New data: 12,000 NC students have used Opportunity Scholarships to leave public schools last 2 years

More than 12,000 North Carolina students left a public school for a private school in the last two years using the state's general private school tuition assistance program, new data shows.

That represents a loss of about $97.3 million in state headcount-driven revenue for the public schools, the state Department of Public Instruction estimates.

The state effectively saved $25.7 million on those students by spending less on their Opportunity Scholarship vouchers than they spent on their headcount-based public school funding. At the same time, the state is spending more overall on the Opportunity Scholarship program because more than 60,000 new recipients the past two years didn't previously go to a public school. That could be because they were already private school students, were new kindergarteners, were new to the state or moved to a private school from a homeschool.

The Opportunity Scholarship program provides tuition vouchers to any North Carolina family that enrolls their child in a private school, up to about $7,700 this school year, depending on the family's income.

The program has been one of the state's biggest educational investments in recent years --- and one of the most contested by people who believe the money spent on the program should stay in the public sector.

Democrats view the expanded Opportunity Scholarship voucher program, which is now available to families of all incomes who were already attending private school, as a diversion of state money that could have been used on public schools instead. Democratic lawmakers have introduced numerous bills to eliminate the program or reduce its funding.

Republicans have largely favored the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program as a means of helping families afford private schools as alternatives to public school education when that public school education isn't working for their families.

The program serves about 107,000 students this year, costing about $587 million, both drastic increases from when it started more than a decade ago as a program serving only the state's lowest-income residents who were also not yet enrolled in a private school.

Since 2024, the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program is now open to all families of North Carolina school-aged children, and it allows them to apply for funding to send their children to a private school. The student must still be admitted to the private school. About two-thirds of private schools accept Opportunity Scholarships and some now require that students apply for the voucher before applying for school endowment-funded financial aid.

That 2024 expansion, which attracted nearly 50,000 new students to the program, is why the state now reports on the program's potential financial impact on public schools, though the expansion's impact was initially smaller than some feared, when considered at a statewide level.

School losses, school savings

For the state, the program represents cost increases and relatively little savings, given the price tag of more than half a billion dollars.

No money is saved when providing vouchers to the students who weren't in public school before, resulting in a net increase in education spending by the state.

If the state saves any money from the Opportunity Scholarships program, it's supposed to reinvest that money into public schools.

The state would save money if students moved from a public school to a private school using an Opportunity Scholarship that amounted to less than what the state was paying for that student to be educated in a public school.

For example, if the state spent an average of $8,000 on 100 students that each qualified for an Opportunity Scholarship of $4,000, the state would save $400,000 by those students transferring to a private school using the voucher.

The $25 million in savings from the public school students transferring to private schools should trigger a reinvestment of that amount in public schools, under the law that expanded the Opportunity Scholarship program. That's on top of the $10.1 million saved the year before that has yet to be reinvested in public schools this current year, as DPI officials say they understand it.

"We did not receive that $10 million from last year," Rob Dietrich, DPI's senior director of enterprise data and reporting, told the State Board of Education on Thursday.

State lawmakers have yet to agree on a comprehensive new budget for the current school year, in part disagreeing over how much to cut certain taxes next year and how much to spend on teacher pay, among other things.

On Thursday, state Board Member Jill Camnitz asked whether lawmakers could consider any money provided to schools already has counting toward that $10 million.

Amanda Fratrik, DPI's school business services director, said that was possible but that she believed the law established that the funds were to be reinvested in some capacity.

The vast majority of the new Opportunity Scholarship voucher recipients during the 2024-25 school year --- all but about 6,700 --- were private school students in the fall of 2023, according to last year's report.

Still, that translated into larger dollar amounts for school districts across the state.

The state spent an average of about $7,900 per student during the 2024-25 school year, and its funding formulas are largely based on headcount. A loss of 6,700 students for that school year translates to more than $50 million in state revenues lost, in addition to an unknown amount of federal revenue based on headcount.