NC Democrats say religious groups with millions in state funding lack accountability. Now there's a standoff over records
Private groups, including many aligned with conservative Christian churches and activists, have received hundreds of millions of dollars in state government funding in recent years. But they aren’t being transparent about their operations, Democratic state senators said during a press conference Wednesday.
It’s an accusation strongly denied by some of the groups in the lawmakers’ crosshairs.
The Senate’s top Democratic leader, Raleigh Sen. Dan Blue, as well as Greensboro Democratic Sen. Gladys Robinson, raised their concerns about transparency Wednesday at a news conference.
"The crisis pregnancy centers and private schools are receiving a staggering amount of public dollars, with little oversight and little accountability," Blue said.
Robinson and her fellow Greensboro Democrat, Sen. Michael Garrett, have in recent weeks been pushing private schools and antiabortion pregnancy centers for more information on what they’ve been doing with their government aid — but have been met by silence from almost all of the more than 100 groups they contacted.
On Wednesday, Blue expressed dismay that Republicans at the state legislature seems uninterested in asking the same questions. Last year GOP lawmakers created an oversight committee with vast new powers to investigate groups that receive taxpayer funding. Blue said that while the committee has so far pursued multiple requests for investigations by Republican lawmakers, including investigations into DEI measures, Democratic inquiries have been shut down with no explanation.
“Good governance should not be a partisan issue,” Blue said, later adding: "When you're starting to spend hundreds of millions or billions of taxpayer dollars, we need transparency. We need to know what the results are."
But some of the groups Democrats are seeking information from say they already provide most of that information to the state. They believe political motivations might be the true driving force.
Kristi Brown, executive director of Mountain Area Pregnancy Services in Asheville — one of the groups that received a letter and declined to respond — said it's not lost on her that this is happening in the middle of an election year, as well as right after Republicans voted to further restrict abortion access in North Carolina.
"All of this just feels like a direct attack, to try and shut pregnancy centers down," she said. "We know that a lot of individuals in the state are not happy with the new abortion laws that went into place last year, dropping it from 20 down to 12 weeks. So this feels like an attack, just because of some of the new rules in place."
Robinson said Wednesday some Christian pregnancy centers have improperly used their state funding for religious purposes in the past. Brown said her group doesn't do that, and that the state already has safeguards in place to make sure any public dollars aren't misspent.
Limits on lawmakers power?
One of the recipients of Garrett’s letter to private schools was Cornerstone Christian Academy in Statesville, where most of the 265 students’ families are paying their tuition with aid from state vouchers.
Co-founder Renee Griffith told WRAL News that she has no intention of replying to the request for information. Much of what Garrett’s letter requested was data her school already reports to the state, she added, questioning how much attention lawmakers are paying to data they should already have.
“This is just not the way government should operate,” Griffith said. “If they have questions, let's go through the authorities that are already in place that have that documentation. Let's get what we need from them. And then, if we're unable to answer the questions through that authority that has been put in place, then add additional requirements to that authority. Don't come after the schools.”
All of the schools and pregnancy centers that received letters are religiously affiliated, and nearly all are Christian. Blue's office said the intent was not to target only religious groups, but it just so happens that all of the largest recipients of vouchers are religious schools.
At least one of the private schools the Democrats contacted is an Islamic school, the Al-Huda Academy in Durham. It was one of just two schools that responded to the dozens of requests Democrats sent, Blue said. The other was Cristo Rey Research Triangle High School, a Catholic school in Durham.
Multiple other schools and pregnancy centers that received the letters — which referenced the possibility of criminal penalties for noncompliance — reached out to Wake County lawyer Paul “Skip” Stam, a former high-ranking Republican state legislator.
Stam told the groups not to cooperate and fired back his own letters to Garrett and Robinson, criticizing their tactics and telling them they lacked the authority as individual lawmakers to request any such data. Any requests need to come from the committee as a whole, Stam said.
Blue said Wednesday that GOP leaders don't appear to agree with Stam's assessment.
He cited multiple investigations that the oversight committee, called Government Operations or GovOps, has begun in recent months based on requests from individual lawmakers. All have been requests by Republican legislators, Blue added, raising questions of whether the committee's oversight power is reserved only for one political party.
"Transparency seems not to be popular in the General Assembly these days, but we will keep striving for accountability for our citizens' tax dollars," he said.
Democrats opposed the committee's new powers when it was created last year, Blue acknowledged Wednesday. But he said that if the legislature is going to give itself vast new powers of oversight, those powers need to be shared among the entire state legislature, not just whoever is in charge.
A spokesperson for Senate Leader Phil Berger called Democrats hypocrites over their previous opposition to the committee.
"Democrats decried the changes to GovOps’ authority and described the commission as a ‘gestapo,'" Berger spokeswoman Lauren Horsch said. "Yet, Democrats are the only members attempting to leverage the commission’s authority to threaten and scare third parties into disclosing information."
Vouchers and accountability
Democrats have long criticized the private-school voucher program for taking money — and students — away from public schools and sending them to private schools, where there’s often little public accountability for academic success, and where schools are free to engage in discrimination or hire people without credentials as teachers. Republicans defend the program as offering families more choice in how to educate their kids.
Griffith’s school is unabashedly Christian, with an application form that instructs potential families to provide the name and phone number of their pastor, detail which church ministries they’re involved in, and agree that their child can be expelled if the family doesn’t attend church services at least once a week.
But she said the school focuses on academics as well, and that she does agree with the general premise of accountability for private schools — even if she disagrees with how the Democratic lawmakers are going about it. She added that since schools like hers charge families to attend, the ultimate accountability is whether they think it’s worth it to keep paying.
“Our parents that get these scholarships, that money is attached to that child,” she said. “And if a school is doing a poor job, those parents move that child. They vote with their feet. And so they hold schools at a high level of accountability.”
Private schools in North Carolina have to administer at least one standardized test, but they don’t have to use the same end-of-grade tests as public schools. And unlike public schools — whose testing data is publicly reported — private school testing data is only considered a public record if the school receives voucher funding and also checks several other boxes, aimed at the larger schools.
Robinson said that in other states with similar voucher programs, data shows students’ academic scores plummeted when they switched from public to private schools. But North Carolina law makes it impossible to make similar comparisons here, she said, despite the fact the state is on track to spend billions of dollars on vouchers over the next few years.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has slammed the program, saying it’s nothing more than conservatives stealing from state coffers to support their political allies — at the expense of the public schools where nearly all North Carolinians send their kids.
“This latest larceny — and that's what it is — is on top of the hundreds of millions in taxpayer money they've already siphoned out of our public schools for vouchers,” Cooper said in a speech Monday. “It's shockingly irresponsible."
