As an original architect of North Carolina’s school voucher programs, former House Speaker Paul “Skip” Stam always envisioned the Opportunity Scholarship program would grow in size and scope. He imagined that one day, as many as one in five North Carolina students might attend a private school with the help of a voucher.
“It was never intended to be only for very low income people,” Stam said.
Stam and a coalition of lawmakers would meet in his office to strategize over their vision. They debated policy details, but there was one thing they agreed on.
“We never wanted this thing that you had to have been in a public school first,” Stam said.
Stam said that was a concession to get the bill passed. For him, the bill was also about making religious education more accessible.
But this was in the wake of the Great Recession, and voucher supporters had to make the program palatable to Republicans managing the state budget. So to qualify for an Opportunity Scholarship, students had to be low-income and had to use the voucher to exit a public school. Stam and other lawmakers maintained that would save taxpayers money, since a voucher was worth less than the state paid on average for a public school student.
“We had to show that it saved money and that it wouldn’t hurt the public schools at all,” Stam said.
A decade later, lawmakers are now considering a bill that would provide more than half a billion dollars for the vouchers that can now go to any student, regardless of income, even if they have never attended a public school.
When lawmakers changed the eligibility requirements last year, tens of thousands more applications flooded in than the program could afford to grant. House Bill 10 would fund applicants who were waitlisted, most of whom come from families earning more than $115,000, while North Carolina’s median household income is $70,000. Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it, and Republican lawmakers could override his veto this week.
“I really didn’t think that it was going to be so expansive as it is,” said Jane Wettach, a retired Duke University professor who specializes in education law, who has studied the Opportunity Scholarship program over its decade in existence. “In a state where we are significantly underfunding our public schools, that we’re taking taxpayer money to support wealthy families is something that I did not expect.”
With no household income limits, one in five scholarship applicants who are waiting on a veto override to get a voucher have family incomes above $250,000 for a family of four.
“Right now we have underfunded public schools and we have unaccountable private schools,” Wettach said.
Critics say any savings from vouchers come either directly or indirectly from public school funding that could be spent on raising teacher and staff pay to help fill thousands of vacant positions across the state.
School officials are feeling the pinch. This fall, the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association reported more than 8,000 vacant positions for public school employees statewide. North Carolina is ranked 38th in the nation for average teacher pay.
This month, the Wake County school board is discussing how to notify parents when their child’s class is led by a long-term substitute teacher. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools has cut staff due to a budget crunch. Durham County Schools is dealing with a major bus driver shortage.
If lawmakers override the veto of House Bill 10, North Carolina would spend twice as much on private schools as it does on all the school bus drivers in the state. The added funding for vouchers would be enough to raise teacher pay across the board by 3.5%, according to the Public School Forum of North Carolina.
“We ought to first fund our public schools adequately,” Wettach said. “If there’s money left over after we really do a bang up job of our public schools, and the legislature still wants to provide some choice to parents by subsidizing private school education, so be it.”
Wettach said what hasn’t changed over the years is that most students accepting an Opportunity Scholarship use it to attend a religious school, with few requirements placed on those schools.
“North Carolina is one of the weakest states in terms of regulating private schools. And that hasn’t changed,” Wettach said.
Schools that receive Opportunity Scholarships don’t require teachers to have a degree or a background check. Schools aren’t required to teach a specific curriculum or to publicly report student test scores. Other states with similar voucher programs have many of these requirements, and these are all things North Carolina law strictly regulates in public schools.
Although he’s retired from public office, Stam said he hopes the override passes, because then the program will serve so many students it will be hard to backtrack.
“With this expansion, there will be enough people that, politically, they won’t be able to do away with it,” Stam said.
Meanwhile, voters in three other states — Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado — just rejected ballot measures to institute or protect private school vouchers.
