Does School Choice Save Taxpayer Dollars? Yes.

School choice opponents commonly claim that “public dollars should go to public schools,” so anyone who wants their child to attend a private school should do so with their own, private money.  Although that can be a compelling argument, school choice opponents are actually calling for more taxpayer spending by opposing choice in South Carolina.

In April, the South Carolina Department of Education released data on the number of Education Scholarship Trust Fund (ESTF) applications and recipients by county.  Using this data, and pairing it with the most recent per pupil revenue estimates from the South Carolina Office of Revenue of Fiscal Affairs (RFA), we can find several interesting data points:

• The total amount of ESTF awards in a given county, calculated by multiplying the number of ESTF recipients by $7,634 – the award amount for the 2026-27 school year;
• The amount of money the state and county would have spent if those ESTF recipients attended their residentially-zoned private school, calculated by multiplying the number of ESTF recipients by the 2025-26 per pupil revenue estimates from RFA (the most recent year available); and
• By comparing the two numbers above, whether the state and each county can anticipate saving money thanks to the ESTF program since ESTF recipients do not receive the same amount of funding as if they had attended their traditional public school and do not benefit from local revenue.

Due to limitations on the data available, we do have to acknowledge that not every student who receives ESTF funding was a prior public school student and there is a small percentage of students who attend public charter schools and are technically double-funded by the state.  However, the overwhelming majority of students receiving ESTF are being educated outside of the public school system, so we “rounded up” in this case.  As such, the numbers we found below describe a situation where school choice disappeared entirely from South Carolina and all ~15,000 ESTF recipients were forced back into their residentially-zoned public schools.

With that being said, our estimates (and they are estimates!) are staggering.  We find that the state saves money in all but three counties because of the ESTF program, and every county saves the entirety of their local funding share because families are still paying county taxes but do not benefit from it since they do not attend the local public school.

Below you can find state totals as well as an interactive map that provides county-level data for South Carolina.