SC Gov. McMaster lays out new plan to spend $20M in federal COVID-19 education aid
Nearly a month after South Carolina’s high court rejected a second attempt by Gov. Henry McMaster to spend federal COVID-19 money on private schools, the governor announced new plans Tuesday to redirect nearly $20 million of that cash toward other educational needs.
McMaster said he will send $8 million to the state’s Technical College System in what he called “targeted grants” to job-train 3,100 South Carolinians in areas including computer and information technology, criminal justice and health care. Another $7 million will be given to South Carolina’s Department of Education and the state’s First Steps program to expand in-person and full-day 4-year-old kindergarten and day and summer programs for children whose families are eligible for Medicaid or that meet or fall below the federal poverty threshold of 185%.
And another nearly $5 million of the total $19.9 million will be sent to the state’s child-welfare agency to provide education services and tutoring for 600 of the state’s foster care children and other children living in the state’s 74 group homes.
“This is a good day for education and workforce in South Carolina,” said McMaster in his first in-person press conference since he entered quarantined after his positive COVID-19 diagnosis Christmas week.
The money stems from McMaster’s Governor’s Emergency Education Relief, or GEER account — a federal stream of money that runs through the U.S. Department of Education for governors to spend at their discretion on education needs in their states.
The Tuesday announcement caps a months-long legal tangle between McMaster and the courts that ensued after the governor tried to spend $32 million out of nearly $48.5 million total on COVID-19 relief for private schools and millions more on other private colleges, including $2.4 million for historically Black universities.
The state Supreme Court twice rejected that attempt, a decision McMaster Tuesday called again disappointing.
“We are disappointed in that decision and don’t agree with it, nonetheless that is the decision,” McMaster said.
Job training, tutoring and 4K
More than 3,000 South Carolinians will benefit from McMaster’s $8 million for technical college job-training programs through the Technical College System’s continuing education program, system’s director Dr. Tim Hardee said Tuesday.
With 16 colleges across the state, Hardee said the programs will be short term, run anywhere from 15 weeks or less, and students will get about $2,500 each.
State leaders see the program as an added help during the COVID-19 pandemic, which in its early phase last year shut down businesses and manufacturing across the state. Though most of those businesses have since reopened, thousands of South Carolinians still remain out of work. Hardee said Tuesday that the training in high-demand sectors will help fill up shortages.
“We will take people from unemployment to a trained skill that they will now possess and then be able to move into the workforce,” Hardee said.
Meanwhile, $7 million to expand and extend the state’s 4K program further checks the box on a priority list for the program’s directors, the governor and legislative leaders who have for years spent millions to get more children into the program.
The COVID-19 outbreak has cut into enrollment at the state’s 4K full-day programs.
The governor’s office said enrollment is down 12% in private schools and down 23% in public schools involved in the preschool program.
First Steps’ executive director Georgia Mjartan said Tuesday there are now more than 2,000 children enrolled in First Steps’ program and that the governor’s investment should help expand that enrollment figure to their goal of 3,000.
“Our hope is more families will be a part of this,” said Mjartan, who added that with the extension of the program after 2:30 p.m. will allow low-income parents “to have a job throughout the year” to better support their families.
Lastly, the governor said he will send nearly $5 million to the state’s Department of Social Services, about $4.3 million of which will provide tutoring services for at-risk children.
That funding will “strengthen and solidify” remote learning for many of the state’s most at-risk students, said DSS director Michael Leach, who said, the “intentional investment in education will help close educational achievement gaps.”
The governor’s GEER account still has $28 million left that McMaster can spend with a May 11 deadline, and the governor said Tuesday the state anticipates another $21 million from the federal government for education-related needs.
“This is a good day for South Carolina,” McMaster said.
This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 11:18 AM with the headline "SC Gov. McMaster lays out new plan to spend $20M in federal COVID-19 education aid."
