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Vouchers Hurt Ohio will be back at the Ohio State Fair again this year.

The fair runs from Wednesday, July 24 through August 4.

Our booth will be in the Bricker Building at the Ohio Expo Center and State Fairgrounds.

We will be handing out a lot of information about our lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the private school voucher program that is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Last year, we talked to hundreds of fairgoers and we are looking forward to meeting even more people this year.

Ohioans love and value their local public schools, and they want to know how to get involved in helping to protect their communities.

This year, we are giving fairgoers a chance to tell us about their favorite public school teacher, and they will have an opportunity to write their teacher’s name on a post-it note and put it on a wall honoring heroes of the classroom.

We also have a handout for fairgoers that provides them with a roadmap to reaching out to their local school board members, superintendents and treasurers to get involved in our historic lawsuit.

More and more districts are joining our effort, and vouchers are scheduled to go on trial on Monday, Nov. 4 in Franklin County.

We couldn’t be more excited.

Visit us at the Ohio State Fair in the Bricker Building. We look forward to seeing you.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

We’ll be brief today.

We appreciate your reading our weekly emails each Tuesday morning.

We hope they are full of good information and help you stay informed about our effort to sue the state over the unconstitutionality of the private school voucher program.

There are a few steps you can take in less than five minutes to help keep you connected and up-to-date on everything that is happening with vouchers in Ohio and across the nation.

You are already receiving our email, but you can find a great deal of information about our organization and lawsuit at our website: vouchershurtohio.com.

Are you following us on Facebook? If yes, great. If not, please like our page by going here.

You can also follow us on Twitter here.

And Instagram here.

That didn’t hurt, did it?

One last thing: Would you consider thinking of five friends, family members, co-workers or neighbors who you could forward this email to this morning, and ask them to go to our website and sign up for this weekly email?

It’s free, it’s full of information, and let them know, unlike so many emails, we will never ask them for money.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

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Good Tuesday morning,

The pro-private school voucher crowd is on a mission, to explore new worlds of gobbling up hundreds of millions of tax dollars and to boldly go where no voucher program has gone before.

And so a program once falsely sold as a way to help poor families escape urban schools is now largely a flat-out big money grab for greedy private school operators and a refund and a rebate scam for wealthy families who never had any intention of enrolling their children in public schools.

Want proof?

The most explosive growth in private school vouchers after extreme anti-public school lawmakers made Ohio a universal voucher state is in the state’s wealthy suburban districts.

Look at this chart that accompanied a story recently by WKSU radio and Ideastream.

*This chart is based on EdChoice Expansion data from the Ohio Department of Education for school years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. Voucher funding for the year 2023-2024 has not yet been finalized by the ODE.

From the news report: “In Northeast Ohio, that’s manifested in large infusions of cash for private schools in and near school districts like Rocky River, Chardon and Twinsburg, but hasn’t necessarily resulted in a drop in student enrollment in those districts, according to an Ideastream analysis of Ohio Department of Education data from late June.”

The number of vouchers given out in the 2023-24 school year doubled to 130,000. The number of students enrolled in public schools dropped by about 5,000 and enrollment in non-public schools increased by about 3,000, according to Ideastream’s analysis.

Do we need any more proof that the state is now in the business of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars a year to private, primarily religious, schools?

We’re fighting back by challenging the constitutionality of the private school voucher program in the court of law, and vouchers go on trial in Franklin County on Monday, November 4.

Is your district part of our lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn how to join here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

Margaret Mead was right. She once said:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Our organization, Vouchers Hurt Ohio, is not big, but it is composed of thoughtful, committed individuals who are determined to win in the court of public opinion and the court of law when it comes to challenging the constitutionality of the harmful private school voucher program known as EdChoice.

We have the facts and the truth on our side, and we have the Ohio Constitution in our back pocket.

On Nov. 4, vouchers go on trial in Ohio. You can read our five counts here.

In the court of public opinion, you would be hard pressed to find a positive article about private school vouchers in Ohio in recent months or even years.

Why? Because when it comes to the EdChoice plan, the emperor has no clothes.

What was once sold as a program to give poor families and students a choice has been exposed as a lie. Now, the hundreds of millions of dollars going to mostly religious private school operators are subsidizing the private education of wealthy families.

Recently, the Upper Arlington City School board members had two meetings before voting to join the lawsuit. At the first, a few pro-voucher people showed up to provide testimony that was riddled with falsehoods, misinformation and outright lies.

Prior to the second meeting, where the board voted to join the lawsuit, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted sent an email to the board trying to bully them into not joining that had four apparent lies in it that our small group of committed individuals easily exposed.

Husted did not show his face at the second meeting and he has avoided the media since sending the lying email, and no one supporting vouchers testified at the second meeting.

It’s hard to defend hundreds of millions of dollars being given to mostly religious private schools with zero financial or academic accountability.

Although we are winning in the court of public opinion, the legislature, led by Senate President Matt Huffman, continues to move forward with the expansion of universal vouchers.

As promised, Mr. Huffman put money in the recent capital improvement budget to use public tax dollars to pay for private school construction projects and expansion.

Read about that here in Mr. Huffman’s hometown newspaper, the Lima News.

Mr. Huffman was unavailable for comment. No surprise. It is hard to defend the indefensible.

Is your district part of our lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn how to join here.

Happy a great Independence Day!

Some of the wealthiest districts in the state are getting hit the hardest by the explosive growth of the unaccountable universal voucher scheme in Ohio.

A recent story in the Dayton Daily News says it all: EdChoice vouchers: Students living in suburban districts part of latest use increase in Ohio. Read it here.

The Daily News noted: “Although the number of students in suburban public school districts using vouchers increased, it didn’t mean enrollment went down in those (public) districts.”

Dayton focused on Centerville, which had the second-highest number of students living in the district and attending private schools on vouchers in the 2023-24 school year.

Enrollment in Centerville did not drop, and the analysis by the Dayton newspaper found that two private schools in the area, Incarnation and Spring Valley, added 673 universal vouchers to their program, but enrollment in those two schools was also flat.

The Dayton newspaper noted…”meaning that many people who were already attending started taking vouchers.”

Vouchers were sold to the Ohio and American public as a way to give families with lesser means a choice, but it is now a full-blown refund and rebate plan using public tax dollars for wealthy families to put their children in private, most often, religious schools.

It is the exact opposite of what it originally purported to be: private religious schools are raking in hundreds of millions of public tax dollars diverted from public schools and this program is making segregation of our schools worse.

Centerville voters have turned down two levies in the last year. The funding for private school vouchers comes from the same line that the state uses to pay for public schools, and Ohio’s public schools are not funded at a constitutional level.

The universal school voucher program is creating universal problems across Ohio.

According to the Dayton Daily News: “The number of income-based EdChoice vouchers used in private schools in six area counties — Montgomery, Miami, Greene, Warren, Butler and Clark — jumped from 3,058 in the 2022-2023 school year to 12,637 last year.”

Lawmakers are not going to stop. They are going to expand this program even more and they are creating a separate and unequal system of schools for the wealthy haves and another for the rest of Ohio. 

We believe this is unconstitutional, and more and more school districts are joining our lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the private school voucher program known as EdChoice.

Last night, Akron’s school board voted to join.

Is your district part of our lawsuit? Check here. 

If not, why not? Find out how to join here.