Charter school accountability bill awaits hefty amendment in SC House panel
One of South Carolina’s leading school choice advocates is soon expected to introduce a lengthy amendment to a charter school accountability bill the state Senate passed earlier this year.
House Education committee Chair Shannon Erickson, R- Beaufort, said Tuesday she would introduce her 36-page amendment at an upcoming hearing.
“I figured we needed to have a large discussion about this and it would be more appropriate to do it with a large body instead of doing it twice,” the Beaufort County Republican told members of a House Education panel, which briefly discussed the Senate bill Tuesday before reporting it to the full Education committee without changes.
Erickson’s amendment, which she provided to The State Media Co., roughly doubles the size of the already-extensive bill.
Outside of making some changes to virtual education, the amendment primarily addresses the business side of charter schooling, which has evolved significantly in the three decades since the General Assembly passed the state’s Charter Schools Act in 1996.
“No one is disagreeing with the programmatic choices (charter schools) get to make,” Erickson said Tuesday. “Most of what we have heard is: ‘How do you follow the dollars? And who gets paid what, when and how?’ ”
The full Education committee was scheduled to take up the Senate bill — and Erickson’s amendment to it — Tuesday afternoon, but postponed its discussion after debate on other legislation ran long. As of Wednesday morning, a hearing on Erickson’s amendment to the bill had yet to be rescheduled.
S.454, passed unanimously back in February, shores up the regulatory framework of the state’s decades-old charter schools law by clarifying financial and operational practices and establishing guardrails for education management companies and privately-run charter school authorizers.
Charter schools are independently-operated public schools that are afforded additional flexibility in their financial, personnel and curriculum choices to encourage innovation.
Unlike traditional public schools, charters are approved and overseen by authorizers, with whom they enter into contracts that codify their mission, educational structure, governance policies and performance goals.
Authorizers can be local districts, the legislatively-created Public Charter School District or institutions of higher education or their affiliates. They provide support and oversight to the schools under their charge in exchange for a portion of their state funding.
While early charter schools were primarily mom-and-pop shops authorized by local districts, today the sector is dominated by deep-pocketed education management organizations, or EMOs, that operate schools under the auspices of statewide, and in some cases, privately-run authorizers that are exempt from state ethics and government accountability laws.
The charter school reform bill is an attempt to rectify the mismatch between current law — which doesn’t address many of the potential conflicts of interest that have emerged in the sector — and the present-day industry landscape.
Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree, who has introduced multiple iterations of the bill over the years, said it was conceived as a means of preventing struggling charter schools from switching sponsors to evade accountability, a process known as authorizer shopping.
Over time, the Horry County Republican’s bill has grown to include enhanced oversight and accountability of authorizers and additional transparency around complex industry relationships.
Erickson’s amendment to the bill makes more than two-dozen changes, although many simply expand upon the reforms outlined in the original version.
A few notable additions include a requirement that charter schools post monthly transaction registers on their websites; a prohibition on members of the General Assembly serving on charter school or authorizer boards or having an ownership stake in education management companies or charter school development companies; and a restriction on authorizers contracting with schools for services over which they have direct oversight.
Some of the changes to virtual instruction included in the amendment didn’t sit well with one charter school executive.
David Crook, CEO of the Cyber Academy of South Carolina and Heron Virtual Academy, two of the state’s 11 virtual charter schools, said a proposed requirement that virtual charters provide no more than 20% asynchronous instruction was an unreasonable expectation.
“It fundamentally changes how virtual schools operate to arbitrarily require 80% synchronous time,” Crook said in an interview after Tuesday’s hearing. “What does that literally mean? If you go into a brick-and-mortar classroom anywhere in South Carolina, no teacher is teaching synchronously 80% of the time.”
The amendment defines synchronous instruction as “virtual instruction in which the instructor is able to interact with students in real time.” Asynchronous instruction, according to the amendment, would include recorded lessons, lectures and other on-demand instruction that does not require the student and instructor to be present online at the same time.
Crook said mandating 80% synchronous instruction fails to recognize the autonomy and individuality of students. While the vast majority of students at his schools attend live instruction when it’s offered, he said there were instances when synchronous instruction was unnecessary or unworkable.
“We’ve got students who are working full time. We’ve got students who are parents,” Crook said. “So that kid has to stop parenting in order to be in a synchronous class that he or she may not need? It’s just arbitrary, and not based on any input from anyone.”
When asked at Tuesday’s subcommittee hearing whether her amendment effectively “eliminates” virtual charter schools, Erickson told state Rep. Jay Kilmartin, R-Lexington, that was not the case.
“I am not aware that we’ve ever talked about removing the virtual schools,” she said. “I believe they’re a very important component to what we do. There’s children who are making great strides in that learning system.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 10:57 AM with the headline "Charter school accountability bill awaits hefty amendment in SC House panel."