After years of inaction, SC lawmakers have reached a deal on charter school reform
With just days remaining in the legislative session, South Carolina lawmakers have reached a deal to bring greater transparency and accountability to the state’s largely unregulated charter school sector.
The compromise legislation, an amalgam of separate charter school reform bills approved earlier this year by the House and Senate, passed unanimously in the upper chamber Tuesday following a week of interchamber negotiations.
The House concurred with the compromise bill Wednesday morning, sending it to the governor’s desk for his signature.
Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree, the original bill’s sponsor, described the amended legislation as the base Senate bill with a number of improvements.
“Quite honestly,” said Hembree, an Horry County Republican, “we were able to sit down and kind of look at some of (the House’s) ideas and came up with things that we both felt were more beneficial to the overall effort.”
Broadly speaking, the legislation enhances oversight of authorizers, the largely unaccountable entities responsible for opening, closing and overseeing charter schools; increases transparency requirements for authorizers, schools and the management companies that operate them; and clarifies certain terms and processes left vague or undefined in the state’s decades-old law that governs charter schools and their authorizers.
The S.C Department of Education, which currently has a limited role in the state’s charter school sector, would take on the responsibility of overseeing and evaluating authorizers, which can be local school districts, the legislatively-created Public Charter School District and institutions of higher learning or their nonprofit affiliates.
The passage of the accountability-focused bill marks the culmination of a multiyear effort to modernize the Charter Schools Act amid growing concerns about scant oversight and conflicts of interest in the burgeoning sector.
While the General Assembly has long recognized the insufficiency of the state’s charter schools law, it hadn’t made updating the law a priority until this year.
“This is now an issue that has sort of bubbled to the top,” Hembree said in January, after Senate leaders announced that charter school reform would be a focus of the upcoming legislative session.
The Senate, which for the past three years had failed to pass charter school reform proposals, moved quickly this session to approve Hembree’s carefully-vetted bill.
Following the bill’s passage in February, House Education committee chair Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, got to work gathering stakeholder input for a House amendment.
Erickson’s collaborative, two-month process concluded in late April when she introduced a 45-page amendment to the Senate bill.
The lengthy amendment, which the House adopted unanimously, built upon the Senate’s reforms, but also revised the upper chamber’s definition of a charter school authorizer to exclude organizations affiliated with colleges and universities.
That change, which Erickson said was necessary to prevent higher ed authorizers from delegating their responsibilities to “unaccountable” private organizations, would have forced both the Charter Institute at Erskine and the Voorhees University Charter Institute of Learning to reconstitute under the umbrella of their affiliated universities.
Such a restructuring won’t be necessary under the compromise bill approved Tuesday.
The amended legislation permits nonprofit associations directly affiliated with public or private colleges and universities to act as authorizers as long as they “serve at the pleasure of, and be subject to the oversight and control of, the governing body of the institution.”
While the compromise bill uses the Senate’s definition of an authorizer and drops some requirements the House added for locally-authorized schools, it largely retains the additional accountability and transparency measures added by the lower chamber.
Among the House’s additions included in the final bill are a provision that charter schools post monthly transaction registers and credit card statements on their websites, and a requirement that schools wishing to expand beyond their current location go through the standard application process.
The latter measure was inspired by Gray Collegiate Academy’s bypassing of the normal application process this past fall to open a new “satellite” campus in Irmo, about a 15-minute drive from its West Columbia campus.
“We had an issue with a school that had one location in one part of a county and built an entirely different school in another part of the county doing the same function that was literally 20 miles away,” Hembree said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “They did not seek another application. They just said ‘This is the same school. We don’t have to go through that process again.’ ”
Going forward, schools that want to open a separate location more than one mile from their original campus will be required to submit an application for replication.
The compromise bill also retains multiple House-added restrictions on authorizers’ ability to sell services to schools they oversee and forbids authorizers from “unfairly” competing with private entities that offer similar services to schools.
Multiple lawsuits filed against the Charter Institute at Erskine, an affiliate of Erskine College, allege the state’s largest authorizer attempted to push out education management companies working with its schools in order to take their business.
The state’s legislative watchdog agency, which last year investigated the district over concerns about its financial and operational practices, found that while the Charter Institute was not acting as an education management organization, it had stood up a vendor that contracted with four of its schools.
The Charter Institute defended its financial support of the vendor, Teach Right USA, as “lawful and appropriate,” but ultimately terminated its relationship with the organization to alleviate the Legislative Audit Council’s concerns.
This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 8:27 AM with the headline "After years of inaction, SC lawmakers have reached a deal on charter school reform."