The Senate Finance committee this week approved a one-year budget directive to put the Education Oversight Committee in charge of collecting, analyzing and reporting the test results of voucher students, whose private school tuition and other education-related expenses are subsidized by taxpayer-funded scholarships.
The EOC, an independent body charged with assessing school performance and standards, is already supposed to handle the analysis and reporting of voucher student data, but has not previously been charged with collecting test results from education service providers and the parents of scholarship recipients.
State Senate Education Committee Chairman Greg Hembree, who introduced the measure Tuesday, said the EOC’s role working with public school student data for the annual state report card made it a natural fit to do the same for students enrolled in the state’s voucher program.
Hembree, an Horry County Republican who has clashed with the Department of Education over its decision to award vouchers to homeschool students, said his proposal was motivated by the challenge lawmakers have faced obtaining accurate data from the agency.
“I think it’s better governance to have a disinterested party collecting that data,” he said. “I know the Education Oversight Committee prides itself on being an honest broker — that’s the way they describe themselves — and this is the kind of data that’s just data. We need the honest data so we can make good decisions.”
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on Hembree’s proposal.
The agency, which is required by law to annually provide individual student assessment results and information to the EOC for analysis, has yet to do so since the program’s inception.
As a result, there’s no way for the public to know how voucher students are faring academically compared to their traditional public school counterparts.
State Superintendent Ellen Weaver told a Senate panel in February that the outstanding student assessment data would be transmitted to the EOC “in the next week.”
Seven weeks later, the department has yet to successfully transmit the data.
Representatives from the two agencies met recently to discuss details of the data transfer and appear to be close to a resolution.
“The department estimated that they would get us our requested data by Friday, April 10th,” EOC spokeswoman Tenell Felder wrote in an email Tuesday. “We are hopeful to receive the requested data on this date so that we can begin our verification process.”
Once the EOC receives the student assessment data, it will need additional time to analyze it before producing a report. The exact timeline for that is to be determined, Felder said. SC Supreme Court decision impacted data collection
Education department officials have blamed their test collection delays on the South Carolina Supreme Court’s 2024 decision prohibiting the use of taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school tuition.
Following the decision, private schools, which had been the primary vehicles for transmitting student assessment data to the department, were removed from its Education Scholarship Trust Fund reporting and payment system, Weaver explained in a Feb. 4 letter to a Senate panel.
With schools no longer able to report through the department’s system, the parents of education scholarship recipients were tasked with transmitting student assessment data directly to the department.
Collecting the data from parents, who often submitted their children’s test results as screenshots or non-standard files, made the process of compiling and validating the data “extremely time intensive,” Weaver wrote.
“We have been working diligently at the staff level to collect those tests, essentially one-by-one, from parents,” she testified Feb. 19 before the same Senate panel.
Weaver said the department had received test results from all but 78 of last year’s roughly 1,900 scholarship recipients, and had removed from the program all students for whom it had been unable to obtain results.
The collection of student assessment data should be easier this year in light of changes to the state voucher law that opened the door for private schools to return as service providers and resume responsibility for reporting student assessment data, department officials have said.
That said, nearly 1,200 of this year’s education scholarship recipients are educated at home and should by and large be responsible for transmitting their results directly to the department.
Individual participant reporting could increase further next year, as more than 2,600 home-educated students have been awarded scholarships, barring the adoption of a recently proposed measure that would suspend their enrollment. Will responsibility for data collection really change hands?
The EOC’s takeover of data collection for the voucher program still remains far from guaranteed.
Earlier this year, the House budget committee adopted a provision identical to Hembree’s that was stripped from the lower chamber’s spending plan on the House floor.
State Rep. Neal Collins, who introduced the House measure, said he also was driven to act by the S.C. Department of Education’s delay in transmitting student assessment data.
The Pickens Republican, who sits on the Education Oversight Committee, expressed disappointment that his measure was struck from the budget as “non-germane,” but said he was glad the Senate had reinserted it.
“As conservatives,” Collins said via text message, “we should hold all programs accountable, but especially new ones before investing more in them.” If the EOC does end up being tasked with voucher student data collection, the agency said it would seek to collaborate with the S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs office to build a secure portal to receive and store student-level data. The department had a similar arrangement when it collected individual student data from private and independent schools for the Educational Credit for Exceptional Needs Children program, Felder said.
© 2026 The Herald (Rock Hill, S.C.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
