Charleston P&C SC Sens object to adding 1000 homeschool students to voucher program
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Education Lab
GOP state senators object to 'unintended' use of SC voucher scholarships for homeschooling
- By Ian Grenier igre...@postandcourier.com
- Feb 5, 2026
COLUMBIA — A panel of state senators sharply questioned how South Carolina parents were able to use the state’s voucher program to pay for homeschooling after the legislature had written the law to prohibit it.
Their objections in a Feb. 4 education subcommittee meeting came in response to the S.C. Department of Education’s interpretation of the legislation, which has allowed over 1,000 students to use the state-funded scholarships to pay for instruction at home.
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The law states that students receiving the scholarships cannot participate in any of the three home instruction programs set out in state code, a restriction that was supported by some homeschoolers during legislative debates in order to avoid the potential of expanded state oversight.
“There’s not a question about whether we intended it for homeschool or not,” Senate Education Committee chairman Greg Hembree, R-Little River, said. “We didn’t.”
Hembree has introduced a bill intended to fully shut off any way for homeschooling parents to use the scholarship money, and to end what is essentially a new homeschool system formed without the legislature’s assent — or at least without its intent.
The students in question, about 10 percent of those in the program, are called “unbundlers.” They use the scholarships to purchase various educational services or products from multiple vendors, creating a “parent-directed” smorgasbord of an education program, according to a December report on the Education Scholarship Trust Fund program’s first year.
In a letter to the subcommittee hours after its meeting, state Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver argued that the “unbundling” system meets the two shared elements of the statutorily-created homeschooling options: it satisfies the state’s compulsory attendance law, as the ESTF law stipulates, and it has an accountability measure, namely the requirement that students take annual tests.
Other states have a similar system, the letter said.
It also argues that several categories of expenses allowed by the law would likely only be used by “unbundling” families, including textbooks, exam fees, individual courses and “other educational expense approved by the department to enable personalized learning consistent with the intent of this act.”
“With more than 1,000 students currently participating as unbundlers in the 2025-26 school year and thousands more applying for the coming school year, the department believes it is important to preserve this flexibility for families who rely on it,” Weaver wrote.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey suggested the department’s handling of the program could have been a “deliberate effort to circumvent the law.”
“If we’ve got an agency that is deliberately interpreting the law differently than how the legislature obviously intended it, that’s a larger problem,” the Edgefield Republican, who had pushed for a narrower program, said.
Nobody from the department spoke during the subcommittee meeting, but Hembree said they plan to meet again to hear from the agency before they vote on his bill. He’s not necessarily opposed to opening the program to homeschoolers, but there needs to be a discussion about it, he said.
The Education Department’s interpretation of the law was defended by Oran Smith, senior fellow with the Palmetto Promise Institute, a conservative think tank that has long pushed for school choice and was founded by Weaver.
While “capital-H homeschooling” for scholarship recipients is forbidden by the law, “lowercase homeschooling” created by parents’ picking and choosing from a mixture of educational options was not, Smith said. They had hoped that it meant the legislature was allowing for a fourth, informal option for homeschooling based on the voucher program.
His explanation did not appear to sway Massey, who described it as “deliberately misleading.”
“This strikes me as something that people wanted to do, and we’re going to ask for forgiveness later if necessary,” he said. “That was never talked about.”
Families receiving the vouchers this year, including those who used it for home instruction, have had mostly positive experiences, according to a report last month from the state Education Oversight Committee.
Becca Williams, a mother of four homeschooled children, told senators that the $7,500 scholarships have helped her better understand her kids’ learning styles and accommodate their mental health needs.
“It’s been extremely beneficial to them,” she said.
While the department held out the law’s testing requirement as a justification for its interpretation of the legislation, its staff have not yet turned over the results to the EOC.
It has attributed that delay to the disruption following the S.C. Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that using the scholarships for private school tuition violated the state constitution, which it said shifted the reporting responsibility to parents. Their hodge-podge data submission has made compiling and validating the data “extremely time intensive,” according to Weaver’s letter.
The court’s ruling did not disrupt the participation of “unbundlers” in the program, the department’s December report notes.
Legislators passed a revamped version of the law last year, again allowing parents to use the scholarships for private school tuition. Weaver and Gov. Henry McMaster are now pushing for them to expand the program to 20,000 slots next school year — 5,000 more than is already set to happen under the law.
Critics have urged lawmakers to wait on any expansion until they can address other reported issues, including the EOC’s finding that some providers may be using the scholarships to increase prices.
Reach Ian Grenier at 803-968-1951. Follow him on X @IanGrenier1.