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There will be no dollars left for high-income families. For the middle class, it’s wait and see. The lowest-income families have their offers in hand.
Amid a surge in applications that outpaced an increase in funding, demand has outstripped supply this year for North Carolina’s newly expanded, state-funded private school scholarships, according to information released by the state on Saturday. That’s a change from past years.
Legislation passed by the General Assembly in 2023 expanded funding and opened the vouchers program to families of all income levels and to students who have never attended public school. Until this application cycle, a family’s household income could not exceed twice the limit for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.
Critics of the changes, including NC Gov. Roy Cooper, expressed outrage that even the wealthiest people in the state were now eligible to tap public dollars to send their children to private schools. Those top income-level families could still potentially claim those scholarship dollars in future years, especially given budgeted future funding increases, but it turns out there’s just not enough funding left for them this year.
NC Opportunity Scholarships are awarded first to students who already had the scholarships in past years. After that, they are awarded via a system of tiers, based on family income and number of people in the family. Award amounts are also higher for the lower-income groups. Within a tier, funds may be awarded by lottery, if there’s not enough to cover the whole tier.
The North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority sent out award offers on Friday to the families of 13,511 new applicants in Tier 1, the households with the lowest income levels. Those families have until April 19 to accept or decline their offers.
The assistance authority expects to make award offers to some Tier 2 families in early May. But that’s it. For a family of four, eligibility for Tier 2 is capped at $115,000 in income.
“There are not sufficient funds available to offer students in Tiers 3 and 4 an award,” the agency said in a news release Saturday.
According to the release, the agency received 72,000 new Opportunity Scholarship applications during the application period that ended March 1. That’s up from 11,617 new applications during the application period last year.
There’s about $294 million available for the Opportunity Scholarship for the coming school year, up from about $181 million available for the 2023-24 school year, according to the spokeswoman for the NCSEAA. That includes administrative expenses to run the program.
Across the state, more than 32,000 students in grades K-12 received the scholarship to attend private schools in 2023-24.
Jessie.Pounds@greensboro.com
336-373-7002
@JessiePounds
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