COLUMBIA — The growing number of charter schools in South Carolina could face more scrutiny under a bill that’s next on senators’ to-do list.
The proposal, a priority for Senate leaders, comes after years of increasing concerns about a lack of oversight for charter schools, the for-profit managers some use for operations, and the sponsors that hold the schools’ contract, Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree, who sponsored the bill, told the SC Daily Gazette.
A recent report recommending more clarification and oversight from the state to prevent conflicts of interest, misspending and other issues made the problem more immediate, said Hembree, a Little River Republican. As did the closure of Limestone University, which sponsored 17 charter schools.
Charter schools are intended “to create a legitimate avenue for parents, teachers, and community members to take responsible risks and create new, innovative, and more flexible ways of educating all children within the public school system,” according to the 1996 law that allowed their creation.
What is a charter school?
Charter schools are public schools, but they have more flexibility than traditional public schools and are largely autonomous.
Each is governed by a school board elected by parents. And each has an overseeing sponsor that holds its charter — its operating contract. The sponsor is supposed to ensure that contract is followed. But its actual oversight ability is limited.
State law initially required charter schools to be sponsored by their local school district. But with local boards often refusing to sponsor a school they couldn’t control, legislators in 2006 created a statewide district to sponsor charter schools. Six years later, they added colleges to allowed authorizers.
But they didn’t put enough guardrails in place as the options expanded, Hembree said.
The charter school system “is not a baby anymore,” he said Thursday as he explained the bill to senators. “It’s a fully grown program in South Carolina, and it’s going to grow some more.”
The number of charter schools in the state has exploded in recent years. In 2012, when Gov. Nikki Haley signed the law allowing colleges to become sponsors, 17,000 students attended 47 charter schools statewide.
The number of schools has more than doubled since, to 111. And the number of students has increased exponentially, reaching 67,000 this school year, according to the state Department of Education.
The number of students in charter schools has grown so much faster than the population in traditional public schools that the state’s school funding formula fell out of whack last year, requiring a budget compromise that adjusted the percentage of state dollars for different types of schools.
And there’s no slowdown in sight. Organizers have submitted plans with the state to open about 80 new schools in the 2027-2028 school year.
The Charter Institute at Erskine, already the second-largest authorizer, plans to sponsor 10 more schools next school year and another 40 over the next three years.
The changes proposed in the bill would put more work on the authorizer’s plate, but the institute is on board, said Superintendent Cameron Runyan, who’s said for years that state law limits its oversight options.
“That program is growing, and whenever a sector grows, it’s maturing,” Runyan said. “It’s important to make sure that it matures in the right manner.”
When Erskine College, a small private school in Due West, started authorizing schools in 2017, Hembree realized the process needed more oversight.
With another statewide sponsor on the scene, schools in hot water with their sponsors started switching from the original Public Charter School District to Erskine to escape accountability. Five years later, schools began jumping to the newly formed Limestone Charter Association.
It’s a process known as “hopping and shopping,” Hembree said.
“Right away, we were like, ‘Man, this is going to be the Wild West,’” Hembree said.
Limestone’s closure last year left only Erskine and the original statewide district, but Voorhees, a private historically Black university in Denmark, has stepped up to begin sponsoring schools. Other colleges could sign up through what’s now a very easy process. State law offers a monetary incentive to do so. Authorizing colleges can keep 2% of state aid to each school, which is supposed to cover administrative expenses.
The bill would restrict the movement of schools from one authorizer to another, crack down on schools that consistently underperform and put more rules in place for the people running the authorizers and the charter schools.
Hembree isn’t trying to target charter schools or specific authorizers, he said. His goal is to help the students, who make up about 8% of the state’s public school population.
“They’re the ones that are the big losers in all of these shenanigans that the grown-ups get involved in,” Hembree said.
Hembree has introduced the bill every legislative session since 2022. This year, Hembree hopes the report, which looked into operations at Erskine, and the closure of Limestone University will give the legislation the momentum it needs to become law.
Debate in the Senate starts Tuesday. Hembree is optimistic about the bill’s chances of becoming law.
After all, concerns about charter schools have “bubbled to the top,” Hembree said.
Chronically underperforming
During the 2024-2025 school year, 19 of the 31 schools in the state to receive the lowest possible rating of unsatisfactory on their annual state report cards were charter schools.
Charter schools, like traditional public schools, can’t choose which students to accept. The exceptions are schools geared toward students with disabilities and girls-only or boys-only schools, which the 2012 law authorized.
Some of the schools — which can be brick and mortal, virtual or a hybrid of both — are set up to help students who aren’t succeeding in a traditional school, meaning their ratings may skew lower. But when a school is consistently failing its state report card, which takes into account academics, career readiness and general school climate, then something is clearly wrong, Hembree said.
“A failing school’s a failing school, and we need to take steps to try to address them,” Hembree said.
Under the bill, a school that received the lowest possible state rating for three years in a row would have to close permanently, strengthening existing state law that relies only on federal standards. If an authorizer didn’t take action, the bill would allow the state Department of Education to close the authorizer and transfer its schools elsewhere.
Existing law doesn’t give the education agency the ability to intervene, Hembree said.
“I think that’s on us,” Hembree said. “That’s a failure of the General Assembly to foresee that situation and create that structure.”
“We didn’t do it before,” Hembree added. “That’s why we’re doing it now.”
Authorizers would also have to meet higher standards to start sponsoring schools under the bill.
Prospective authorizers only need to register with the state Department of Education, which can mean sending a letter as short as a paragraph, Runyan said. Any college could then start sponsoring schools and receiving the monetary aid that comes with it.
“There rightfully, I think, needs to be some front-end vetting,” Runyan said.
The bill would create an application process, giving state officials more authority to turn away unqualified sponsors. Potential authorizers would have to give the state copies of proposed charter agreements, plans for staff and their compensation, and a plan to enforce the schools’ contracts, including plans for how officials would evaluate how well schools are performing.
Existing authorizers — including Voorhees University, which plans to sponsor its first charter schools in the 2027-2028 school year — would not have to reapply.
‘Hopping and shopping’
Underperforming schools in danger of closure often search for a different authorizer to take them in. Without a responsible authorizer to hold them accountable, those same schools can keep operating, Hembree said.
When a charter school escapes accountability, that means students are stuck with a subpar education, Hembree said.
“You shouldn’t be able to game the system, because you’re gambling with these children’s futures,” Hembree said.
A charter school looking to move would need permission from both its existing and prospective authorizers under Hembree’s proposal. Valid reasons for denying that application under the bill include violations of the school’s existing contract, low performance scores on state evaluations, more than one transfer in the past decade or less than two years of operation as a charter school.
That way, authorizers could continue the oversight the bill requires of them, monitoring schools’ performance and closing any that don’t meet expectations or uphold their end of the contract, Hembree said.
Sen. Josh Kimbrell, who has kept the bill from advancing in the past, said his biggest concern is that schools might be “held hostage” by an authorizer that doesn’t best suit its needs if the rules become too strict. Schools shouldn’t be able to move willy-nilly to escape scrutiny, but some schools have legitimate reasons to want to swap, said the Boiling Springs Republican.
“That is my biggest concern, is that we find a way that is a fair balance between the two, that there’s accountability for the school but there’s also accountability for the authorizer,” Kimbrell said.
Some schools may want to move to an authorizer with higher standards or get away from an authorizer whose mission doesn’t mesh with that of the school, he said. If a charter school can offer a good reason for its swap, there should be a process for an exception, he said.
“I just don’t want it to be lopsided,” Kimbrell said.
The bill would allow charter schools to seek out new sponsors if their authorizer closed, like Limestone University did last year. And it would require the state education department to “develop a streamlined transfer application” making it easier for schools to move to a new authorizer if their original one shut down for any reason. That would help avoid the uncertainty that came with Limestone’s closure last year, when the state education department leapt into action to try and find homes for its charter schools.
Of the 17 schools Limestone Charter Association sponsored, 12 joined the South Carolina Public Charter School District, and two went to the Charter Institute at Erskine, according to the state Department of Education. Three of the schools will close at the end of the school year.
The authorizers divvied up another seven schools slated to open for the 2026-2027 school year.
Spending rules and conflicts of interest
The people running authorizers and the management companies hired by charter school boards need more oversight as well, especially when it comes to questions about conflicts of interest and transparency in their spending, Hembree said.
That became especially clear following a report from Legislative Audit Council issued in November, he said. The report by the Legislature’s research agency found that the Charter Institute at Erskine didn’t break the law. In some cases, though, that was because the law was either vague or silent about how authorizers and their board members should act, according to the report.
The bill as written would make about half of the changes the Legislative Audit Council suggested. Other recommendations may be added during the floor debate.
Take, for instance, institute officials’ trips abroad to London and Stockholm. Although leaders said the purpose of the trips was to tour other charter schools and bring home ideas for their own program, the audit questioned whether leaders made the most efficient use of their time and money on the trips.
All told, the institute spent $820,000 on travel between 2023 and 2025, nearly $478,000 of which was for professional development. That’s far beyond the $193,000 the South Carolina Public Charter School District spent on the same type of travel, and none involved overseas trips, the report found.
Nothing in state law prohibits that kind of spending for a charter school, the report found. The law doesn’t address authorizer spending at all, including travel or how much of its budget an authorizer should spend on rent or buying property, another issue the report raised, leaving the practice in a legal gray area.
Although the authorizers receive state funds through the charter schools they ostensibly oversee, whether they must go through the same set of approvals to spend that money is unclear, the report found.
Charter schools and their authorizers would have to follow the same rules as traditional public schools, including when it comes to their finances, under the bill. In an effort to bolster transparency, the schools would have to post their annual budgets and audits online for people to see. And charter school board members would have to go through the same training process required of traditional public school board members.
“If you’re receiving millions of dollars in public funds to do public education, you just turned into a public entity that has to do public reporting, and you can’t hide behind some technicality,” Hembree said.
The Charter Institute at Erskine generally releases the information state officials want to see, but that doesn’t mean other authorizers will do the same, Hembree said. Each charter school has its own school board, making it even more important to create consistent rules about what they can and can’t do, he said.
Also questionable are requirements about conflicts of interest, the report found. Existing law mentions that school board members can be removed if they engage in conflicts of interest but goes no further than that, leaving it up to interpretation what qualifies and whether that also applies to the authorizer, according to the report.
For instance, the Charter Institute at Erskine paid a charter school leader for consulting services for four years, a job that included speaking at conferences and attending meetings of charter school officials, according to the report. The institute also paid a former board chair for office furniture.
Neither of those actions seemed to violate state law, according to the report. The college prohibits certain conflicts of interest through its own policy, but state oversight could help strengthen that, the report suggested.
Board members and employees wouldn’t be allowed to do business with companies run by themselves or their immediate family members under the bill. Nor could they serve on the boards of multiple charter schools or authorizers at once.
There was too much “cross-contamination,” Hembree said, between charter schools and the companies they contracted with.
“We needed a little more separation,” Hembree said. “It was a little too cozy in some of these relationships.”
Senate bill boosting oversight for SC charter schools wins unanimous support
A House budget-writing panel grilled the head of the Charter Institute at Erskine over a recent audit
BY: SKYLAR LAIRD - FEBRUARY 10, 2026 8:00 PM
COLUMBIA — A bill creating more oversight for charter schools, the management companies they hire and the authorizers that hold their contracts sailed through the Senate on Tuesday.
The Senate’s unanimous vote to send the proposal to the House came less than an hour before a House panel grilled the head of the Charter Institute at Erskine, the state’s second-largest charter school authorizer, over findings in a report an oversight agency released last November.
Nearly every recommendation from that report wound up in the bill the Senate approved Tuesday. The only exception was a funding adjustment Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree plans to propose as part of the state budget, he said.
Senate advances bill
The bill wasn’t written to target Erskine, Hembree said.
But the charter institute was its impetus. When the small private college in Due West started authorizing schools in 2017, Hembree realized the state law allowing colleges to sponsor schools didn’t include much oversight.
What is a charter school?
Charter schools are public schools, but they have more flexibility than traditional public schools and are largely autonomous.
Each is governed by a school board elected by parents and employees. And each has an overseeing sponsor that holds its charter — its operating contract.
The sponsor is supposed to ensure that contract is followed. But its actual oversight ability is limited.
South Carolina has 67,000 students attending 111 charter schools this school year.
Struggling charter schools switched from the state’s Public Charter School District — a statewide authorizer created in a 2006 law — to Erskine in an effort to escape accountability. When Limestone College, another small private college in Gaffney, opened its own charter authorizer five years later, schools began moving again.
The bill would limit that process, sometimes called “hopping and shopping,” by requiring schools to get permission from both their old and new authorizers and meet a series of criteria.
Authorizers would have to shut down schools that failed to meet state standards three years in a row, and the state Department of Education could close authorizers that failed to do so.
Becoming a sponsor would also require more steps, with approval required by the state education agency. Under existing law, becoming a sponsor and contracting with a charter school requires only a notice to the state.
The bill would also require authorizers, management organizations overseeing operations for schools, and charter school board members to follow the same laws about transparency, conflicts of interest and oversight as traditional public school districts.
“We had nobody overseeing the authorizers,” Hembree, a Little River Republican, said Tuesday.
Just as Erskine prompted the bill in the first place, the Legislative Audit Council’s report on Erskine prompted most of the changes made Tuesday, as Hembree pulled recommendations from it. About half of them were already part of the bill.
Changes to the bill included a prohibition on authorizers owning any property not “necessary or convenient” to run its charter schools, making it clear that charter schools are subject to the same spending oversight as traditional public school districts, and a requirement that all charter school board members go through annual training.
“If we pass this, are we truly reforming the charter school system in South Carolina?” Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, an Orangeburg Democrat, asked Hembree on Tuesday.
“I think we’re making it a lot stronger,” Hembree replied.
Some charter schools do a great job of educating students, but legislators need to make sure that’s the case at all of them, Hutto said. Under existing law, failing charter schools can escape accountability by switching authorizers and the state education department can do nothing about it.
“Charter schools have a valuable place within our education system,” Hutto said. “But they need to be providing the quality education at or similar to, at least, what we expect of the public school system.”
The bill also tries to create more oversight of the management companies some charter schools hire to oversee operations.
“I’ve always had an uneasy feeling about it,” Sen. Russell Ott said Tuesday. “I don’t like the fact that we’re essentially having charter schools hire private, for-profit management companies come in and run the school, essentially.”
“In my mind, the board should be making those decisions,” the St. Matthews Democrat added.
Charter schools would have to let authorizers look over any potential contracts with a management company, giving the sponsors a chance to warn the school if its board chooses a company with an unsavory reputation, Hembree said. The authorizers couldn’t tell a school not to sign the contract, though.
“At least in this bill, you give the authorizer the opportunity to intervene and say, ‘Hold it,’” Hembree said.
The management organizations would also be subject to the same conflict of interest rules as charter schools and authorizers, barring people from serving on the board of a charter school while running a management company.
Representatives question Charter Institute at Erskine
The Senate bill came up repeatedly as a House budget-writing panel went through the state audit point by point, asking the institute’s superintendent to explain each concern raised in the report.
State law allows authorizers to keep 2% of state aid going to the schools they sponsor, which is supposed to cover administrative expenses. In Erskine’s case, that’s expected to total $5.6 million this school year, according to the institute.
The charter institute did not break the law, auditors concluded and institute Superintendent Cameron Runyan emphasized Tuesday.
Erskine has already created several of the policies recommended in the report, including keeping donations and private funds separate, requiring board approval for international travel and cutting ties with a nonprofit the institute was running for recruiting teachers, Runyan said.
“We certainly don’t get everything right,” Runyan said. “There’s no doubt. But what I can tell you is that our heart and every effort that we make at the charter institute is for children.”
Still, representatives questioned whether the institute was a good steward of taxpayer dollars.
For instance, legislators asked, did charter leaders really need to visit London and Stockholm with their families to speak with international school leaders? Why does the institute own an event venue in Columbia’s tallest building? And should a principal at Gray Collegiate Academy really make more money than most of the state’s superintendents?
“To me, just my bias, one dollar away from education is the worst sin that you could possibly do,” said Rep. Neal Collins, R-Easley.
All international travel was done using private donations, and all sightseeing was after hours, Runyan said.
The charter institute bought the 25th floor of a building across the street from the Statehouse because it needed a bigger office, and the event space is often used for school activities, such as graduations, proms and conferences along with being rented out for weddings and private events, he said.
Pay decisions are up to charter schools’ boards, not authorizers, Runyan said.
House Education Chairwoman Shannon Erickson peppered Runyan with questions about how the authorizer operates and how it should run, including whether its leaders should be subject to state laws about ethics and access to records.
Although Runyan said the institute is as transparent as possible, Erickson said she needed more assurance that Erskine was really using its state money in the public’s best interest. Even if the institute is operating legally, any public perception of problems could sour people on school choice as a concept, she said.
“I know you didn’t break any laws,” the Beaufort Republican said. “However, the ethics part and the smell test of it leaves me wanting.”
The bill the Senate passed Tuesday will help quell many of the concerns the House panel had, Runyan said. Much of the report came down to the authorizer operating in legal gray areas the bill would clear up if it passes the House.
“That legislation, if it becomes law as it’s currently written, will mandate those types of increased transparency,” Runyan said.
Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
