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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

Good Tuesday morning

It’s Election Day, 2025 and the stakes are high for 108 public school districts.

Those 108, representing more than one in every six school districts, are going to voters today with a levy request.

“Local school levies have always been part of the equation. Unfortunately, it seems like they’re gonna be a bigger part of the equation,” Ohio Education Association President Jeff Wensing told Morgan Trau, a reporter for the Ohio Capital Journal.

Wensing pointed to data from Policy Matters Ohio that indicated anti-public school lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine slashed funding for public education by nearly $3 billion over the next two years.

Read Trau’s story here.

Trau writes about lawmakers attempting to shift the blame on rising property taxes to local school districts, but she misses a major reason 108 school districts have levies on the ballot today.

At the same time lawmakers cut spending to public schools, they increased the funding for EdChoice private school vouchers at unprecedented levels.

In the next two years, private schools, mostly religious, will receive $1.7 billion in tax dollars. There are no income limits on vouchers so families receiving them are wealthy and already had enrolled their children in private schools so this is a refund and a rebate program.

This is why we believe Vouchers Hurt Ohio and why we have sued the state, challenging the constitutionality of EdChoice private school vouchers.

In June, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page agreed with our lawsuit and ruled vouchers unconstitutional on three counts.

The second count is directly related to how EdChoice vouchers siphon precious tax dollars away from public schools. We maintain, and Judge Page agreed, that vouchers increase the dependence on local property taxes to pay for public schools.

Four times in the ‘90s, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled a public school funding formula that was overreliant on local property taxes is unconstitutional.

The money for EdChoice vouchers comes out of the same line-item in the budget that pays for public schools so a dollar more for vouchers is a dollar less available to pay for public schools.

More than 300 public school districts have joined us in our lawsuit. We believe every district has an obligation to stand up for their students, families, communities and taxpayers and sign on to Vouchers Hurt Ohio.

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

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Happy Local Levy Day!

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio