Most NC adults don't support private school voucher expansion, new WRAL poll shows

Opponents of private school voucher expansion outweigh supporters, an exclusive WRAL News Poll shows.

The poll, conducted by independent polling firm SurveyUSA, asked 900 adults about the nearly $300 million planned spending on vouchers for this year, which is now available to any family in the state after lawmakers lifted an income eligibility cap and made current private school families eligible.

The poll asked if the state should spend more, the same, less or none of that money in the future.

The results were mixed, with similar amounts of support for current or increasing voucher funding as there was opposition to the current amount of voucher funding. But more people opposed the current amount of voucher funding than said it needed to increase.

• 16% of respondents said more money should be spent on the program.
• 21% said that the nearly $300 million figure was the right amount of money.
• 19% said the state should spend less than the nearly $300 million figure.
• 22% said the state shouldn’t be spending any money on private school vouchers.
• 21% said they were “not sure.”

The poll was released on the same day the North Carolina Senate voted 27-to-17 to expand funding for the state’s general private school voucher program, also known as the Opportunity Scholarship program. If it became law, the bill would add $248 million to voucher funding for this year, on top of the $293 million already budgeted, for a total of $541 million. It would add another $215 million next school year. It would fully fund a more than 50,000-student waitlist that was created this year after state lawmakers removed the income cap on eligibility and made current private school students eligible.

The House is expected to vote on the measure Wednesday.

Opportunity Scholarships are checks of up to about $7,500 that any family in the state can get to send their child to a private school. It doesn’t have academic requirements.

The vouchers essentially repurpose what the state spends on each public school student in the form of a voucher to send them to private school, although opponents argue schools have fixed costs and the loss of funding to public schools can complicate operations. Public schools lose money if one of their students opts for a private school instead.

Vouchers are a hot-button issue, Lance Fusarelli, a professor of education leadership and policy at North Carolina State University, told WRAL News in an interview last month about public opinion and public schools.

That’s because vouchers are perceived by some as taking from one group to fund another, he said. Public opinion could be more positive if people felt like no one was losing anything.

“If it's a good Christmas, then everybody gets some — teachers get a pay raise, people that want vouchers get a voucher,” he said. “But if it gets perceived as we're going to spend this much on vouchers, we have to make cuts or limit or freeze teacher pay or, you know, class size and stuff like that, then that goes from a win-win to, like, a zero-sum.”

Proponents of vouchers say they’re essentially a funding mechanism that allows the state per-pupil allocation to follow a student where they ultimately go to school. They argue that families who aren’t happy with their assigned public school should have a choice to send their children elsewhere. That’s what many families with Opportunity Scholarships have done.

Opponents of the voucher program argue the money that goes into the voucher program could be better spent on benefiting public schools as a whole, through things like teacher raises. They note ways in which public schools are already hurting: teacher shortages, bus driver shortages, mold growth, and malfunctioning HVAC systems.

Senate President Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, called public school systems “bureaucracies” and said voucher opponents favored those over giving families more choices.

During a news conference Monday opposing voucher expansion, Jerry Wilson, policy and advocacy director at the Center for Racial Equity in Education, said he’s seen public opinion opposing vouchers before.

“Yet lawmakers are rushing to continue yet another expansion of this unpopular program,” he said.

Rosemary San Nicolas, a mother of Hoke County Schools students, said the few private schools in her area don’t accept vouchers.

The expansion of private school vouchers doesn’t help the teachers at her children’s school who work multiple jobs to make ends meet or hire bus drivers during a shortage at their school, she said.

“It doesn’t support our students, it doesn’t support our teachers,” said San Nicolas, who lives in Raeford. “It’s not benefitting any of us.”

But Rachel Brady, a mother of four, including two private school students, echoed Berger’s comments about families needing choices that meet their needs.

“This means everything to my family,” she said of the potential for one of her sons to get an Opportunity Scholarship under expanded funding.

Increased spending on vouchers isn’t a pure increase in public spending; if some of the students are current public school students, the state allocation to fund them transfers from the public school to the private school. But the voucher expansion passed in 2023 removed the requirement that voucher recipients first be public school students. That means the state would spend money for the first time this year on students who have only ever been private school students. The state doesn’t track how many new voucher applicants are already private school students.

Information for this article was contributed by WRAL reporters Brian Murphy and Eric Miller.

WRAL News Poll: Survey of 900 NC adults shows voter trends for November election