By admin 
A dispute between Senate Republicans and state Superintendent Ellen Weaver over her department’s administration of the state’s school voucher program, specifically as it relates to homeschool students, has been a major education storyline this legislative session.
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Here are key takeaways:
- Some Senate lawmakers were surprised to learn earlier this year that the Department of Education had awarded vouchers to more than 1,000 home-educated students, whom they had intended to exclude from the program. While South Carolina’s voucher law expressly prohibits participants from enrolling in traditional homeschool programs, the department’s interpretation of the law allowed for the possibility that students could be homeschooled outside the traditional framework as “unbundlers” and remain eligible for scholarship assistance.
- Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey told Weaver in February she had created a “real trust problem” and that her department’s stance was “not a faithful implementation of the law,” warning during a heated Senate Education panel that it could sink her future agenda.
- In March, Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree and a bipartisan group of senators asked an independent state watchdog agency to investigate the school voucher program. The Legislative Audit Council approved the probe in late April, with Director of Audits Marcia Lindsay saying investigators aimed to finish the investigation by year’s end.
- Meanwhile, a bill Hembree had introduced in January to permanently bar unbundlers from the program stalled in the Senate Education Committee, prompting him to shift focus to passing a temporary budget measure to restrict their participation.
- The Senate in April adopted Hembree’s budget proviso, which grandfathered in roughly 1,000 current unbundlers, but prohibited the department from awarding scholarships to any additional home-educated students.
- Budget negotiators killed the Senate proviso in late July, ruling it violated a House rule requiring that temporary provisions be “directly germane to the appropriation of funds.” The decision cleared the way for all 2,524 homeschool students awarded scholarships for the fall to participate in the program.
The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.
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