Charlotte Christian School states on its website that all families applying for financial assistance for the 2024-25 school year must also apply to North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program. The same is true of Trinity Academy in Raleigh, North Raleigh Christian Academy and many other schools in the state that accept voucher payments.
It makes sense. If the state is handing out free money, why wouldn’t every school want that to help pay for tuition instead of their own scholarships and assistance. Why wouldn’t any parent want to take advantage of it?
There’s at least one problem, though: In many cases, every taxpayer is footing the bill for people who already can afford private school. And it’s likely going to get even more expensive.
Expanding North Carolina’s private school voucher program has been a top priority of Republican lawmakers for years. Since creating the program a decade ago, lawmakers have eliminated income eligibility requirements, making it so anyone can apply to the program. The result is that some schools have now shifted the burden of providing tuition assistance to lower-income families onto the state by mandating that families apply to the voucher program when requesting financial aid — and that North Carolinians are paying for affluent families to send their kids to private school.
But there is a cost to radically expanding voucher programs and having the government foot the bill for private school tuition. Arizona was the first state in the country to offer universal school choice, and it’s now paying the price. A new ProPublica report found that the program has cost more than expected, and is now contributing to a massive budget shortfall that has prompted deep cuts to critical programs and services, including water infrastructure projects and highway expansions.
Republicans in Arizona claimed that the voucher program would actually save the state money because oftentimes the amount of the voucher is less than what the state spends on the child when it is enrolled in public school. North Carolina Republicans have claimed the same thing. That might have been the case when voucher programs were narrow in scope, with payments going only toward those who would otherwise remain in public school. But the problem now, ProPublica reported, is that many voucher recipients are students who were already attending private school in the first place — so the state is now spending money on those children that it was not spending before.
The same is becoming true in North Carolina, especially when private schools are now requiring families to apply to the voucher program in order to receive financial assistance. For many families, that wasn’t an option before, so the burden of tuition was shouldered entirely by the family and any aid or scholarships provided by the school itself.
Lawmakers have made it clear they plan to expand the program even more , which will likely subsidize tuition costs for wealthy families who already attend private school. When Republicans removed the income eligibility requirements for Opportunity Scholarships last year, applications hit a record high, increasing by more than 500% from the year prior. More than half of those applications came from families in Tier 3 and Tier 4. A family of four in Tier 3 has an annual household income of up to $259,740, while Tier 4 includes the wealthiest families.
However, demand for voucher funding still exceeded supply , so only lower-income families received a subsidy for the upcoming school year. That left 55,000 families on the waitlist, the vast majority of whom wouldn’t have qualified for a voucher before the income caps were removed, The News & Observer reported . Republican lawmakers now plan to further increase voucher funding by several hundred million dollars to clear the waitlist, saying they “did not intend for there to be a wait list under any income level.”
“[Legislators] are wanting to assume costs for a whole new sector of education that the state has previously never assumed before,” Kris Nordstrom, a policy analyst with the NC Justice Center, told me.
That could have consequences. The General Assembly’s nonpartisan Fiscal Research division has already predicted that North Carolina could have a budget shortfall of more than $2 billion by 2028, and that hole will be dug deeper if lawmakers continue to expand the program, Nordstrom said.
Nordstrom said that what’s happening in Arizona should serve as a warning for North Carolina. For private schools and wealthy families who are getting a subsidy, vouchers are a great deal. For taxpayers, though? Not so much.
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