About this site

ESTF Provider Finder makes South Carolina’s approved ESTF provider list searchable. That list is public, but it is published as a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet cannot answer the two questions that decide a family’s afternoon: what is near me, and can they take my money.

What this site does

It takes the Department of Education’s published file, cleans it up, works out what each provider actually offers, puts them on a map, and tells you plainly whether ESTF funds can reach them today. Of the 822 listings, 608 are approved providers set up to accept ESTF payments. The rest are either approved but not yet registered for payments, or South Carolina public charter schools, which we list separately so families can find them — those are not on the Department’s ESTF file and every one says so.

What this site deliberately does not do

• It does not rank or recommend. There is no paid placement, no sponsored listing, and no commercial relationship with any provider. The default order puts providers who can accept ESTF payments first, then sorts alphabetically. That is the whole ranking.
• It does not host reviews. A small directory with a handful of ratings is worse than none: it looks authoritative while being statistically meaningless, and it creates a moderation obligation nobody here can meet. Search for a provider’s name to find reviews elsewhere.
• It does not decide eligibility or interpret programme rules. Those are determinations for the Department of Education, and getting them wrong here would be worse than not addressing them. Where rules matter, we link tothe official FAQ.
• It does not handle money or enrolment. Payments go through ClassWallet; enrolment is between you and the provider.
• It does not track you. No accounts, no cookies, no advertising networks.

Privacy

Yours

There are no accounts and no cookies. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without building a profile of you, so there is no consent banner to dismiss. If you use the “near me” feature, your location is used in your browser to sort results and is never sent anywhere.

Providers’

The state’s file contains contact details for every provider, including many who are individual tutors working from home. Publishing that at full fidelity is legal — it is already public — but a spreadsheet you have to open is not the same artefact as an indexed website that never forgets. So:

• We do not publish contact email addresses. They are in the state’s file; they are not on this site, in any page, or in any file this site downloads. Publishing several hundred addresses would hand bulk senders a ready-made list.
• We do not put a precise pin on a private home. Where a provider is registered at what looks like a residence, we show the town and a general area instead of a street address, and the map position is deliberately imprecise.
• We say when an address is a shared office rather than a place to visit, so nobody drives to the wrong end of the state.

If you are a provider and something here is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, get in touch and we will correct or remove it. The state’s own list is separate and only they can change that.

Accessibility

This site targets WCAG 2.2 AA. Every part of it works with a keyboard, the map has a complete list equivalent, and nothing relies on colour alone to convey meaning. If something does not work for you, that is a bug worth reporting.

Cost and independence

The site is static files on a free hosting tier, with no database and no advertising. It costs almost nothing to run, which is deliberate: a public-information resource that depends on revenue eventually starts serving the revenue.

More on the data itself: how we process the provider list.