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Good Tuesday morning,

In state after state, where anti-public school zealots, backed by billionaires, have pushed to expand private school vouchers, grass roots coalitions like Vouchers Hurt Ohio have formed to fight back.

Wyoming is the latest state where vouchers have been ruled unconstitutional.

A Laramie County District Court Judge stopped the new Wyoming private school voucher scheme that planned to spend $30 million to provide $7,000 for each student to attend a private school or home school.

Like Ohio, Wyoming’s voucher program has no income limits for the recipients so millionaires are eligible for a voucher.

Wyoming’s program is a pittance compared to Ohio where our lawmakers have approved spending $1.5 billion in the next two school years on vouchers with zero financial or academic oversight.

The cases in Ohio and Wyoming are similar.

In Ohio, Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page ruled on June 24 the EdChoice private school voucher program is unconstitutional on three counts, including that the state is not funding our public schools at a constitutional level while siphoning away billions of dollars to private schools.

Also in Wyoming, the judge noted the voucher program allows public funding of private schools that have discriminatory admission policies.

In Ohio, Judge Page made the same legal point in her ruling and said school choice is “semantics,” because all the power is in the hands of the private school operators.

Private school operators use discriminatory admission policies to determine who gets in and who is left out, including race, religion, family income (millionaires please apply), disabilities and any other reason they may want to use to slam their doors shut.

Wyoming is the latest in a series of states ruling vouchers unconstitutional.

This is an historic time for public schools as we face a truly existential threat from the rise of private school vouchers.

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

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

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

For the third year in a row, Vouchers Hurt Ohio operated an information booth at the Ohio State Fair.

We learned a lot during the 12 days our volunteers worked the booth as we talked to hundreds and hundreds of people.

Students and adults alike took time to write the name of their favorite teacher on a sticky note to place on our wall of heroes. We had so many that we needed a second poster board and we took hundreds of photos of these Ohioans from districts all across the state in front of the heroes’ wall.

We were cool inside the Bricker Building, but outside was hot and humid so more than 1,000 fairgoers took one of our “I’m A Fan of Public Schools” hand signs to help them keep cool in the intense heat.

Many of the Ohioans visiting our booth already knew that private school vouchers were taking hundreds of millions of dollars from our underfunded public schools and giving them to private schools with zero financial or academic accountability.

They were excited to learn we won round one of our lawsuit when Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page ruled on June 24 that the EdChoice voucher program is unconstitutional on three counts.

They also saw our poster board, quoting the Ohio Constitution, Article VI, section 2: School Funds that states “no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this State.”

There it is in black and white.

We gave them information about what public school districts in Ohio had joined our coalition suing the state, and let them check to see if their district was a member or not by simply scanning a QR Code.

We had hundreds of Ohio citizens sign letters to their local education leaders – superintendents, treasurers and board members – either thanking them for standing up for public schools and taxpayers by joining our lawsuit or asking them to join for the same reasons.

It was not an official poll, but it was crystal clear that Ohioans don’t like an EdChoice program that is primarily a refund and rebate boondoggle for wealthy families and a taxpayer-paid cash cow for private, primarily, religious schools.

And they are angry. They have good reason to be.

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

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

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

At a press conference on Monday announcing the state will appeal a recent ruling that Ohio’s EdChoice private school voucher program is unconstitutional on three counts, House Speaker Matt Huffman said lawmakers are compelled by the Ohio Constitution to fund private, religious schools.

Compelled!

Our attorneys proved within a matter of minutes that Huffman was wrong. In fact, the passage Huffman misquoted from the Ohio Constitution had already been clarified by the Ohio Supreme Court in two cases: one in 1872 and the other in 1945.

Here is what Bill Phillis, the Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding’s Executive Director, had to say about Matt Huffman’s error.

“To put it politely, Mr. Huffman was mistaken in stating that the Ohio Constitution “compels” the legislature to fund religious schools and education. He shortchanged the public in his statement today by not citing the first part of the passage he referenced.”

“Mr. Huffman failed to read the part in this same section that states…”No person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or maintain any form of worship, against his consent; and no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society.”

Dan Heintz, a Vouchers Hurt Ohio steering committee member, Cleveland Heights-University Heights school board member and teacher at Chardon City Schools, said:

“Mr. Huffman is wrong and if he was a student in my high school history class, I would be compelled to give him an “F” for a partial and misleading answer. If lawmakers were compelled to fund religious schools for the past 150 years, why did it take them more than 110 years to get started?”

Huffman appeared at a press conference with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Yitz Frank, School Choice Ohio, Aaron Baer, Center for Christian Virtue, state Rep. Jamie Callender, and Tom Fischer with Indiana’s EdChoice Legal Advocates. Fischer was there because an attorney for the Institute for Justice couldn’t make it. Yikes!

The stated reason was to announce the state would file an appeal. Yost gave zero details on the appeal.

The real reason they held the press conference? They are sweating bullets that all these stories that the EdChoice voucher scheme has been ruled unconstitutional may lead to parents not seeking vouchers.

They looked nervous, scared and once again they have not come up with one legal argument to justify spending $1.5 billion in tax dollars for private, primarily religious schools.

History and the Ohio Constitution is on our side.

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

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

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

“There is no Santa Claus, there is no Easter Bunny, and there is no such thing as school choice.”

This is a quote from Dan Heintz, a Cleveland Heights-University Heights School Board member and teacher at Chardon Local Schools.

“The Ohio Constitution is real; school choice is a fairy tale,” he told reporters at a press conference Vouchers Hurt Ohio held last week.

Since its inception, the pro-voucher crowd has sold the siphoning away of billions of tax dollars from public schools as a choice for parents and students.

Once upon a time, vouchers were cynically sold as a “choice” for poor parents, but the pro-voucher crowd has dropped all pretense of helping poor families.

Now, in its new, improved packaging, vouchers are advertised as the choice for all families when in fact the vast majority of vouchers are going to wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private schools.

In her ruling that the EdChoice private school voucher program is unconstitutional, Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page addresses the false issue of “choice.”

In our Count 1, where our attorneys successfully argued that private school vouchers create a separate and unequal system of uncommon schools open only to the privileged, Judge Page writes:

“The chartered non-public school, not the student or parent, applies to the state for an EdChoice voucher. By bestowing participating private religious schools with complete control over prospective students’ participation, the “school choice” here is made by the private school, not “as a result of independent decisions of parents and students.”

The private school operators choose, and they can discriminate using race, religion, family income (oh so important), academic or athletic ability, and disabilities to accept or reject any student without explanation or accountability.

“Chartered non-public schools participating in the EdChoice program are not subject to anti-discrimination laws, giving them complete control over whether to enroll a prospective student, and allowing them to turn students away based on their religion, sexual orientation or disability,” Judge Page writes in her 47-page opinion.

These are our tax dollars taken directly from the pool of money that is supposed to pay for our common system of common public schools open to all children.

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

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

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio