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Good Tuesday morning,

The Ohio School Boards Association annual convention in Columbus this year brought together 6,500 school board members, newly elected and incumbents, superintendents and school treasurers from across the state.

Spoiler alert: The private school voucher scheme that is taking $1.7 billion away from public schools for mostly wealthy families and mostly religious schools was the number one issue on the minds of the gathered educators.

Denis Smith, a retired school administrator, worked our Vouchers Hurt Ohio booth at the OSBA convention and writes about his experience in the Ohio Capital Journal. Read his story here.

“That concern about dwindling state support for public education came through loud and clear from school board members who stopped by the…exhibit booth to offer their concerns about the expansion of vouchers and the harm they inflict on public schools,” Smith writes.

“As a volunteer at the conference for the last 14 years, there is no question that the response from board members I spoke with last week about the Ohio legislature’s continued bad behavior directed at public education was the strongest during the time period,” Smith writes.

A packed room of educators crammed into a presentation on the voucher lawsuit by the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, and Vouchers Hurt Ohio.

Smith writes about some of the educators he talked to at our booth.

A few examples:

“I’m a lifelong Republican,” a school board member from Southwest Ohio told Smith, “but the harm done to public education by the legislature has to stop.”

Another board member, also from Southwest Ohio, said, “I’ve personally supported Catholic schools over the years, but the vouchers are wrong and are harming public education.”

Jeanne Melvin, President of Public Education Partners, told Smith:

“Ever since the judge ruled in June that Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program is unconstitutional, opinion has changed. School district leaders and residents finally realize that the voucher agenda was created by a legislature that seeks to privatize our system of public schools, and they are angry. The success of pro-public education board candidates and school levies this election cycle has ignited a passion to fight back,” Melvin told Smith.

Is your district part of our historic lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

Good Tuesday morning,

Remember that old saying: don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back? Well, don’t be surprised to see a number of state lawmakers in casts.

Legislative leaders have been jumping up and down with pretend joy over their recent efforts to pass laws addressing the rising property tax issues across the state.

As Thomas Suddes, a statewide columnist notes, it’s pure “baloney.”

“What legislators actually did was pass the buck, as usual, to voters to raise more local money for schools by passing more property tax levies, or to butcher local schools’ budgets. Which, given voters’ rage over property taxes, is likelier?”

Read Suddes’ column here.

The headline says it all: “Property-tax ‘reform’ just shifts school-funding to homeowners.”

You know who has to ask voters to pass those levies? Local school board members, superintendents, treasurers, and the community groups that put together levy campaigns.

So the enmity shifts from irresponsible lawmakers to those responsible for ensuring our local public schools are funded.

If you wonder why we are suing the state, challenging the constitutionality of the EdChoice private school voucher scheme, look no further.

At the same time, lawmakers and Gov. DeWine are shortchanging local public schools, they are prepared to spend $1.7 billion in the next two years on a boondoggle for private, mostly religious schools, and a rebate and refund for mostly wealthy families whose children were already enrolled in private schools.

It bears repeating: the funding for EdChoice comes from the same line-item in the two-year state budget that pays for public schools, so a dollar more for private school vouchers is a dollar less available for public schools.

Suddes quotes Howard Fleeter in his column. Fleeter testified before lawmakers that in fiscal year 1999, shortly after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state’s funding system unconstitutional, the state’s share of funding local public schools was 45.7 percent.

In the current fiscal year, which began July 1, the state’s share of funding public schools is expected to be 35 percent.

We believe this system that siphons away $1.7 billion from public schools for private schools is unconstitutional, and Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page agreed with us in June on three counts.

Join us.

Is your district part of our historic lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

We’ll keep it short and sweet this week: Happy Thanksgiving from Vouchers Hurt Ohio! Enjoy your holiday weekend and we’ll be back with our regular updates next week.

Good Tuesday morning,

We’re getting under their skin. Losing is making them sweat.

We’re talking about the pro-voucher crowd, and they have $1.7 billion reasons to be nervous.

Their cash grab will go away when the Franklin County Common Pleas ruling that EdChoice private school vouchers are unconstitutional is upheld.

We know anti-public school billionaires across the country are pushing for vouchers in state after state. In each of those states, they have grass tops organizations that they fund.

In Ohio, we have the Bogus Buckeye Institute. See how they appropriate something about the state they operate in to appear organic.

The Bogus Buckeye Institute is part of something called the State Policy Network. If you go to the network here, you will see the Mackinac Center in Michigan, the Palmetto Promise in South Carolina. You get the drift.

It would be fine if they wanted to just pretend to be think tanks all around the country, but they are intent on influencing public policy, and their marching orders from their billionaire backers are to get busy promoting EdChoice vouchers in Ohio.

Which leads us to an Op/Ed that ran in the Columbus Dispatch. Read it here.

It’s full of factual errors, conflates information, and it’s just flat out wrong. This is why some people say the Bogus Buckeye Institute (BBI) is a “stink tank.”

Steve Dyer, the former state lawmaker who helped develop a constitutional formula for funding schools, tore the Op/Ed apart in his online substack.

You can read Dyer here.

Dyer points out that the BBI makes a false claim that public schools are swimming in money by including money for vouchers and charters in the state’s overall spending.

“That’s right,” Dyer writes. “(BBI) is writing an entire article complaining that school districts whine too much about vouchers taking money away from public school kids by citing K-12 expenditure data that…includes money going to vouchers and charter schools.”

“Ohio public students are receiving $1.6 billion less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 15 years ago,” Dyer writes.

He says this money could fully fund the Cupp Patterson Fair School Funding Plan.

We think the Bogus Buckeye Institute think tank needs to take a little more time thinking before putting out hogwash, but they have a different agenda.

Unfortunately, their views reflect the policies of the state legislature and the governor, so we are going to the courts for relief.

Is your district part of our historic lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

Good Tuesday morning,

A week ago today, voters across Ohio went to the polls to make decisions about their local elected officials, school board members, levies and other important matters.

It sounds crazy, but sadly it is true: Many people who run for local school board positions are pro-voucher and anti-public schools.

Fortunately, last Tuesday, public schools and their students were big winners as local voters supported levies, and elected pro-public school candidates for their local school boards while rejecting many anti-public school candidates run by pro-voucher groups and public school haters.

In Southwestern City Schools, one of the largest districts in the state in Franklin County near Columbus, Kelly Dillon, Camile Peterson and Chelsea Alkire won election as a slate.

Southwestern was one of the original districts to sign on to our Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit, but the board of elections were targeted a few years ago by pro-voucher, anti-public school groups, and dropped out.

The election of these three candidates should help our effort to fight back against harmful private school vouchers.

In Delaware County, pro-public school candidates Molly Snodgrass and Jessica Parent were elected to the Big Walnut Schools board of education.

In northeast Ohio, Mentor votes rejected a conservative slate that called itself “Team ISO” that campaigned on banning books, cuts to spending and “culture war” issues. They were soundly defeated by voters in one of Ohio’s more conservative counties.

While Team ISO was attacking the Mentor schools, school board President Maggie Cook was reelected after talking about AP courses, College Credit Plus programs, their career-technical opportunities and other pro-public school ideas.

In Akron, voters sent School Board President Carla Jackson packing. Four years ago, Jackson was unopposed. Last week, she got just 10 percent of the vote. Jackson is the head of middle school academics at the Emmanuel Christian Academy.

In Upper Arlington, a district that joined our lawsuit with a 3-2 vote, Board President Lou Sauter, a no vote, lost reelection.

In Forest Hills, near Cincinnati, voters rejected four anti-public school candidates and supported a candidate who ran on the platform “making school board meetings boring again.”

During his successful campaign for office, Jeff Nye told the Cincinnati Enquirer: “We need to fill the leadership vacuum at the top of the district and put the focus back on education and student wellness, not on politics or imagined grievances, and make sure the kids know that all students are welcome in Forest Hills.”

Is your district part of our historic lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio