Gov. Roy Cooper vetoes funding for NC school vouchers, ICE cooperation requirement
By LUCIANA PEREZ URIBE GUINASSI and DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN
Published September 20m 2024
North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper announced Friday he has vetoed a bill sent by the Republican-controlled General Assembly that would fund private school vouchers and require sheriffs to cooperate with requests from federal immigration authorities. “We’re here today because we know that private school vouchers are the biggest threat to public schools in decades,” Cooper told reporters.
Republicans have enough votes to overturn Cooper’s vetoes. “That veto can be upheld if enough legislators in both parties tell Republican leaders that they don’t want to vote on the veto override this year,” Cooper said. House Bill 10 would spend about $500 million of taxpayer money on private school vouchers, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program. The legislature opened the voucher program to everyone regardless of income, creating a waitlist of about 55,000 families.
Let’s be clear, I am not against private schools and parents choosing that option,” Cooper said. “It works for some children, but I am against taking taxpayer dollars out of the public schools and giving private school vouchers to the wealthiest North Carolinians, and that is exactly what House Bill 10 does. Instead, we could use this money that House Bill 10 appropriates to give public school teachers an 8 and a half percent raise and $1,500 retention bonus” and more, he said. Asked if he had had conversations with Republican members of the legislature about the bill, including those from rural districts, he said he had visited “a lot of schools over the last few months, and a number of them have come and listened to my presentations, have gone around in classrooms with me, and a number of them have expressed concerns about this.” “I hope that there will be enough of them to go to the leadership to say, let’s take a pause,” he said.
The bill also requires sheriffs to cooperate with detention requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as funding K-12 public schools and community college enrollment increases, Medicaid and broadband high speed internet expansion. Wendi Craven, a member of the Burke County Board of Education and a principal at Hickory High School, joined Cooper’s news conference and described herself as “an educator first and a Republican second.” She said that in Burke County some of the private schools had raised their tuition, “so the vouchers are not necessarily helping the lower income students that it was initially targeted to help.”
She said this bill would lead to “a loss of money” and “school systems will be seriously damaged.” Loss of money comes “in a critical time as we continue to address learning loss and mental health crisis.” “COVID has stunted many of our children,” she said Speaking on the Leandro case — an ongoing lawsuit filed 30 years ago by plaintiffs seeking to push the state to increase funding for public education — she said she did not understand how that case could be fought for years “with no progress, and yet, miraculously, millions of dollars are found to fund vouchers for private education.”
Another speaker was Mike Hawkins, former Transylvania County commissioner, who was elected as a Republican, and said: “Public schools are one of the two cornerstones of rural life in North Carolina, the other one being churches.” “In rural North Carolina, the public schools provide a commonality. Everyone’s gone to the public schools, everyone has children who are going to the public schools. They all experience the same thing ... so you can’t understand this issue without understanding that threats to public schools threaten not just the public schools, but they threaten the very fabric of rural life in North Carolina,” he said. Speakers at the presser cited a North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) analysis predicting hefty funding losses for public schools and significant funding increases for private schools
SUPPORT FOR VOUCHERS
Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore said they decided to pass HB 10 as a mini budget bill because it included funding and policy that each chamber had already supported. Moore and other Republican House leaders had wanted it to include additional raises for teachers, but the Senate disagreed. The ICE cooperation part of the bill was a priority for Rep. Destin Hall, the powerful House Rules Committee chair who is expected to be the next House speaker. Hall previously told reporters that he would have liked raises to be included, too, as previously reported by The News & Observer. There are “a number of folks, including myself, who would like to see some more teacher raises.” Hall previously told reporters.
The raises already allocated in the last budget “can tide us over until next spring and summer,” then lawmakers will come back “and work on that issue,” he said. The NCGOP said in an email statement sent by spokesperson Matt Mercer that “Cooper’s disappointing veto of HB 10 is completely expected. Requiring Sheriffs to cooperate with ICE while over 10 million illegal immigrants have poured across the Southern border is a common sense measure to help keep North Carolina safe.” “Funding Opportunity Scholarships allowing families to choose an education plan that works best for them is a common sense way to improve student outcomes. It is unfortunate that in his final weeks in office Gov. Cooper would continue to play political games at the expense of North Carolina families,” he said.
Mike Long, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, in an emailed statement Friday said Cooper “has been opposed to the Opportunity Scholarship Program since day one.” While Cooper continues to oppose “parental school choice ... we know firsthand that tens of thousands of families in our state have benefited from this program, while we also saw historic demand for the program this year.”
“Our legislature is choosing, through the expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program and Special Needs ESA, to invest in students, while Governor Cooper would rather our state invest in systems. The time to invest in students over systems is now, and we encourage leaders in the General Assembly to override the Governor’s veto of House Bill 10 as soon as possible,” he wrote.
The state’s Education Student Accounts (ESA+) program provides funds to help pay tuition and fees for private schools to students with disabilities. The mini-budget bill also includes $24.7 million in recurring funds to clear this program’s waitlist. Most Democrats opposed the bill, with three swing-vote Democrats joining Republicans to pass it in the House. The legislature is out of session until Oct. 9, when it returns for just one day next month. Republicans may vote on whether to override Cooper’s veto that day or wait until a weeklong legislative session that will be held after the general election in November.