Scoppe: You get a free computer, and you get a free computer, and you … don’t

Some people wait until August to buy a new computer, for the kids or for themselves, and specifically the first weekend in August, so they can take advantage of South Carolina’s silly little back-to-school sales-tax “holiday.” Spend $1,000 on a laptop, and the savings can run from $60 to $90 depending on where you live, which seems like a great deal if you don’t pay enough attention to prices to realize you can probably get a better deal some other time of the year.

Starting this year, select savvy shoppers will have the taxpayers pick up 100 percent of the tab. And cover a lot of other school costs while they’re at it.

A new state law means the lucky parents of up to 10,000 students — rising to a minimum of 15,000 next year — can reduce their costs for sending the kids to public school by as much as $7,500. That’s $7,500 that most parents will still be paying from their own bank accounts, or credit cards.

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In addition to the laptop, and printer, and other “technological devices” that our throw-taxpayer-money-at-a-few-parents S.C. Education Department approves, parents can hand taxpayers the bill for school uniforms (if they’re required) as well as any fees they have to pay for their kids to play football or run track or join the cheer squad or participate in band, to attend summer school and afterschool programs and take the PSAT or the SAT or the ACT more than once. We’ll also pick up the field trip fees and technology fees and parking fees and just-because fees, and pay for tutors. And we’ll pay for “any consumables and items necessary to complete a curriculum or that are otherwise applicable to a course of study that has been approved by the department,” whatever that means.

Taxpayers will even provide up to $750 a year for Uber to pick the kids up after school, or drive them to school in the morning, so parents don’t have to be bothered.

Of course, this being a government program, there are caveats.

This taxpayer largesse is not available to parents who send their kids to their neighborhood school — only those whose kids attend a charter school or transfer to a different public school inside or outside their district.

Technically, there’s an income limit, although at $96,450 for a family of four — rising to $160,750 next year — it’ll be hard to find many public school families in South Carolina who don’t qualify.

All about vouchers

And the biggest limitation is that 10,000-student cap, which covers both the public school families reducing their out-of-pocket costs and private-school families. Because this giveaway is part of South Carolina’s new school voucher law.

I suspect that many if not most of the parents who managed to grab those $7,500 “scholarships” for this year are using them to help cover private-school tuition, since those parents and said private schools are the ones who have been lobbying the Legislature for the free government money for years.

But the House has already voted once to eliminate the caps and create a “universal” voucher program, with no income limits and no limit on the number of vouchers. There’s no reason to think it’ll take long for the Senate to come around. And before you know it: You get a free computer, and you get a free computer, and you get a free computer! As long as you don’t attend your neighborhood school.

Remember when legislators used to assure us that the “can’t even begin to project it” price tag for a voucher program just for “poor” kids and kids with disabilities was ridiculous — that even if we didn’t cap enrollment, vouchers would always serve a niche market, because most parents want to keep their kids in the public schools?

The modest expansion of the program to cover expenses for kids in public schools in 2023 and the much larger expansion this year make those assurances seem almost as quaint as those same lawmakers’ assurances that the program would be targeted to poor kids, and that it would come with muscular accountability measures.

From a policy perspective, the public school component is bizarre. We already provide more state funding for charter schools than traditional public schools. And if legislators want to increase public school choice, all they need to do is require every district to allow open enrollment. Well, that and pay for transportation for students attending anything other than their neighborhood school, because that is a real barrier for a lot of kids.

Legal maneuver

But the public school component has nothing to do with policy; it was designed to help legislators weave their way around what a badly written Supreme Court order made them believe were the parameters of a state constitutional prohibition on using public funds to directly benefit private schools.

Both the new law and the one the court struck down last year sought to bypass that restriction by allowing families to receive vouchers if they chose to move their kids to a public school other than the one the district provides for them.

This raises a host of policy questions beyond the ones entailed in the idea of paying parents to send their kids to private schools, mostly revolving around this one: Why is our Legislature so determined to provide financial assistance for kids whose parents are actively involved in their education and not for the kids who most need that assistance — the ones with parents who can’t or won’t do more to help them learn?

If we were prioritizing the extra spending for kids with demonstrated need, that would make some sense. Instead, we’re prioritizing kids lucky enough to be born to active and savvy parents. That is, kids who start off with advantages that many kids will never have. The public school component of the voucher law is just one more way we’re doing that.

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