Universal eligibility was supposed to open doors. It paid the families already through them, and left the rest with fewer.

NC dropped from 43rd to 46th in teacher pay. NC dropped from 43rd to 46th in per-student funding. The NEA’s April 2026 Rankings & Estimates projects the statewide average NC teacher salary at $59,971, down from $60,323. Salary schedules aren’t being cut. The statewide average is moving down as the workforce composition shifts. NC is the only state projected to see teacher pay decrease this year.

During the same window, the Opportunity Scholarship plus ESA+ appropriation reached $625 million for FY26 (the current school year), up from $435 million across the prior 2024-25 biennium. The line grows on a published schedule. Every dollar of it is a dollar that did not move the public-school formula.

When the General Assembly meets, the voucher line gets indexed and expanded automatically. The teacher line gets debated. The result shows up where you can read it.

930 NC private schools accept Opportunity Scholarship vouchers. 520 of them now draw the majority of their enrollment from voucher recipients. That is 56 percent of the schools in the program. Their financial existence is tied to continued voucher expansion.

Once a private school crosses majority-voucher, the political math flips. The constituency for keeping the program becomes the school operators themselves. Their budgets only close if the line keeps growing. Every legislative session, that constituency is waiting at the door.

The county tax base depends on the public school. Buyers price a neighborhood on its school. When vouchers pull the funding floor lower, county property tax has to cover the gap. So you pay for the school down the street on your state bill, then again on your county bill, while a private school three counties over collects the difference.

NCDPI’s May 2026 Cumulative Difference Report is the most recent state-published number: of 106,704 voucher recipients, 11.5% had previously attended an NC public school. The other 88.5% were already in private school or never in the public system. The voucher absorbed their tuition.

The shortfall this creates is $35.8 million. Over 2024-25 and 2025-26, the 12,252 voucher students who actually left a public school received $106 million in state vouchers. If they had stayed, their public schools would have received $141.8 million in per-pupil allocations. The General Assembly wrote a Public School Reinvestment Fund into statute for exactly this gap. Amanda Fratrik, NCDPI Director of School Business Services: “The language in the law says it’s their intent to create a Public School Reinvestment Fund and to put the funds that are identified in this report into that fund. As of now, there has been no money put into that fund.”

The single biggest receiving address sits in Northampton County. Northeast Academy, in Lasker, went from 88 voucher accounts in 2023-24 to 967 in 2024-25. $4 million paid to a single address in one year. The disbursement geography and the enrollment geography are not the same map.