Education Scholarship Trust Fund Passed the Senate!

POST UPDATED 5/7/2025:

Governor Henry McMaster has signed S.62 into law! The signature today officially gets things moving and lets you use ESTF funds for school tuition once again.

NEXT STEPS:

• If your families have not yet uploaded your fourth quarter invoice to ClassWallet, make sure they do that ASAP so it can be paid out of their ClassWallet funds immediately. Have them upload any unpaid invoices from previous quarters too, if we missed paying any of those with the Rescue Fund. Here are directions on how to upload to ClassWallet. Ignore any warnings that tuition can’t be paid – those will be going away if they haven’t already, as they are moot now. You should start getting payments in the next few days.

• New ESTF applications submitted Jan 15 – March 15 should be approved in the next day or two, now that the prior public school attendance requirement is removed. If your families are waiting to hear back on an application, have them log into their FACTS application portal to make sure that all the supporting documents are uploaded; I’ve been told that there are 3200+ applications missing supporting documents, and they cannot be approved until those documents are uploaded. A big issue for a lot of folks is the Medicaid card—it has to be a document that contains their “Medicaid Member ID” number, not their First Choice number or anything else.

• If families at your school fall within the income limits and wish to apply for ESTF for the 2025-26 school year, direct them to sign up for the email list at SCSchoolChoice.com and I will send out an email with application info as soon as it opens. Not all 10,000 of the scholarships have been awarded yet for 2025-26! A one-week early priority window for military families opens May 12, and applications are open for everyone May 19.

• Joshua (the ESTF program manager at the Department of Education) and I recorded a podcast last week to share info about the program. I think it will be a super helpful resource for parents and school administrators—I’ll send it out to you when it’s done being edited so you can share it with families.

• I know that new changes in the law may be confusing and it’s a lot to keep up with; that is why Palmetto Promise Institute and the ESTF office at the Department of Education are hosting a webinar next week, May 14, 2:30-3:30pm, for schools to learn more about the updates to the program and ask all your questions you may have about end of year testing and everything else. We would love to have you join us!