Parents fear losing vouchers for homeschooling. GOP senators say K-12 agency misled them.

COLUMBIA — Elliott Mead, 10, is using his $7,500 from the state this year to learn about wildlife conservation and ukulele lessons on top of his core classes, all of which he takes at home.

But the Beaufort fourth grader and other students using state dollars for homeschooling should never have gotten that money in the first place. That’s according to senators who crafted the law creating the Education Scholarship Trust Fund program, designed to help parents pay for private tuition and other costs associated with not sending their children to their locally zoned public school.

Around 1,000 families used taxpayer money from the program to home educate their children last school year, state Superintendent Ellen Weaver wrote in a letter to legislators earlier this month. The Department of Education praised the homeschooling program, which it referred to as “unbundling,” in an end-of-year report on the money.

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Senators never meant to create such a program, they said during a meeting earlier this month. A second Senate Education hearing is set for Thursday.

At the initial subcommittee meeting, legislators who advocated for school choice vouchers said repeatedly the money should not go toward homeschooling.

Parents were misled into believing they could use the scholarships for homeschooling, senators said.

The debate pits the program’s biggest supporters against each other over how the money can be spent — GOP legislators versus Weaver and the conservative think tank she led before becoming superintendent, which pushed for the law.

“This sounds to me like it was a deliberate attempt to circumvent what everyone understood the law to be,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said during the Feb. 4 meeting. “And that’s not cool, man.”

When legislators wrote the law creating the voucher program for K-12 students, they intentionally excluded homeschoolers. The law makes it illegal for any parent educating their child through one of the state’s three homeschooling options to receive the scholarship, which was $7,500 per student this year.

That was at the request of homeschooling parents and associations representing them, who feared the state aid would bring increased government oversight.

A bill authored by Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree aims to erase any ambiguity by deleting the two lines that Weaver’s agency contends allows “unbundling.” State law leaves scholarship approvals to the state Department of Education, and the agency has interpreted those lines as legalizing homeschooling uses.

But any sort of schooling needs oversight, and a program created accidentally does not carry enough accountability, Hembree said.

“There’s a lot about this that troubles me, but something that really is eating at me is — I think about the kids, about the students at home and the families that are told this is OK, encouraged to do this,” said the Little River Republican.

“They come to rely on it, they sign up for it, they rely on it, then all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out from under them,” he added.

How does it work?

The Department of Education’s interpretation essentially created a fourth option for homeschooling.

Instead of a local school district, a homeschooling association or a local group of parents holding children accountable, the agency itself oversaw the program, making it legal, Weaver wrote in the letter sent to senators after the Feb. 4 meeting.

Under the law, once a parent signed the agreement required to start receiving money, they met the state’s attendance requirements to avoid truancy.

The law also required all scholarship students to take a qualified standardized test and submit the score to the agency, which created a form of accountability for the state to be sure parents were actually educating their children, Weaver wrote.

Several of the categories of items the funds can pay for — such as curriculum, individual courses and testing fees — only make sense if a parent is educating their child outside of a traditional classroom, Weaver wrote.

Outside of the specified categories, the law allows the money to go toward “any other educational expense approved by the department to enable personalized learning,” which Weaver said meant parent-curated homeschooling programs.

Legislators called that characterization of the law disingenuous. Senators made it clear during discussions at the committee level and on the floor that they did not believe homeschooling should be allowed under the bill, Massey said.

To claim otherwise “is deliberately misleading, and that’s offensive to me,” the Edgefield Republican said.

The bill would remove the automatic compliance with attendance laws for parents who signed onto the program, requiring children to either enroll in a traditional school or give up the funds and join an approved homeschooling option. The bill would also remove the line on department-approved “personalized learning” expenses. And it adds language specifically banning a “home-based personalized learning program.”

Curriculum, testing fees and individual classes were meant to supplement a student’s education outside the classroom, senators said. For instance, if a student wanted to take a language class not offered at their private school, they could use the money to pay for an extra class in that language, not put together a full course load of single classes.

Allowing students homeschooled through one of the three options already allowed in state law to receive funds is not out of the question, Hembree said.

The Education Oversight Committee recommended doing so to clear up confusion after parents’ responses on surveys over the last two years included gratitude that they can use the money for homeschooling, which committee staff have said repeatedly violates the law.

But if legislators are going to do that, they need to do so intentionally to make sure no students fall through the cracks.

For example, children educated at home under the voucher program may not qualify for college scholarships funded by state lottery revenues. They also might not be able to join a school’s sports team the way a traditionally homeschooled student could.

If the state is going to pay for students to be educated at home, officials need to be sure those same students are actually getting a quality education, Hembree said.

“We have to have some kind of control, some kind of oversight,” he said. “These are public dollars. We can’t just throw them out there and hope it’s done right.”

The education department has not yet reported test scores to legislators or the state Education Oversight Committee despite repeated requests, legislators and committee members have said. Officials are still working to compile the results, Weaver said in her letter.

Weaver has asked legislators to fund 20,000 scholarships in the upcoming school year. That’s 5,000 more than state law requires and double the number participating this year. Her request would cost an additional $61.4 million. Gov. Henry McMaster repeated that request in his own budget recommendations.

But legislators note they have no idea how well students are performing under the program.

The parents using the funds

As for Elliott, his school day typically starts with an online class, where he and a small group of other students learning from home go through English, math, science and social studies lessons.

After his core classes, the fourth grader takes a break to play before completing some homework. His afternoon classes take a different approach: Elliott takes courses in wildlife conservation, how to play the ukulele and other specific topics.

Elliott, who has autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learns best when he’s allowed to explore the subjects that most appeal to him, said his mother, Cassie Mead. He struggles to sit in a classroom and complete assignments all day, but he excels when his lessons tie back to his interest in animals and music, she said.

“He is incredibly intelligent and super bright,” Mead told the SC Daily Gazette of her son. “But a classroom learning model just doesn’t work for him.”

Elliott’s difficulties adapting to a classroom made him extremely anxious about going to school, so Mead started homeschooling him in first grade. After an adjustment period for Elliott and his parents, he started to blossom, she said.

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Mead was initially reluctant to apply for the state money, because she didn’t want her son to face repercussions if he didn’t perform well on a test, she said. After learning the law had no consequences for a low performance, Mead decided to sign up.

The extra money has helped Elliott grow even more, she said.

Mead no longer has to rely on freely available curriculum or cobble together lesson plans, which was exhausting, she said. Taking online classes with other children helped Elliott improve his social skills and develop his confidence.

Using state money to pay for tutoring and lesson plans freed up other parts of the family budget to pay for other activities, such as Elliott’s karate lessons, Mead said.

“It has honestly been such a relief,” Mead said.

Parents who educate from home have to take on a lot of roles, said Amanda McTeer, another Beaufort parent who has homeschooled all three of her children. Two of them are getting state scholarships. Despite spending a decade as a teacher, she still had to learn a lot to make sure her children were getting all the education they needed.

“This way, we do have so many other professionals who are pushing our kids and really filling them up with knowledge and learning in ways they never have before,” McTeer told the Gazette.

McTeer decided to start homeschooling when her son Miles, now 11 years old, was diagnosed with kidney disease before starting kindergarten. No traditional school would have offered the type of medical support McTeer felt her son needed during the day, she said. Virtual options wouldn’t work, either, because he struggled to learn while spending all day in front of a computer.

“For us, it’s not possible to use public or private school at this point,” said McTeer, whose oldest child has already graduated. “This just provides us with so many more opportunities that we, my kids, would not have otherwise.”

Her daughter, 6-year-old McKinley, is also receiving state funds while getting an at-home education.

McTeer still does much of her children’s teaching. The state dollars help pay for extra experiences for her children, such as a virtual class dissecting a novel all year for Miles and a science class that takes periodic field trips for McKinley. She couldn’t afford options like that before, she said.

“It’s just been really great for them, and they really love it, and it would be really hard to lose at this point,” McTeer said.

This school year, applicants had to make no more than 300% of the federal poverty level, or $112,950 for a family of five. The income cap will rise in the 2026-2027 school year to 500% of the poverty level.

Legislators don’t want to take money from families like the Meads and McTeers, but the program needs clear rules, senators said.

“I do feel for the parents, because they have taken advantage, and I don’t blame them,” said Sen. Darrell Jackson, a Columbia Democrat. “If I’m the parent and someone says, ‘You can take advantage of this,’ then the parents did what the parents would do.”

The Department of Education should never have approved the money for home education without first consulting legislators, Hembree said.

“I just think it was unwise to put these families in this position without a very clear understanding that this was the intention of the General Assembly,” Hembree said.