First Posted: 8/25/2014

LUMBERTON — A Hail Mary by supporters of a program that would have distributed public vouchers to send children to private schools was shot down by North Carolina’s Supreme Court this week, frustrating some Robeson County parents who planned to take advantage of the program.

Legislative leaders tried unsuccessfully to persuade the state’s highest court to release voucher money after being unable to move the N.C. Court of Appeals to do so. Their effort follows Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood’s ruling, entered on Aug. 28, that a 2013 law to use public money for tuition at private and religious schools violates the North Carolina constitution.

Jennifer Dial, a Maxton resident, was among 21 local families that had planned to take advantage of the program. She had hoped to send her 10-year-old daughter, Amari Payne, to Flora MacDonald Academy in Red Springs and was forced make other arrangements in a haste.

“It has been horrible. Not only because I wanted my daughter to attend a private school but just the timing of it all,” Dial said. “I spent all of yesterday trying to get my daughter enrolled at one of these public schools at the last minute so that she wouldn’t miss the start of the school year. She is just devastated. She had a party to say goodbye to her old friends, and she just wants to get the best education she can. I have got a heartbroken fifth-grader.”

The school voucher program would have provided qualifying students from low-income homes as much as $4,200 annually in taxpayer dollars toward attending a private school.

Statewide, 1,878 students were expected to receive vouchers through a series of planned disbursements, which would have began before Hobgood’s ruling. In Robeson County, 64 students were offered vouchers but only 21 had accepted them before the injunction, according to Elizabeth McDuffie, director of grants, training and outreach with the North Carolina Education Assistance Authority.

Critics says the program siphons money that could be used for improving the state’s public schools, and that it delegates authority to unregulated schools that could potentially fail to teach students up to the state standard.

“I do not think any public dollars should be going to private schools,” said Brenda Fairley-Ferebee, member of the Robeson County Board of Education. “Public dollars were set up for public schools and private schools, they should not receive those dollars. This is why the state is broke now … . If public dollars are going to be used then everybody should be on the same playing ground. There is no regulation.”

Flora MacDonald Academy Headmaster David Holloway agrees, saying that he feels that some private schools do not do a good job preparing children for the real world. But he feels that if his school and others like it were scrutinized by regulators, they would easily make the grade.

“We would welcome the chance to show that we qualify,” Holloway said. “I think if our school fell under the scrutiny of regulators they would be very pleased to see how we run our school. I think we would be in compliance in every way, I am not sure all private schools would.”

Flora MacDonald Academy, which currently serves just under 100 students, was expecting three new students to take advantage of the school voucher program and had anticipated an even larger number in the 2015-16 school year had the voucher program been continued. The Created For You Christian Academy in Red Springs and Riverside Christian Academy in Lumberton each expected seven students to take advantage of the vouchers, according to McDuffie.

The other four students who accepted the vouchers planned to attend private schools out of county.

Dial feels that lawmakers seem unwilling to do the kinds of things that would decrease classroom sizes and allow students the kind of individual attention made possible at much smaller schools like Flora MacDonald.

“Being a teacher is a hard job, when you have so many kids in your class,” Dial said. “They can’t teach them. Maybe they have given up on the public schools? It is just horrible.”

For Chrissy Smith, who teaches for Deep Branch Elementary, large classrooms have become the norm.

“When teaching third grade I had 26 students by myself, and it can be really, really tough, when there are 26 of them and just one of me,” Smith said. “This year I have about 20. For one person, yes, it is too big, though in the lower grades we typically have a teaching assistant.”

Despite not being able to go to the school she had wanted to go to, Amari says that she is choosing to look on the bright side.

“I was sad at first but when my mom told me I was enrolled in another school I got a little happier,” Amari said. “Because I was going to go to private school and now I am not, but now I get to go to a school with all my old friends again.”