No new private school vouchers, State Board of Education asks lawmakers

The State Board of Education is urging lawmakers not to offer any new private school vouchers, known as Opportunity Scholarships, next year.

The board voted Thursday on its state legislative priorities and voted 9-2 to add their opposition to Opportunity Scholarships in the cover letter. Treasurer Brad Briner, a Republican, and fellow Board Member Olivia Oxendine, opposed the language.

Most of the board is comprised of appointees of former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

Opportunity Scholarships are the state's general private school voucher program. Families apply to the program and must get accepted into a participating private school. Then, the state writes a check to the private school to cover some or all of the tuition, up to an amount based on the family's income and the average state per-student public school expense.

Starting this school year, any family of any income can apply to the program and receive at least more than $3,000, and any current private school student is now eligible. Those changes have ballooned the state's planned spending on the program to more than $500 million next year.

Board Member Catty Moore, who is also a former Wake County Public School System superintendent, made the suggestion Thursday. The language she drafted also includes a request to reappropriate the money set aside for new vouchers on public school needs. It does not recommend that anyone who currently has a voucher lose it.

Voucher opponents argue public schools need more help and that state spending could be better used on them, while supporters argue that some families want a choice to send their child somewhere new now.

Oxendine voted against the measure, saying she's a believer in "allowing parents to make up their minds, to have their choice, to know what is best for their students, their child," whether that's to send their child to a traditional public school or a private school.
Moore and others discussed the needs public schools still have that aren't funded by the General Assembly
Superintendent Mo Green, who took office last month, helped draft the original legislative requests that Moore and the rest of the board added to Thursday.
He believes public funding should help out with public school needs over private school needs.
His original list of requests totaled more than $1.1 billion -- for things like more special education funding, free school meals, school resource officers, additional laptops and school health personnel. Then, the board added another request to expand individual and small group tutoring.
"The list was long," he said, "and so we recognize that there are certainly limited funds."
The Republican-led majority of the General Assembly has supported expanding Opportunity Scholarships, in spite of strong school board and Democratic opposition, during votes the past two years to remove eligibility requirements for the program and boost funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. The likelihood of reversing course is low.

The board is recommending six main budget items to lawmakers:

• A pause on further Opportunity Scholarship funding
• An expansion, including an unspecified amount of money, of high-impact tutoring for students who are struggling. The Department of Public Instruction is still working out a dollar amount and the structure of the program after board members suggested adding it Wednesday. High-impact, or high-dosage, tutoring is done in groups of one to three students, for at least 30 minutes three times each week. It's generally supported by research to help students gain ground. Many schools across the state spun up these programs using federal pandemic stimulus dollars but have since exhausted those funds and have now discontinued them, reduced them or had to find other funding sources to pay for them.
• $100 million for school facility needs in school systems affected by Hurricane Helene. The board also recommends continued supported of affected schools and students.
• Raising educator pay so that North Carolina has the highest teacher salaries in the Southeast and so that North Carolina educators get extra pay for having a Master's degree -- a benefit that teachers once got but was eliminated for new Master's degrees a decade ago. North Carolina was fifth out of 12 in the Southeast in average teacher pay during the 2022-23 school year, according to the National Education Association. It was 10th in the Southeast in starting teacher pay. Lawmakers have been giving extra boosts to starting teacher pay in recent years to improve that ranking, while giving raises of a few hundred dollars to less than $1,000 to more experienced teachers.
• Reform principal pay, which is currently partly based on the size of a school and the school's standardized test performance. Critics have said it disincentivizes good principals from moving to lower-performing or smaller schools.
• Help address some of the $12.8 billion in school infrastructure needs, identified in the 2020 school facility needs survey. Another survey will be conducted later this year and published next year.

The board is also asking for funding for several other measures. Here are a few of them:

• $377 million for free breakfast and lunch for all students not currently receiving it. A handful of states have moved to cover this in recent years, after the federal government provided all meals at no cost to students for two years during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• $229.8 million in extra special education funding that would come from changing funding formulas. The board wants lawmakers to adopt a plan to weight funding, with higher amounts going to students with more severe disabilities.
• $152.6 million in technology funding to help schools that can't afford to replace students' laptops
• $120 million to turn a school resource officer grant program into an automatic distribution to elementary and middle schools
• $65.4 million for more school counselors, nurses, social workers and psychologists
• $44 million to assess elementary and middle school math skills
• $39 million the expand the elementary teacher literacy training program into middle schools, most of which would be one-time funding
• $16.1 million toward the state's pilot teacher leadership program, known as Advanced Teaching Roles. It pays extra to higher-performing teachers to take on more coaching and curriculum planning responsibilities.

The board also recommended several policy changes that wouldn't necessarily require a budget appropriation. Those include:

• Allowing schools to start the year earlier in August
• Allow schools affected by Hurricane Helene to continue to be funded based on pre-hurricane enrollment next year
• Eliminate the state's textbook commission