North Carolina Auditor Dave Boliek plans to audit the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the state’s popular voucher program that now serves roughly 107,000 students at a cost of around $587 million a year.
Boliek, a first-term Republican, told The Assembly, which first reported the audit, that the program had surfaced in his office’s risk analysis and that he hoped to publish findings this fall.
“One of the things that we want to look at are new tranches of money from a risk analysis, and the Opportunity Scholarship does fit within that,” Boliek told The Assembly. “We certainly would like to be able to have an audit completed of the Opportunity Scholarship [program] in due course. When that is actually going to happen will depend on the amount of work that is required and the schedule of the professional team.”
A spokesman for the auditor’s office, Randy Brechbiel, said in a statement to the News & Observer that the program “falls within our scope” alongside the school districts, state agencies, universities, and local governments the office routinely examines.
The voucher program has grown substantially since lawmakers first created it in 2013 to help students from low-income families leave low-performing public schools and attend a private school. The Republican-led legislature made the program universally available beginning with the 2024-2025 school year — meaning all families, regardless of income, are eligible to participate, but on a sliding scale that gives larger vouchers to lower income families.
Each scholarship is worth between $3,578 and $7,942 each year, spread across four income tier levels ranging from $61,050 for a family of four in the first tier to $274,725 a year in the fourth tier.
“Advocates of the Opportunity Scholarship Program welcome a proper audit of the program,” said Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation. “It’s important for parents, schools and the public to know that the NC State Education Assistance Authority is administering the program fairly and efficiently.”
The review could create friction within Boliek’s own party. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly turned aside Democratic proposals to expand the program’s reporting requirements. There is no public data on how voucher students perform on standardized tests.
The audit comes amid a sustained Democratic effort to scale back the program. Gov. Josh Stein’s recommended budget, released in April, would impose a moratorium on new scholarships and cap eligibility at roughly $90,000 a year for a family of four — a change Carolina Journal reported would remove an estimated 60,000 of the program’s current recipients.
A state report presented to the State Board of Education in May found that more than 12,000 students used Opportunity Scholarships to leave public schools over the past two school years, with the largest share coming from the middle-income tier that the cap in Stein’s proposed budget would split, Carolina Journal reported.
Democratic state lawmakers have mounted their own effort to cut the program. In early May, four House members filed a bill to cut nearly $400 million from the scholarships over two years and redirect the money to child care subsidies. The Democrat-controlled State Board of Education has also asked lawmakers to freeze new awards and steer the money to public schools.
Recent polling has shown continued strong support for the voucher program. A Carolina Journal poll from January put support for Opportunity Scholarships at nearly two-thirds of likely voters.