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COLUMBIA — Donations will fully cover third-quarter private school tuition payments for South Carolina K-12 students initially relying on taxpayer-funded scholarships, South Carolina’s main advocacy group for school choice announced this week.
The announcement that no student faces being imminently forced to change schools for lack of payment came as senators continued debating a GOP proposal to reinstate the scholarships. Republicans have said it’s a priority because the students’ parents are in limbo.
The additional $700,000 collected in December will cover tuition for the third quarter and part of the fourth quarter for all students impacted by last September’s state Supreme Court ruling that halted public scholarships for private tuition, according to the Palmetto Promise Institute.
The conservative think tank received the $700,000 collectively from two national nonprofits and an anonymous donor, bringing the total it’s raised since the court ruling to $2.2 million.
That is covering tuition for about 600 students. The state’s Catholic diocese separately raised money to cover 195 students in the program enrolled in its 32 schools.
Keeping every student enrolled for the remainder of the school year will likely cost an additional $800,000. The institute’s leaders are hopeful they can raise that in time to cover all students’ fourth quarter tuition payments.
“We have until the end of April to get the rest of the money,” Wendy Damron, the group’s president, told the SC Daily Gazette.
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The think tank, which has fought for private school choice since its founding, has so far been able to pay tuition for every student enrolled in the program last year under a 2023 law partially thrown out a month into the school year.
The state Supreme Court ruled the private tuition payments violated the state constitution’s ban on public dollars directly benefiting private education. The legislation being debated on the Senate floor as Republicans’ first priority of the year is geared to restart and expand eligibility for the private school scholarships.
Previous donations have come from wealthy philanthropists.
This time, $100,000 each came from the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which pays for students to attend private schools, and the JM Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit founded by investor Jeremiah Milbank. The group has also received about $100,000 in smaller donations, according to a news release.
Because income criteria for the program’s first year was limited to Medicaid-eligible students, their families likely couldn’t afford to pay tuition on their own.
If donations are not enough to cover every student for the fourth quarter of the school year, the Palmetto Promise Institute will decide who gets the money based on schools with the highest concentration of students relying on the funds, Damron said.
Schools with fewer students relying on the scholarship would likely have an easier time finding the money in their budgets or raising their own funds to support their tuition, while schools with a lot of scholarship students might be relying on the money to operate, Damron said.
“These schools really do care about the kids and want to keep them there,” she said.
The money raised was also enough to cover first-quarter tuition for 85 students whose families had not yet used the $1,500 transferred to parents’ account ahead of the high court’s decision, according to the Palmetto Promise Institute. While the court did not require families to pay back money used, it did stop the payments.
The Catholic diocese covered another 34 students whose parents hadn’t made a first-quarter tuition payment before the ruling, according to numbers provided by the group.
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That means just over 800 students were using the money to pay for private school, out of the 2,880 enrolled in the program. The state Department of Education said in a court filing that parents of “nearly 700” students had made a payment to a private school during the beginning weeks of the school year.
The department has yet to publicly release numbers on how enrolled students have used the taxpayer money. It remains unknown, for example, how many were using the money to pay fees to transfer to another public school district. Other allowed expenses under the law include textbooks, tutoring, and computers.
Debate in the Senate continues Wednesday on a bill that would pull money from the state’s lottery fund instead of the general fund to avoid the constitutional ban.
It would also increase the scholarship amount from a set $6,000 annually to whatever the state sends to public schools on a per-pupil average, which would be roughly $8,500 next school year. By 2027, the bill would increase income eligibility to 600% of the federal poverty level — enabling the vast majority of students to be eligible. The program would be capped at 15,000 students.