September 12, 2024
Under the law, families with an income of less than roughly $120,000 were allowed to receive vouchers of up to $6,000 in a program initially designed to serve about 5,000 students a year before it increased to 15,000 students who fell within the statewide school-age population.
The Supreme Court of South Carolina has officially overturned a voucher law allowing parents to use taxpayer money to fund their children’s private school education.
According to AP News, the 3-2 ruling came down on Sept. 11, preventing using “Education Scholarship Trust Funds” to pay tuition or fees. On the other hand, parents can use them for other private expenses to benefit their children’s education, including tutoring, textbooks, and other educational resources.
Under the law, families with an income of less than roughly $120,000 were allowed to receive vouchers of up to $6,000 in a program initially designed to serve about 5,000 students a year before it increased to 15,000 students who fell within the statewide school-age population.
“A parent who chooses to use a scholarship to pay their child’s private school tuition is undoubtedly using public funds to provide a direct benefit to the private school,” wrote Justice Gary Hill in his first major opinion with the state’s highest court.
“Our General Assembly knew how to draft an amendment to present to the people that would allow public funding for private schools, but it did not,” Hill wrote of the lawmakers responsible for amending the South Carolina constitution in 1972 to guarantee the right to free public education for all children.
The amendment occurred when South Carolina lawmakers worked for two decades to prevent Black children from attending school alongside white children, even going as far as shutting down public schools as a whole.
On the contrary, Chief Justice John Kittridge, responsible for one of the opposing votes, argued that the voucher law ruling “ignores the broad power South Carolina’s Legislature has to create policy.”
“The literary style of the majority opinion may be appealing, but its underlying rationale is anathema to the rule of law,” he wrote.
Justice Kittredge also argued that other state programs allow private money to be used to fund public education institutions, citing initiatives like the pre-kindergarten program First Steps and state lottery-funded scholarships for college to support his claims. However, Hill noted that his decision was made because the programs in question are structured differently from the trust fund-driven vouchers.
Following the ruling, Republican State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver vowed to work diligently to get the “Education Scholarship Trust Funds” back up and running.
“Families cried tears of joy when the scholarship funds became available for their children, and today’s Supreme Court ruling brings those same families tears of devastation,” wrote Weaver in a statement.
Supporters of the “Education Scholarship Trust Funds” law will be allowed to appeal the highest court’s decision, and lawmakers have the option to place a constitutional amendment before voters to eliminate the constitutional provision in 2025 and beyond. The latter option has always been available. However, they hesitated to do so out of fear that a majority vote would be impossible.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) noted that the ruling “may have devastating consequences for thousands of low-income families ” and asserted that the state would ask the Supreme Court to reassess its latest ruling.
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