The General Assembly approved the expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship program to help wealthy families pay for private school, but declined to include extra money to raise teacher pay. Local leaders, parents, and legislators say this latest round of funding will hurt public school teachers and students.
The North Carolina House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a massive $463 million funding increase for the state’s private school voucher program by a margin of 67-43.
The increase to the Opportunity Scholarship program will provide an additional $248 million this school year — bringing the state’s total commitment to the private school voucher program to $541 million for the 2024-2025 school year — and another $215 million next school year.
The additional funding for vouchers will total an astounding $5 billion over the next decade.
The expansion is expected to eliminate a waitlist of around 54,000 students whose families have applied for vouchers to attend private schools. The program provides up to $7,500 per student to offset the cost of attending a private school in lieu of traditional public schools.
For some parents, public school advocates, and elected officials, this massive voucher funding scheme is taking place at the expense of the state’s public schools, teachers and students, all while benefiting a minority of students in the state — students whose families are more likely to be wealthy and live in cities or suburbs.
Speaking at a rally opposing vouchers outside of the General Assembly prior to the House vote on Monday, Giancarlo Nolasco, an 11th grade student at Jordan Matthews High School in Chatham County, expressed his frustration with the latest round of voucher expansion.
“We have so many talented and hardworking students at Jordan Matthews, but we’re struggling because we don’t have the resources that we need,” he explained.
The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) President Tamika Walker Kelly also put out a statement criticizing the decision.
“The plan is dangerously irresponsible for the financial health of our state government and threatens the future of local school budgets statewide,” she said.
Notably, the final bill sent to Gov. Roy Cooper does not include any money to increase pay for North Carolina teachers, who are among the lowest paid teachers in the nation.
A recent WRAL poll found that more North Carolinians oppose current funding levels for vouchers and that nearly 25% don’t support any amount of voucher funding.
Cooper has been vocal about his opposition to voucher expansion, but Republicans hold a supermajority in the legislature and will almost certainly override his potential veto.
Stretching resources for local school systems, counties and parents.
According to a recent report, North Carolina’s school spending per pupil ranks last in the country at $10,791 per student, nearly $5,000 less than the national average.
Belle Boggs is a parent of two who lives in Chatham County. She told Cardinal & Pine that while the school system there has done a great job offsetting the lack of funding from the legislature for things like teacher salaries, she worries it may not be sustainable and that many counties — especially the state’s more rural ones — don’t have the same tax base and resources in the first place.
“Our county commissioners and our school board listened to the feedback of parents and community members who said that we were in crisis,” Boggs said of Chatham’s local leadership.
Boggs explained how the local commission approved $2,000 pay increases for all certified staff.
“They did get a much more significant raise than the state was offering. But that was our county, which is relatively affluent, it’s not like Eastern North Carolina, like Bertie County, that’s really going to suffer from this,” she said.
Bertie County has two private schools, or one private school for every 8,477 people. Many Eastern North Carolina counties, including Edgecombe, Washington, and Martin counties, have no private schools. Other counties have merely a handful, and not nearly enough to accommodate all students, assuming their parents could afford the tuition, even with a Opportunity Scholarship supplement.
Buncombe County state Rep. Lindsey Prather, whose district includes rural communities, says this will have a significant impact on her county and district.
“We stand to lose $5.5 million just this year in our school budget because of this taxpayer funding private school voucher program,” she told Cardinal & Pine following the vote in the House on Wednesday.
Stephanie Walker currently serves on the New Hanover County Board of Education and is running to serve on the county commission, which plays a key role in funding schools at the local level. She says increasing voucher funding undermines public schools, because when students leave the school system, it leads to less funding for the county from the state.
“The money goes out the door,” Walker said.
Schools lose around $7,500 in funding — the full amount of the voucher — when a student leaves the public school system.
“I think this voucher program, it’s a push to take more money, divert more money away,” Walker said.
State Sen. Lisa Grafstein said Wake County stands to lose a significant amount if students on private school waitlists leave the system.
“In Wake County, that’s somewhere north of $54 million…huge sums of money coming out of school systems at a time when we have already, for a very long time been underfunding our schools,” she said.
The state currently also faces a long-term teacher shortage. Last year, NC Newsline reported that there were over 6,000 teacher vacancies on the 40th day of the 2023-2024 school year.
Walker believes that with resources being further stretched thin by voucher expansion, the teacher shortage crisis many counties are facing could be exacerbated.
“It is a crisis…the state has made it a lot harder to be a teacher. Not enough incentive to be a teacher,” she said.
The long-term impact of vouchers
For parents and legislators alike, if the state continues on its current trajectory, they worry what the future may hold.
North Carolina has seen significant growth in recent decades, particularly in the Triangle and Charlotte areas. Global businesses have moved to the state or plan to move to the state, including Red Hat and Apple. This year, North Carolina was ranked as the second best state for business after being the best in 2023.
Grafstein fears that if the state doesn’t reverse course, future progress could be hindered and businesses may choose to look elsewhere if the state’s public schools continue to be neglected.
“There’s nothing inevitable about North Carolina continuing to be that kind of magnet. We have to continue to invest in order for it to stay as vital and productive as it’s been,” she said.
Boggs worries about the impact that vouchers are going to have on already-struggling school systems and parents, who often fundraise to support their local schools.
“The idea that I, as a working academic, have to go and fundraise a bunch of money so my legislators can give my tax money to people who think that the public schools aren’t good enough for them, that just boils my blood. I’ll do it. I will keep volunteering. I will do as much as I can but the parents are getting burned out too. The same way that the teachers are,” Boggs said. .
For Prather, the concept of providing wealthy families with further subsidies is especially frustrating.
“We are still siphoning taxpayer money to these wealthy families in these urban counties to the detriment of our rural counties and the vast majority of North Carolina families,” she said.
