That may mean a multi-year runway to a full universal type of ESA. Schools must have the ability to ramp up capacity. The market needs time to send signals to developers and investors. And we need time to address the kinks in small programs so that they do not replicate when the program is scaled up.— Robert Luebke, John Locke Foundation, March 23, 2023
That’s North Carolina’s leading conservative policy organization describing the program as a runway, three years before SB 990 was filed. The escalation was always the design.
The pilot.
North Carolina’s first voucher line item: $445,000 for the Special Education Scholarship for Children with Disabilities, later folded into ESA+. One agency, one narrow eligibility class, one small line in the budget. The first step is always small. That is the point of a first step.
The biennium budget.
What the General Assembly budgeted for Opportunity Scholarship plus ESA+ across the two-year window. 80,000 students funded. Means-tested in name only after the 2023 universal expansion. NCDPI’s May 2026 report: of 106,704 voucher recipients, only 11.5% had previously attended an NC public school. The other 88.5% were already in private school or never in the public system. Universal expansion was sold as opening doors for kids stuck in low-performing schools. It mostly reimbursed tuition families were already paying. The actual line ran past this number.
Where we stand right now.
FY26 voucher appropriation. The current school year alone outspends the biennium total above, because demand keeps overrunning the fiscal note. Each year the line gets re-baselined upward.
Lay the wallet rail.
The architecture is the point here. SB 990 §3(k) appropriates $445,000 nonrecurring for the Student-Based Educational Wallet Pilot: one public school unit, one high school selected by SEAA, $395 per student, FY 2027-2028. SB 990 gives the State Education Assistance Authority (the agency that already runs the voucher program) statutory authority to operate an ESA-style wallet rail. Once the rail exists, scaling it is a budget question. The structure is already in place. Every state that built this rail then watched two things expand on schedule: who qualifies, and how much each one gets. Both have only ever moved upward.
Florida 2023, ported to NC.
Steps 5 and 6 are not currently filed in NC. They are the published trajectory in every other state that built this same wallet rail. Each figure is scaled from a state that already ran the playbook through that step.
Remove the income cap. Add homeschoolers and private-school families already enrolled. Florida did this in 2023 and went from $1.3B to $4B in two years, driven primarily by adding roughly 400,000 voucher accounts when caps came off. Scale-adjusted for NC’s K-12 population, the equivalent step lands here.
Total K-12 ratio: NC 1.81M ÷ FL 3.30M ≈ 0.55 (public + private + homeschool; NCDPI / NCDNPE; FLDOE / FL DOE non-public).
$2.7B × 0.55 ≈ $1.5B incremental at NC scale.
Friedman Step 11 fully implemented.
$14.9B is the destination EdChoice’s Friedman Index scores states against: voucher amount equal to per-pupil spending, every K-12 student eligible, every eligible student participating. The architects published the goalpost themselves. Universal ESAs in practice draw from the state share. Apply NC’s state per-pupil to its full K-12 population and you get $14.9B per year. North Carolina’s entire 2025-26 K-12 state appropriation is $12.75B. What they call full success is bigger than the public school system it sits next to.
No state has hit full participation. Arizona, four years into universal eligibility, is at roughly 9% take-up (101,845 enrolled, May 2026). The ceiling is what the rubric scores against. No state has spent that yet. Step 5 is what NC is likely to pay in the near term. Step 6 is what the architects say full success looks like.
NC state per-pupil ≈ $8,260 (NCDPI 2024-25).
NC eligible K-12 population ≈ 1.8M (1,533,889 public + ~115K private + ~165K homeschool).
$8,260 × 1.8M ≈ $14.9B per year.
For comparison, NC’s 2025-26 K-12 state appropriation is $12.75B.
$14.9B is what the architects published as the ceiling. No legislature has voluntarily rolled this kind of program back. The line only moves in one direction.— The honest version of the pitch
Once the wallet exists, the program grows along two axes: who qualifies, and how much each qualifying student gets. In every state that built this rail, both have only moved upward. Florida added homeschoolers, then private-school families, then bumped the per-student amount. Arizona removed the income cap, then layered in unbundled tutoring. Iowa, Utah, West Virginia followed the same pattern. No legislature has voluntarily rolled the program back. Where the program has been narrowed (Utah’s Fits-All Scholarship, halted in April 2025 by a Utah state court ruling on Article X; appeal pending at the Utah Supreme Court), the intervention came from a courtroom. Lawmakers haven’t reconsidered.