing opportunity for as many South Carolina families as possible,” he said.
With the program likely to continue evolving in the years ahead, as lawmakers tinker with income thresholds and scholarship caps, Erickson said it was too soon to draw any firm conclusions from the current demographic data.
For the time being, she said she was pleased that scholarship recipients remained largely reflective of the state’s population.
“That, for me, shows that it’s getting to a wide range of people, and for now, that’s the measuring stick that I can use,” Erickson said. “If it were too far leaning one way or the other, I’d be worried about that.”
Promoting school vouchers
Lawmakers on both sides of the voucher debate agreed that families could use more education about the program, but disagreed in their assessments of the Department of Education’s handling of its promotion this year.
Devine, who said few of the public school families she encountered were familiar with the education scholarship program, called for more outreach to historically underserved populations.
“If we really want to make sure it’s readily available — especially to children in rural communities, to children in underperforming schools — there has to be an onus on the Department of Education to do targeted outreach into those areas so that they know,” she said.
The senator said when she asked state education officials to hold an information session in her district earlier this year, she was told families could find what they needed to know online.
“That’s not what I wanted (to hear),” said Devine, who called it unrealistic to expect that families could submit a “perfect” application after reading an online FAQ. “I wanted an opportunity for citizens to ask questions of the agency that would be administering the program.”
Raven, the Education Department spokesman, wrote in an emailed statement that the agency was more focused this year on implementing changes to the law than on marketing, and had relied on outside organizations and providers, such as private schools, to get the message out to parents.
“As we prepare for next year, however, the (South Carolina Department of Education) has launched a standalone website to serve as a one-stop shop for families interested in applying for the program,” he wrote.
Both Massey and Erickson agreed that state education officials had marketed the program sufficiently, but pointed to opportunities for improvement going forward.
Massey said he would support a statewide campaign targeted to families outside of major media markets while Erickson suggested distributing literature about the program at grocery stores and pediatricians’ offices.
She said most of the families she’d spoken to had learned about the program through word of mouth and predicted that as participation increases, widespread familiarity will follow.
“The more families who participate in this program and the more schools that have children attending, the more the regular everyday South Carolina citizens are going to know about it,” Erickson said.
This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "School voucher demand soared after SC expanded eligibility. Who’s really benefiting?."