Wake school leaders take a stance against private school voucher expansion bill
Published September 26, 2024
Wake County school leaders say a bill that would expand funding for private schools ignores public school needs.
Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill last week, but Republicans have a supermajority, and they have overridden his vetoes in the past.
On Thursday, Wake County Public School System Superintendent Robert P. Taylor and school board Chairman Chris Heagarty and Vice Chairwoman Monika Johnson-Hostler hosted a press conference stating their opposition to the expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship program.
“We can’t let this bill become law and destabilize our already underfunded schools without speaking out,“ Heagarty said.
Wake County system officials say they don’t have enough data yet to estimate the potential impact, but the Office of State Budget and Management estimates the school system could lose several million dollars and public schools across the state could lose more than $70 million. That would happen as the result of public school students leaving for private schools — and their state dollars going with them.
House Bill 10 would provide $463.5 million more toward general private school vouchers — called Opportunity Scholarships — over this school year and the next school year. It would cover a 54,000-student waiting list for a voucher. That list ballooned this spring after lawmakers removed income eligibility caps for applicants and made current private school students eligible to apply.
“As we hear it from families that benefit from it, it has been liberating to their children and to their family as far as their educational needs,” said Mike Long, president of Parents for Educational Freedom North Carolina, a group that supports Opportunity Scholarship expansion.
But opponents of the expansion argue it uses public money to pay for private schools without holding them accountable for their performance, all while public schools are still underfunded for things like competitive employee pay and adequate special education services. Special education funding, for example, is capped to only 13% of students, even if more are identified, and isn’t adjusted for varying needs or cost of services.
“We could benefit students across the state” by using the money set aside for vouchers on public schools,” Johnson-Hostler said.
The expansion of Opportunity Scholarships could affect public schools, because public schools could lose more students to private schools. Because public schools are funded for every student enroll, they would lose money. That’s a problem, Taylor said, because schools have many fixed costs.
“We still have to run the same A/C unit. We still have to run the same bus,” he said. “So our cost doesn’t necessarily diminish.”
Public school leaders should keep in mind that many families do want to leave public schools, even if most choose to stay, Long said.
“The Opportunity Scholarship gives them the opportunity to make that move that they see fit, and that's why we keep coming back to say, why are they leaving?” Long said. “Let's address those issues in our public schools and improve on those things, and then perhaps we'll see a difference in where it will go the other way, where parents won't be leaving them, and they will be returning to them.”
The press conference took a place a week after school board members discussed vouchers — mostly, to oppose them — during a school board meeting.
Thursday’s event signaled a more official opposition from the state’s largest school system.
Numerous school boards have passed resolutions opposing the expansion of Opportunity Scholarships or asking lawmakers to spend more on public schools, including the Wayne, Wilson, Chatham, Bladen and Chapel Hill-Carrboro school systems.
The Wake school board hasn’t passed a resolution opposing vouchers but did approve a “legislative agenda” asking lawmakers to prioritize public school needs before vouchers.
Wake County has a high concentration of private schools, similar to other urban counties in North Carolina.
But it’s unclear if the county school system would be disproportionately affected by the voucher program’s expansion.
The North Carolina Educational Assistance Authority, which administers the voucher program, doesn’t ask Opportunity Scholarship applicants where they currently attend school. So it’s impossible to know how many of the applicants from Wake County — who could suddenly be awarded an Opportunity Scholarship if the bill becomes law — are attending a Wake County system school, charter school or homeschool or are already private school students.
The Office of State Budget and Management issued estimates Sept. 4, ballparking a $11.6 million additional loss during the 2025-26 school year for Wake County public schools, if the bill passed. That’s mostly the school system but would include losses for any charter school that lost students to the voucher program.
That $11.6 million would be on top of a $1.9 million already expected to be lost under current voucher funding, for the new voucher recipients already funded in Wake County. But it wasn’t based on state data on who has applied for a voucher, because that data isn’t available. It’s based on the percentage of voucher applicants in other states who moved from a public to a private school, once their voucher programs became open to all students, as North Carolina’s became this year.
The Office of State Budget and Management’s estimates assume most of the new voucher recipients are already private school students.
Statewide, the Office of State Budget and Management estimates a loss of $76.2 million for public schools for the 2025-26 school year for students who leave to go to a private school, compared to last year, before the eligibility expanded. That money would go toward private schools, along with another $108 million toward private schools to pay for the Opportunity Scholarships of current nonpublic school students. That would be a net increase in education funding of $184 million.
Opportunity Scholarship funding would top half a billion dollars for the current school year, if the bill passed, and grow even more next year, eventually reaching more than a billion dollars within the next decade.
The state, which is charged by law with funding education, spends about $12 billion on public schools each year. Counties, which are charged with funding school facilities, spend each year about $4 billion on education and more than $1 billion on facilities.