Republican Ellen Weaver races to get master’s by Election Day

One of the leading candidates to replace outgoing state Superintendent Molly Spearman lacks the statutory qualifications for the position, but has remained in the race on the pledge she would meet those requirements by the general election.

Republican Ellen Weaver, a prominent school choice advocate who has outraised all nine other candidates combined, is racing against the clock to complete a master’s degree by Nov. 8 in order to satisfy the education requirement South Carolina lawmakers established four years ago for the state’s top schools official.

Weaver, who leads a conservative think tank and until recently chaired the state’s Education Oversight Committee, enrolled in an online master’s program at a private evangelical Christian university in South Carolina earlier this year around the time it came to light that she and at least two other Republican candidates did not meet the legal requirements for the position they were seeking.

Both other candidates who lacked advanced degrees withdrew from the race, but Weaver has pushed on with plans to finish a master’s in roughly seven months.

With just over a week to go until the June 14 primary, Weaver, 43, is one of 10 candidates — six Republicans, three Democrats and one Green — vying to replace Spearman, a Republican who has served as state superintendent since 2015.

“Ellen is energized and committed to fulfill this new requirement,” Weaver’s campaign manager Ryan Gillespie said in a statement Friday. “She believes it’s a great opportunity to show our students by personal example what it looks like to be a life-long learner and to encourage them that they can accomplish anything they set out to achieve.”

State Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, one of the legislators who helped craft the qualifications Weaver seeks to meet, isn’t so keen on her accelerated educational pursuit.

He said he wasn’t familiar with Weaver’s specific situation, but that her efforts seemed designed simply to “check a box” and ran contrary to what lawmakers had intended when they established criteria for the state’s schools chief in 2018.

At the time, lawmakers were pushing a ballot initiative to transform the state superintendent into a governor-appointed position and added a requirement at the behest of Democrats that officeholders have a master’s degree and “broad-based experience” in public education or financial management.

South Carolina voters roundly rejected the ballot measure, preserving an elected state schools chief, but the qualifications for the position stuck, making it one of only two statewide elected offices for which candidates must meet education requirements. The other is solicitor, which requires officeholders to be licensed to practice law by the South Carolina Bar.

“The idea was not that somebody could just run out and get an overnight degree or fly-by-night degree,” Hutto, D-Orangeburg, said. “The idea was that we would have a legitimately qualified person who has a substantial degree to be able to run and administer one of the most important jobs in the state.”

Weaver, who serves as president and CEO of the Palmetto Promise Institute, a conservative advocacy organization founded by her old boss, former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, has pushed back against criticism that her lack of academic credentials disqualifies her from the job.

“Ellen believes letters behind your name do not necessarily equal effective leadership,” Gillespie said. “Palmetto State parents know leadership is the most important quality we need in a Superintendent now.”

Will Weaver finish her degree in time?

Weaver enrolled this spring in the educational leadership program at Bob Jones University in Greenville, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in political science two decades earlier.

The flexible 33-credit online program, which is designed for a busy professional and advertised as having a 12-to-18-month completion time, allows students to listen to lectures, participate in discussions and take quizzes and tests on their own schedule, according to the university’s website.

It is tailored to people pursuing leadership roles in Christian education and promises to equip students to “be an excellent leader in a Christian school context.”

Students take classes on the historical and philosophical foundations of American education, learn to develop their own educational theory, practice and philosophy of Christian school management, and learn how to implement the business principles necessary to operate an educational institution, according to the online program description.

Gillespie, Weaver’s campaign manager, said she chose Bob Jones because its program focuses on education, not just general leadership, and because it allowed her to start classes “immediately.”

Neither Gillespie nor the university would say exactly when Weaver enrolled at Bob Jones, but comments she made to the Charleston Post and Courier at the end of March indicate she was not yet enrolled at the time. On March 31, Weaver told a reporter she was pursuing a master’s in leadership at Western Governors University, where she’d enrolled within the last month, the Post and Courier reported.

At some point, however, she switched to Bob Jones, where an administrator recently confirmed she’d taken classes during the spring academic session.

Even if she had enrolled at Bob Jones immediately after that March 31 interview, Weaver would have missed the registration deadline for the spring session, which ran from March 7 to April 30.

The university’s website says students should register for courses at least three days prior to the course start date, but in Weaver’s case, she appears to have been allowed to register mid-session.

To date, Weaver has completed two of the program’s 11 required classes — Pupil Personnel Services and Assessment in Learning, both offered in the spring session — and started on her capstone research project studying the impact of different approaches to discipline on academic, safety and other outcomes in schools, Gillespie said.

A review of the program’s class schedule shows that Weaver could theoretically complete her coursework by mid-October, if she took four classes (12 credits) in each of the next two academic sessions.

The timeline for her research project is less clear.

According to the course catalog, the three-credit capstone course has a prerequisite Weaver has not met and runs from late August through mid-December. Students enrolled in the research project also must be teaching in a traditional K-12 classroom during the semester they complete it.

Gillespie did not respond when asked whether Weaver, who is not an educator, had received special dispensation to waive the prerequisite and take the course early without having to teach while she conducted her research.

Alternatively, she could substitute the research project for an independent study at the discretion of the program coordinator, university administrator Randy Page said.

Page, who denied the university had given Weaver any special treatment, said her proposed seven-month timetable for completing a master’s in educational leadership was neither unprecedented nor unusual.

“We would do for any student what we have done for her,” said Page, who has given $200 to Weaver’s campaign, according to public campaign filings. “Any student can take multiple classes, any student can do it as accelerated or as slowly as they would like to.”

Hutto, however, questioned the rigor of any master’s degree that can be earned online in a matter of months and said he doubted it would adequately prepare someone to run the state’s public school system.

“If some university wants to sell degrees, I guess that’s just part of the marketplace,” he said. “But that’s not what the law was contemplating.”

Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, an Edgefield Republican who worked with Hutto and Sen. John Scott, D-Richland, on the qualifications provision in 2018, said voters should be the ones who decide whether a state superintendent candidate’s credentials are adequate to perform the job.

“Voters get to make a decision whether an online degree is sufficient, as opposed to an in-person class-taking degree,” he said.

Massey said that while he doesn’t think having qualifications is necessarily a bad thing, he generally favors fewer statutory requirements for elected officials and would not have supported imposing the requirements had he known the office of state superintendent would remain an elected position.

“You have to trust the voters to vet the candidates and not to elect someone who is unqualified for the position,” he said.

Could a Weaver victory be challenged?

As long as Weaver is awarded her master’s degree by Election Day, she should be in the clear legally to hold the office, if elected, said State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire.

If she’s elected without having earned the degree, however, things get complicated.

Whitmire said he wasn’t aware of any prior instance in which a candidate was elected to statewide office without meeting the statutory requirements of that office. If it were to happen with Weaver, the election commission would need to seek legal advice, he said.

“It would be a unique situation,” Whitmire said. “There’s not a code section I can point you to that says here’s how this is handled. At this point, we don’t know. And if we’re faced with that, we would get legal advice about what, if any, authority or legal obligation we have to resolve it.”

Parties are responsible for determining a candidate’s qualifications and certifying that they either meet or will meet those qualifications by the general election in November.

Once the ballots are cast, however, the situation gets murkier.

“When you get down to certifying the results of the elections and declaring winners, does the State Election Commission have authority at that point?” Whitmire said. “That’s something today we do not know yet.”

One possibility is a legal challenge filed by another candidate that gets the case before a judge who would ultimately decide the outcome.

Whitmire said he wasn’t aware of plans by another candidate to file a lawsuit against Weaver, but said a legal challenge is conceivable if she wins.

“Even if the State Election Commission decides it has some obligation or authority (to act), that won’t stop a legal action,” he said. “I think, obviously, legal action is a possibility in that scenario.”

This story was originally published June 5, 2022 5:00 AM.