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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.

The board of education for Upper Arlington City Schools voted last week to join our Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.

This is a historic moment, as Upper Arlington board member Nidhi Satiani noted before voting yes.

Satiani pointed out that Upper Arlington was among a group of wealthy districts in Ohio that did not join the historic DeRolph case in the ‘90s that challenged the constitutionality of the public school funding program in Ohio and won.

Satiani said Upper Arlington needed to be on the right side of history.

Here is an impressive report on last week’s vote in Upper Arlington on The Spectrum, a public affairs program that airs on WCMH Channel 4 in Columbus that is hosted by Colleen Marshall.

Marshall points out that Lt. Gov. Jon Husted fed false and misleading information to the Upper Arlington school board prior to the vote in an attempt to stop the district from joining our lawsuit.

Later in the program, Marshall has two political strategists on to discuss the different viewpoints on the private school voucher program.

When Mehek Cooke tries to use the same lies and falsehoods that Husted attempted to peddle, Marshall shuts it down. This show airs on NBC and it is must see TV.

Lt. Gov. Jon Husted must be very worried.

This past week, he took the unprecedented step of trying to bully board members of Upper Arlington Local Schools by sending them a letter full of misinformation in an attempt to dissuade them from joining the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.

Husted is not the first state official to try to bully local school districts. Senate President Matt Huffman worked with State Auditor Keith Faber to send threatening letters to school board treasurers.

Stop and think about why they are doing this?

Husted in his letter to Upper Arlington said the question of constitutionality for the voucher program had been settled 22 years ago. 

This is not true. If it had been settled, we would not have a court date. Husted knows vouchers are scheduled to go on trial on Nov. 4 of this year. 

Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page has accepted all five of our counts challenging the constitutionality of the harmful universal private school voucher program despite efforts by the Ohio Attorney General and out-of-state groups to have the case dismissed.

So if Husted is so sure of his voucher program – yes, in the letter he took credit for creating it as an Ohio House member – then why is he so worried?

Is it because Husted and the pro-voucher gang could lose in court, where the law and the Ohio Constitution matter?

This is why Husted went to such lengths to stretch the truth in his letter to the Upper Arlington board.

Husted’s letter said 130,000 students across Ohio are enrolled in the EdChoice program, and most do not have the means to send their children to a private school without the voucher. 

The vast majority of families taking vouchers this year, as the program grew from 24,000 to more than 90,000 students, are wealthy, and their children were already enrolled in private school so this is a refund and rebate scheme for the well-to-do.

In his desperation, Husted tried to say families with autistic children would be denied a voucher, but our lawsuit focuses solely on EdChoice so the vouchers for autism are not impacted.

Wrong again, Mr. Lt. Gov.

Finally, Husted told the board they would be wasting thousands of dollars by joining the lawsuit. 

Vouchers Hurt Ohio charges $2 per pupil per year so Upper Arlington would pay about $12,000 a year for their roughly 6,000 students to join the lawsuit.

This year, 348 students in the Upper Arlington school district are taking vouchers with high school vouchers worth up to $8,407 and K-8 vouchers worth $6,165. These are tax dollars going to private, most often religious schools.

We believe tax dollars should be invested in public schools, and we believe the Ohio Constitution affirms that idea.

Husted obviously isn’t doing the math.

But this is what bullies do. We won’t be bullied. We aren’t going away. 

Vouchers go on trial in November.

Is your district part of the lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Join here.