South Carolina leaders hope to see a promising future for students across the state.
Tucked into the 2018-19 fiscal year budget that state lawmakers passed last month is a provision to fund a promise scholarship in 34 counties, including Abbeville, Laurens, McCormick and Saluda.
Promise scholarships exist all across the country, and several already exist in the counties served by Piedmont Technical College.
Laurens Future Scholars was the first in the Lakelands. Then there was Greenwood Promise, which just wrapped up its first year. And now the Freshwater Coast Community Foundation is raising money for its Abbeville Promise. Each program will cover the cost of attending Piedmont Technical College for all high school graduates within their respective counties after other sources of funding have been exhausted.
The South Carolina Promise differs from these in several ways. Most significantly, unlike the other programs, which cover a student’s entire tuition if need be, the S.C. Promise will not provide any student with more than $2,000. Students can, however, use the money toward books, the cost of which is not covered by the other promise scholarships.
The S.C. Promise is available to any student who graduated from 2013 to 2018. Local promise scholarships are only available to students who graduated in the year in which they apply.
Both are last-pay programs, meaning other sources of funding, such as Pell Grants, must be exhausted before one can apply the scholarship to their tuition. In counties where students can access both a local promise scholarship and the S.C. Promise, the latter is applied to their tuition first.
“One of the challenges (with S.C. Promise) is that we just got information on it a couple weeks ago,” said Ray Brooks, president of Piedmont Tech. “And the fall semester starts the 21st, so it’s been somewhat difficult to get the message out. I don’t think we’ll really realize the full impact until the spring term, which starts in January.”
According to Brooks, 250 students have already applied and were found by Piedmont to be eligible for the S.C. Promise. He couldn’t immediately say how many of them were new students and how many were already attending Piedmont.
“The other factor that is a bit of a challenge is that we know they’re only funding it for one year,” said Brooks. “My understanding is that they’re looking at it as a pilot program that they can eventually roll out for the rest of the state.”
“We tried to do it statewide,” said state Sen. Floyd Nicholson, of District 10, which encompasses Greenwood, Abbeville, McCormick and Saluda counties. “But we didn’t have the funding.”
Instead, legislators opted to limit the program to the counties that were plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed 25 years ago, Abbeville County School District et al. v. South Carolina. More than 30 school districts joined the lawsuit, including systems in Laurens, McCormick and Saluda counties.
The suit alleged that the state failed to meet its obligation to provide a “minimally adequate” education to all of its students, particularly those in rural counties. In 2014 the state Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor.
The S.C. Promise doesn’t address the root cause of educational inequality in South Carolina, Nicholson told the Index-Journal, “but it helps nevertheless — because as you know, you need more than a high school graduation to get a good, well-paying job now.”
Although the S.C. Promise is only funded for one year, Nicholson is confident it will become permanent. “Right now what we’re planning to try to do when we go back is put a line item in the budget to find it each year to keep it going. There was bipartisan support. I’m very hopeful that it’ll get in the budget for good.”
Whether it will expand to other counties in the state is also up in the air. “Right now, I think we’ll try to make it a line item for those involved in the suit,” Nicholson said, “and if things go well with the economy maybe we can expand it to the entire state. The main thing is to see how much it’ll cost and whether the kids take full advantage of it.”
