By J. Drew Tonissen

In 2024, I stood in a Charlotte auditorium watching two Myers Park High School alumni, one Black and one White, discuss how they discovered their lives were linked through slavery. Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick and De Kirkpatrick shared a last name, but not a race. 

When Jimmie discovered that De’s ancestors owned his in antebellum Mecklenburg County through family research, he made the difficult decision to tell De what he learned. It would change both their lives forever. 

Jimmie’s research paradoxically reunited the two former acquaintances, and they formed a life-long bond. I invited them to speak to my AP Seminar students when I realized how little they knew about the history of slavery and racial segregation in their own back yard.

In 1965, Jimmie Lee was a star running back at Myers Park High School, and he was one of the first Black students to walk through its doors. The Charlotte Mecklenburg School district (CMS) was actively resisting full integration at this time despite more than a decade passing since the Supreme Court had ruled separate but equal schools were illegal under the US constitution in Brown v. Board of Education. 

White segregationists of the time were learning that their old arguments had become offensive to a large segment of the public; arguing for outright race-based segregation was no longer in vogue.

Instead of arguing for outright segregation, White supremacists in North Carolina learned to make their arguments more effective with coded language. Rather than say they wanted all White schools, they used race-neutral language: educational freedom, parental rights, school choice. These arguments were much more effective while still serving their racist intent. 

Sixty years later, we find this same deceptive language coming from voucher proponents in Raleigh, but they didn’t start out using these terms. When the Opportunity Scholarship program was introduced in 2013, it was sold to the public under the guise of helping low income and disabled students. It would take years for the real intent of the program to be revealed. 

Unfortunately for voucher proponents, early data showed that the Opportunity Scholarship program, and others like it across the country, were not working well for low income or disabled students. Most showed little to no gains; others demonstrated outright educational harm. 

Here’s when the NC GOP pivoted: rather than pausing this program to see what wasn’t working, they steamrolled ahead and shifted their argument from one centered in data to one of vibes. 

Suddenly, the Opportunity Scholarship wasn’t about helping low income or disabled students, it was about educational freedom, parental rights, and school choice, the exact same arguments white supremacists used in the wake of Brown v. Board. 

But what about the data that showed negative outcomes, you might be wondering. They quit collecting it. A 2021 report by Duke Law professor Jane Wettach noted that due to “the design of the system, the public has no access to data that reveals anything about the academic performance of the students who have vouchers and are enrolled in private schools.”

After ridding themselves of the negative data, voucher supporters then brazenly expanded the program. What began as a small, $10 million program with an income cap exploded into what we have today: a $600 million expenditure with no income cap, scheduled to increase even when the legislature fails to pass a budget, all the way into the 2030s. 

Early critics of the program were correct: limiting the scope of the vouchers to low-income students only at first was the bait, and then the NC GOP made the switch, and removed the income cap.  

So now, with all measures of accountability removed from the program, we see clearly the intent from the beginning. The Opportunity Scholarship program was never about helping low income or disabled children. It was about getting private school tuition breaks for wealthy (mostly white) families. 

The additional upshot for the NC GOP is that public schools lose funding for every student who leaves with a voucher, leaving our traditional schools hollowed out.  

The program vouchers provide a maximum of $7,686 in the 2025-2026 school year, but average tuition for private school in North Carolina is $13,177. A student from a low-income family would still have to find another $5,000 to cover the costs, year after year. For wealthy families however, knocking a few thousand dollars off their expensive private school tuition is a nice perk.

When I introduced my students to Jimmie Lee and De Kirkpatrick, I communicated that theirs is a story of hope, and caution. Their friendship shows how we can heal the destruction caused by slavery and Jim Crow. 

But we must also stay vigilant. The same forces that learned to hide their racist arguments in race-neutral language never went away, and they are having a moment. When they use phrases like educational freedom, parental rights, and school choice, we must remember: they mean their freedom, their rights, and their choices. 

J. Drew Tonissen is the author of The Resegregation Racket, a Substack series investigating North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. He is an English teacher in Charlotte with over 15 years of experience and holds a PhD in Education Policy from NC State University, where his dissertation examined teachers’ perceptions of accountability policies.