NC voucher expansion would take a heavy toll on rural public schools | Opinion

Republican state lawmakers rely on rural voters to keep them in control of the General Assembly, but they’ve often used that power to alternatively neglect or abuse rural areas.

Republicans refused to expand Medicaid for more than a decade, even as rural hospitals closed or cut services for lack of the extra funding. They underfunded schools, the largest employer in most low-population counties. And they protect industrial hog and poultry operations that foul the air, water and soil in rural areas.

Now Republicans are lining up in favor of twin bills in the state House and Senate that could deliver the biggest blow yet. The “Choose Your School, Choose Your Future” legislation would provide universal vouchers to make it easier for all parents to send their children to a private school. The voucher amounts would vary with income, but even the wealthiest families would be eligible for a voucher equal to 45 percent of the state’s per-pupil allotment, now more than $7,200.

The expansion of the state’s Opportunity Scholarship program would siphon funds from all public schools, but it would be especially hard on rural school systems that have only a few thousand students. Those systems are a significant group in North Carolina, which has the second largest rural student population in the nation, behind only Texas.

Gerry Hancock, a lawyer representing a consortium of more than 70 of the state’s low-wealth school districts, told me, “It is a diversion of funding away from traditional public schools where they desperately need the funds to serve the children – most of the children in the state – who are still in public schools,” he said.

School districts are already dealing with the loss of state funding as per-pupil allotments go to more charter schools. Making vouchers universal will encourage more parents to enroll their children in private schools, many of them small, religious schools.

School districts will lose per-pupil state allotments but will still have the fixed expenses of transportation, utilities and building maintenance. Republicans hope to offset the loss by increasing funding for low-wealth schools, but that funding is uncertain year-to-year while the effects of fewer students will be continuous and growing.

Keith Sutton, a former Wake County school board member and a 2020 Democratic candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, is now the superintendent of schools in rural Warren County. He told me his district’s enrollment since 2017 has dropped from 2,141 to 1,730, in part because of students opting for charter schools. Losing more students to private schools would strain the district’s finances and likely lead to layoffs, he said.

“When you’re already struggling with resources, this would only make it worse, make it more difficult,” Sutton said. “It takes resources to maintain and improve schools, to hire and retain high quality staff. This would only add another blow to that work.”

Opportunity Scholarship vouchers go directly to the private schools, but there would be little oversight of how the funds are spent or the schools’ academic standards.

The lack of accountability reflects the real aim of “school choice” legislation. It’s not about putting children in better schools. It’s about weakening the dominance of public schools and their supposed “indoctrination” of students with a range of perspectives on history, culture and race that many Christian conservatives don’t share.

John deVille is a social studies teacher at Franklin High School in Macon County, where 12 schools serve about 4,500 students. He told me universal vouchers could devastate traditional public schools that are already struggling. “This is the last intentional nail in the K-12 education coffin,” he said.

Sutton hopes lawmakers will slow down and reconsider. “I would like them to take a little more time to study the implications for our most challenged school systems across the state,” he said.

But it appears too late for Republicans to have second thoughts about what they’re about to do to the people who helped put them in power.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com