By admin 
More than twice as many home-educated students are in line to receive school vouchers this coming year after state budget negotiators last week determined a proposal to restrict their participation should be dealt with outside the budget process.
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Negotiators nixed the Senate proposal to temporarily place guardrails on existing home-educated participants and prevent new homeschoolers from entering the program because the plan did not principally deal with the appropriation of funds and thus violated House rules.
The decision means that all 2,524 homeschool students awarded taxpayer-funded scholarships for the fall will be eligible to participate.
The South Carolina Department of Education, which will begin distributing scholarship money to recipients later this week, said it appreciated the committee providing clarity to participating families.
“Every South Carolina student deserves access to the educational option that best meets their needs,” spokesman Kinard Lisbon said in a statement.
The state’s school voucher program, passed in 2023 and amended last year, subsidizes the educational expenses of qualified families that enroll their K-12 children outside their zoned public school.
This year’s 15,000 Education Scholarship Trust Fund recipients will each receive $7,634 that can be spent on a variety of approved expenses, including tuition, tutoring, technology and transportation.
“Unbundlers” awarded education scholarships
State Superintendent Ellen Weaver came under fire from senators earlier this year after they learned her department was granting state-funded scholarships to homeschool students in contravention of what they said was their intention.
While South Carolina’s school voucher law expressly prohibits the participation of students enrolled in any of the state’s three statutorily-defined home instruction options, it leaves open the possibility that students could be homeschooled outside the traditional framework and remain eligible for scholarship assistance.
Ordinarily, such “Option 4” homeschoolers or “unbundlers,” as the department calls them, would fail to satisfy South Carolina’s compulsory attendance requirement. But the voucher law, unbeknownst to many of the lawmakers who supported it, allows otherwise.
As long as parents of unbundlers attest that their children are receiving instruction in several core subjects and taking certain assessments, they meet the state’s attendance requirement and are eligible for taxpayer-funded scholarships, according to the Department of Education.
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Multiple senators, including Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree, R-Horry, and Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, have raised concerns about distributing millions of taxpayer dollars to an unaccountable new class of home-educated students without any legal framework in place to support them.
At present, unbundlers are ineligible to compete in high school athletics, can’t receive high school diplomas and don’t qualify for education lottery college scholarships, according to Hembree.
After a bill the Horry County senator introduced barring unbundlers from the state’s voucher program failed to make it out of committee, Hembree proposed a one-year budget measure, or proviso, to address the issue.
The proviso, adopted in April as part of the Senate budget plan, was intended as a temporary fix to allow time for an independent audit of the voucher program and to give lawmakers a chance to fully debate the unbundler issue next year.
Under the plan, existing unbundlers could continue participating in the program and would be treated as Option 1 homeschoolers, with the Department of Education responsible for the oversight typically provided by a local school district.
New unbundlers, including roughly 1,500 home-educated students the department had recently awarded scholarships for the fall, would be barred from the program.
Budget negotiators took up Hembree’s unbundler proviso last Wednesday, along with other contested spending measures, and ultimately .
House Budget Chairman Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, in consultation with staff, found the proviso in violation of House Rule 5.3B, which requires that all temporary provisions of law must be “directly germane to the appropriation of funds” or “affecting revenue.”
The ruling aligns with a prior House decision to toss out a proposed amendment to Hembree’s proviso that would have reversed its impact and given unbundlers entrée to the voucher program.
Neither Hembree nor Bannister responded to requests for comment on the decision.
It isn’t immediately clear whether the Horry County senator or other lawmakers with concerns about education scholarship oversight will attempt to revive the unbundler issue during next year’s legislative session.
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