SC schools chief has lost ‘trust’ of Senate over homeschoolers in voucher program
A leading Senate Republican told South Carolina’s top education official Thursday that her decision to welcome home-educated students into the state’s school voucher program had created a “real trust problem” that could have repercussions for her agenda down the road.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, made the comments during a Senate Education panel convened to give State Superintendent Ellen Weaver a chance to explain why her department had granted scholarships to students that lawmakers clearly intended to exclude from the program.
Rather than apologizing and promising to reverse course, as senators had hoped, Weaver doubled down on her department’s policy and defended its implementation of the program.
“Respectfully, the department would submit that it has not created a new category of homeschooling,” she told the panel. “We have administered the program within the parameters established in the language of the enacted statute.”
Weaver’s response did not sit well with Massey or Sen. Greg Hembree, R-Horry, who chaired Thursday’s hearing.
“If this is the position that the department is going to take, I don’t think we can change it,” Massey said. “But I don’t think it’s a faithful implementation of the law, and I think this is going to affect everything else that happens here forward.”
The powerful senator praised Weaver as a sharp leader who was brimming with ideas, but said her handling of this issue would make lawmakers reluctant to support her proposals in the future.
“You are on the verge of whatever ideas you have in 2028 or 2030 dying today,” Massey told her.
The crux of the dispute between senators and the Department of Education revolves around the definition of homeschooling.
When legislators wrote the voucher law to explicitly exclude homeschool students participating in any of the three statutorily-defined home instruction options, they intended to prohibit the participation of any student who was educated at home.
They were unaware the law might be interpreted to permit the participation of students educated at home through a program outside the traditional homeschool framework, which some have termed “Option 4.”
Hembree said Thursday that when he first heard the department was granting scholarships to Option 4 students, he didn’t believe it.
“Nobody on this committee had any idea that the department had gone for Homeschool 4,” he said. “Nobody knew about it. We’d never discussed it in the debate.”
Department officials dispute Hembree’s account. They said the department distributed an FAQ sheet to members of the General Assembly in March 2025, two months before the current voucher law passed, that explained parents could educate their children at home using voucher funds as long as they didn’t join a homeschool association or local co-op.
By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, 1,182 of the 10,000 students enrolled in the state’s voucher program were being educated at home as “unbundlers,” the department’s term for voucher recipients who neither participate in a legislatively-defined homeschooling program nor attend a private school full-time, Weaver said Thursday.
Historically, unbundling has not been an option in South Carolina because it does not satisfy the state’s compulsory attendance requirement. Under the state’s voucher law, however, the compulsory attendance requirement is met as long as parents attest that their children are being provided instruction in several core subjects and taking certain assessments.
For that reason, among others, the Department of Education has argued for unbundlers’ inclusion in the state voucher program, which subsidizes the educational expenses of qualified families that opt not to send their K-12 children to zoned public schools.
Participation in the program this year is limited to 10,000 students whose families earn no more than three times the federal poverty level, or $96,450 for a family of four.
“We don’t believe that we have the statutory authority to deny these students who are meeting all of the criteria of the program,” Weaver said of unbundlers. “To do so would actually open up the program and the department to potential legal liability.”
Senators reject the department’s interpretation of the law and said they never intended, nor even contemplated, the possibility that a new class of home-educated students would emerge from the voucher program.
“This strikes me as something that people wanted to do, and we’re going to ask for forgiveness later, if necessary,” Massey said earlier this month.
Hembree, who last year assured his Senate colleagues that the voucher bill excluded homeschoolers, said he now felt he’d “committed a fraud” on the Senate.
“I have been made a liar through your interpretation and your implementation of a policy that you clearly like, that you clearly support,” he told Weaver.
The Horry County senator, who has filed legislation that would prevent unbundlers from participating in South Carolina’s school voucher program, asked the state superintendent Thursday if she’d support his bill and encourage the House to do the same.
Weaver would not commit to supporting the bill, but said she’d work with senators to figure out a path forward and promised to faithfully execute whatever the General Assembly ultimately passed.
“I’m deeply concerned about the students who are in the program right now,” she told Hembree. “I want to work with the Senate to ensure that those students are taken care of in some way that allows them a timeline to transition in a reasonable way if the Senate enacts a policy change.”
Hembree, who earlier this month expressed similar sentiments, on Thursday called attention to the 3,000 students on the voucher waitlist who, if not for the participation of unbundlers, might have received a scholarship this year.
“I think It’s important to note that there’s 1,182 kids out there that weren’t able to access the program based on your judgment of what you believe these statutes to mean,” the senator said.
A number of students who would be impacted by Hembree’s proposal to exclude unbundlers attended Thursday’s hearing alongside their parents.
Amanda McTeer, a mother of three who drove from Beaufort County for the hearing, said her two youngest children have benefited greatly from their participation in the state’s school voucher program.
A former public school teacher, McTeer quit her job about a decade ago to home-educate her children and hasn’t looked back. Prior to this year, she’d participated in one of the state’s approved homeschooling models, but now identifies as an unbundler.
The state-funded scholarships have allowed her to provide her children with opportunities that had previously been out of reach for their low-income family, McTeer said.
“Before, I was fully responsible for every single thing my kids did,” she explained. “But now, there are teachers or tutors who can accept funds, and we can have them go there.”
McTeer said she’s been disappointed by the recent debate around unbundling and is worried about the prospect of losing access to money that has made a material difference in her children’s lives.
“We’ve really worked hard for this,” she said of parents who have spent years advocating for South Carolina to enact a school voucher law. “What’s frustrating for me is having to go to Columbia and follow the meetings again … It’s taking time away from my kids.”
This story was originally published February 20, 2026 at 7:00 AM with the headline "SC schools chief has lost ‘trust’ of Senate over homeschoolers in voucher program."