Strong Policy Wins in 2025, Even More Momentum in 2026

Education Scholarship Accounts Restored for SC Families 

In perhaps the most significant win of the year, South Carolina families are enjoying the benefits of a school choice scholarship program that is bigger and better than ever before.  

After the state Supreme Court ripped education scholarship accounts (ESAs) away from low-income students in the middle of the 2024-25 school year, Palmetto Promise immediately took action. Within days of the ruling, our team traveled to every corner of the state to gather moving video testimonials from affected parents and kids. We collected over 70 pages of written testimony from affected families and shared it with state legislators. As a result, school choice became the first item on the agenda for the General Assembly’s 2025 legislative session, with a series of rare pre-session Education committee meetings that ensured a revamped choice program (contained within S.62) made it to the Senate floor the first week of session. 

Our efforts went beyond just policy; it was personal. Under the leadership of President & CEO Wendy Damron, Palmetto Promise raised over $2.5 million in private donations for a Rescue Fund so no child would be forced to leave his or her school as a result of the mid-year court decision.  

Our efforts paid off. In May 2025, Governor McMaster signed into law an expanded ESA program—the Education Scholarship Trust Fund (ESTF) that 10,000 students are currently enjoying, with thousands more scholarships on the way in the coming years. 

Palmetto Promise’s work to restore education freedom in South Carolina was recognized with the top national award from the State Policy Network—a national cooperative of state-based policy organizations—over the summer. We are seeing South Carolinians embrace this new education program, with students from every single county applying, and a program waitlist nearing 10,000. Applications for the 2026-27 school year open in January. You can visit SCSchoolChoice.com for more information. 

Public School Choice Opens Up 

A lesser-known benefit of the ESTF law the inclusion of a public school choice (“interdistrict open enrollment,” or for our purposes, just “open enrollment”) provision for all SC students, not just those in the ESTF program. The expansion of public school choice was a top priority in our Palmetto Freedom Agenda, and over the summer, we reported on the impact of the new private choice law on public school choice. 

S.62 required the South Carolina Department of Education to develop and publish model guidelines for how school districts can enact public school choice policies that will allow students to transfer between public schools if space is available. We recently submitted a detailed public comment on how these regulations can be strengthened even further, and we look forward to continuing to work both with the South Carolina Department of Education and lawmakers on further securing families’ newly-established right to the choice of a variety of public school options.  

School Boards Finally Required to Livestream All Meetings 

In July 2024, our team conducted a first-of-its-kind assessment of all school districts in the state of South Carolina to see which districts make their school board meetings accessible online. A common critique of legislation mandating livestreaming for school boards has been that most districts were already streaming meetings, so it was argued that a law of this kind was unnecessary.  

Our research found that to be false.  

Only 13 school districts met our “gold standard”—actively livestreaming their meetings and having a codified rule in their school board policy manual that meetings must be streamed. Our research revealed that 44 school districts livestreamed meetings but had no requirements “on the books” to do so. This meant that at any point, any of those districts could have decided to hold a particularly controversial meeting without streaming video online (and we have heard from concerned citizens that this is a real and frequent problem)! 11 school districts did not live stream their meetings, and did not have any policies requiring them to do so. 5 school districts actively violated their own board policies requiring live-streaming, meaning they did not provide any method for citizens to access board meetings online. 

Policy Analyst Felicity Ropp testified before the House Education Committee this spring and shared our findings with legislators. She emphasized a key point that we made in our 2024 report—that the real heavy-lifting of school board policymaking is often done in committee, and that all meetings subject to FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) should be required to be livestreamed. The resulting legislation, S.77, was signed into law this May and included every one of our recommendations. 

What’s On Deck for 2026:  

• Parent Rights/Curriculum Transparency. Parents should be able to go online and know the curriculum being taught in their child’s school. A new library book regulation that restricts sexually explicit material from being available in our public schools is a great first step toward this goal, but at Palmetto Promise we believe that we need to fully protect parental rights by codifying those rights into state statute, not just including them as a budget proviso that must be renewed year-to-year (as we have for the past decade). 

• Higher Education Reforms. Higher education needs reform as well. Among these reforms are requiring members of university boards of trustees to be properly trained, ensuring that students are indeed reading the nation’s founding documents as a part of their college work as state law requires, and that academic programs are reviewed regularly so that poorly enrolled majors can be eliminated. We are also looking for additional free speech protections that will allow student political views to be expressed on campuses without facing discrimination from school administrators or worrying about protestors attempting to “shout them down.” 

• School Choice Protection & Expansion. Now is not the time to back down from our state’s support of school choice. In fact, we need to advance the education freedom cause even further! South Carolina voters are overwhelmingly in favor of universal ESA scholarships. That would mean that any student may enjoy a customized education, not just those in certain zip codes or income brackets. Should they choose to do so, legislators have the ability to fund more ESTF scholarships in the state budget than those referenced in the authorizing legislation! With such a long waitlist and high demand from parents, this should be a top priority. 

• Charter School Funding Protection. In 2025, traditional public school districts—even shrinking ones—were successful in shifting funds away from charter schools. Make no mistake. This is a penalty for Charter growth and success. We will work to protect the existing funding formulas for charter schools and to increase funding wherever possible. 

• K-12 Grading Policy Reforms. Districts across the state restrict a teacher’s ability to assign honest grades to their students. They do this by implementing “grade floors” that establish a minimum score for students, even those who do little or no schoolwork. Grades should reflect the actual work that students do, so the parents, teachers, and administrators have an accurate picture of the students’ academic abilities and support needs. Similarly, schools should not be able to abuse credit recovery programs for these students that allow them to earn credit for these classes without requiring them to demonstrate mastery of the content. A statewide, cross-district reform to state grading policies is long overdue.