NC governor, advocates call for more school voucher accountability after controversial sermon

North Carolina's governor and the leader of the state’s largest teacher group are calling for more accountability in the school voucher program after a pastor connected to a Union Co. school that receives taxpayer money gave a sermon justifying rape.

In a sermon last August, Bible Baptist Tabernacle pastor Bobby Leonard decried women who wear shorts instead of pants or dresses.

“If you dress like that and you get raped, and I’m on the jury, he’s going to go free," Leonard said from the pulpit. "You don’t like that, do you? I’m right, though. Because a man’s a man.”

The pastor apologized a few days later on the church’s website. “I am only beginning to understand the hurt and offense caused, and I take full responsibility,” Leonard said in the statement.

Neither the church nor the school responded Friday to WRAL's request for comment.

As Governor Roy Cooper pointed out in a video this week, the church’s school, Tabernacle Christian School, is largely funded by taxpayers.

Most of the students at Tabernacle Christian get vouchers, averaging more than $6,000 a year – one of the highest averages in the state. Like many private schools, it links directly to the application page for vouchers on its website.

In the 2022-23 school year, Tabernacle received $923,328 in vouchers for 152 students. In 2021-22, it received more than $556,500 for 133 students. That adds up to $1,480,000 in the past two school years.

NCAE President Tamika Walker Kelly called Leonard's sermon "alarming."

A longtime critic of school vouchers, Walker Kelly pointed out that there’s zero government oversight in North Carolina of what schools receiving taxpayer money are teaching students, or how those students perform.

"We believe that lawmakers should institute lots of means of accountability for public dollars being used by these private institutions," Walker Kelly told WRAL News.

For years now, state lawmakers have been steadily expanding the voucher program and increasing its funding, which is at nearly half a billion dollars this year. Meantime, public schools in North Carolina are ranked fourth worst nationally for state spending per pupil.

"We will continue to raise the point that until our public schools are fully funded, we should not be diverting money from them in order to fund schools that hold these types of beliefs," Walker Kelly said.