SC lawmakers who sponsored $1.5M earmark for Upstate Christian school claim misunderstanding

Two state lawmakers who sponsored a $1.5 million budget earmark for an Upstate Christian organization that has announced plans to build a residential school with the money claim the project has been misrepresented. They insist the nonprofit is not actually building a private educational institution, and one said he would not have supported the constitutionally-dubious allocation of state funds to it if the money had been for a school.

State Reps. Mike Burns, R-Greenville, and John McCravy, R-Greenwood, said Christian Learning Centers of Greenville County, which provides free Bible instruction to public school students, simply plans to use the money to construct a new facility to house its existing operations.

The organization, which operates out of a building it shares with a pediatric dentistry practice on Pelham Road in Greenville, needs a new facility because its current lease is expiring and won’t be renewed, Burns said Wednesday.

He said Christian Learning Centers plans to offer after-school programming to disadvantaged and at-risk public school students at its new location but had never planned to use state dollars to operate a school, which legal scholars say would run afoul of the state Constitution.

McCravy, a practicing lawyer, said he believes in abiding by the Constitution.

Confusion over the organization’s plan stems from a detailed proposal its director sent Gov. Henry McMaster in May to request seed funding for a $14 million “first-of-its-kind, state-of-the-art residential school” for disadvantaged middle and high school students in Greenville County.

According to the proposal, which includes architectural renderings of the 32,000-square-foot complex, “The CLC residential school will be an adequate, fully-equipped environment useful for the academic, social, emotional, physical, and spiritual development of young people who, though disadvantaged and potentially at-risk, show promise given the needed support.”

Burns and McCravy both said they hadn’t read the proposal before sponsoring the project, which the General Assembly included in its annual spending plan, but that preliminary discussions with the group had not involved a school.

“Things evolve, things drift, things change a little bit,” said Burns, who had used the word “school” to describe the project to a reporter prior to The State Media Co.’s publication of an article about the controversial plan.

He said the organization may have gotten “over-ambitious” in its proposal but didn’t think it had intentionally misled him.

Janice Butler, Christian Learning Centers’ chief executive officer, said Wednesday that, despite issuing a news release earlier this week touting its “school project,” in which it acknowledged seeking and receiving $1.5 million from the state as “seed funding for a residential school,” it has never in fact intended to build a school with the money.

She denied the project’s focus had changed due to public backlash over the state-funded proposal and said the organization had always planned to build a facility with a “school-type building,” gender-specific dorms and administrative offices where local public school students could seek academic tutoring, mental health counseling and learn life skills.

Christian Learning Centers has repeatedly used the word “school” to describe the project because the facility will offer “a form of schooling,” Butler said.

“Any time you’re trying to teach young people life skills, whether they’re going to be here for the day or be here for five days, that’s all about training, teaching,” she said. “That’s why the use of the word ‘school.’ They’re being with people who can help pour into them, whether someone teaches them a vocation or comes in to inspire them or whatever, it is a form of schooling.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that has called for the earmark to be rescinded, said she doesn’t believe the assertions of project supporters.

“It’s flabbergasting, really,” said Gaylor, whose organization promotes the constitutional separation of church and state. “It is such a brazen way to try to weasel out of this criticism, which is that public money should not go for religious indoctrination of students.”

Gaylor said her organization, which has challenged church-state entanglements across the country, has been in touch with attorneys in South Carolina and is considering filing suit over the Christian Learning Centers earmark.

Who will the facility serve and what programs will it offer?

Christian Learning Centers’ proposed school-like facility will have six classrooms, a cafeteria, library, gym, nurse’s office and teacher resource and break rooms, according to the organization’s proposal.

A separate administration building on campus will house the organization’s headquarters and include a conference room, chapel and seven employee offices.

A pair of dorms split by a courtyard will accommodate 32 boarding students – 16 girls and 16 boys – who will be a mix of homeless public school students and school-age children who are no longer enrolled in school, according to Butler.

Public school students who participate in the organization’s long-running released-time program, which provides students 50 to 90 minutes of Bible instruction at off-campus locations during the school day, also will be served at the location.

Christian Learning Centers will continue to incorporate biblical instruction at its new facility but will accept children of all faiths and backgrounds, Butler said.

“We’re not going to turn anybody away because they’re the wrong race or the wrong religion or things like that,” she said.

Christian Learning Centers is still seeking a location for the complex but wants to build it in Greenville County, within a 20-mile radius of Greenville’s city center. Construction will occur in phases, starting with the school building, and will be contingent on the amount of money the organization can solicit.

Butler declined to say how much it had raised to date but said she’d like to see the entire project completed within three to five years.

“We want to continue serving public school students – or some that would be public school students – get them in a position to do well in school and do well in life,” she said. “And we want to do all of that within state law.”

Is the organization’s plan legal?

University of South Carolina law professor Derek Black said even if Christian Learning Centers doesn’t operate a school in the traditional sense, he still isn’t convinced its plan doesn’t violate the state Constitution’s prohibition on using tax dollars to fund religious or other private educational institutions.

“Nothing you told me absolutely resolves the state (Constitution) issues,” he said Wednesday. “Maybe it complicates them enough to require further investigation, but it certainly doesn’t resolve things or fix them.”

Black, a national expert in education law who directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center, said even if Christian Learning Centers can convince a court its proposed facility is not an educational institution, there’s no getting around the fact public dollars were earmarked for a religious organization.

“The federal Constitution creates a backstop against singling out religion for money, no matter what they’re doing with the money,” he said. “On the federal side, it doesn’t matter whether they’re making a religious school, making religious housing, making religious football fields. You can’t, in my understanding of the law, earmark money and pay religious institutions directly.”

The earmark’s sponsors and the governor’s office have argued that budget earmarks for religious organizations are permissible and routinely included in state spending plans.

This year’s budget, for example, includes multiple earmarks for churches and religious organizations.

While some states legally send public tax dollars to religious schools through vouchers and education savings account programs – the U.S. Supreme Court recently found Maine had violated the Constitution by excluding religious schools from a public tuition assistance program – Black said this situation is different.

Unlike school vouchers, which students can use to cover tuition at private or religious schools of their choice, the Christian Learning Centers earmark singles out a religious organization for public money.

“This decision was made by government, not individual citizens,” Black said. “Government chose religion in the earmark. That’s the distinction from what the U.S. Supreme Court has previously upheld.”

He said the fact the state’s practice of earmarking funds for religious organizations has gone unchallenged in the past does not make it constitutional.

“Maybe it has been happening, but it hasn’t been happening with a sufficient level of transparency because if people who were relatively familiar with constitutional doctrine knew about the practice there would be a very strong chance someone would have sued to challenge this type of behavior before,” Black said. “In other words, the lack of court cases challenging this practice is telling in and of itself.”

For years, South Carolina lawmakers have tucked millions of dollars for pet projects into the budget unbeknownst to the public and even many of their colleagues.

The hidden earmark process became slightly more transparent this year after legislative leaders required the disclosure of sponsors and recipients for the first time, but the system still remains largely shrouded in secrecy.

McMaster, an outspoken critic of the process, has proposed replacing the current method of doling out public dollars with a competitive merit-based grant system administered by state agencies but has not gotten legislative buy-in.

He asked all earmark sponsors this year to provide his office detailed information about their requests, and ended up vetoing more than $52 million in earmarks and one-time appropriations he said were inappropriate expenditures of state dollars.

Earmarks for religious organizations, however, were not among the proposals he nixed.

“(Religious affiliation) was certainly not a criteria that the governor saw as an automatic veto in any way, whatsoever,” McMaster’s spokesman, Brian Symmes, said.

The governor, a “school choice” proponent, sought unsuccessfully in 2020 to use $32 million in federal COVID-19 aid to provide tuition grants for students to attend private schools. The State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that McMaster’s plan violated the state Constitution, but the governor continues to believe the case was wrongly decided, Symmes said.