Ohio to Use Taxpayer Money to Build Private Religious Schools — ProPublica

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand campuses, a nearly unprecedented event in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to pay for private tuition for their children, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a law passed by its legislature this summer, the state now provides millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal of the grants, according to the initiative’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase enrollment in private schools so they can more quickly enroll more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

After Hurricane Katrina and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer money was allocated to repair and improve private K-12 schools in many states. The churches that run the schools often receive government funding for the social services they offer; some Orthodox Jewish schools in New York City have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times found.

But national education finance experts emphasize that what Ohio is doing is completely different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and author of a new book about the history of billionaire voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to build their schools, Cowen said, or they have held fundraisers or asked the diocese for help.

So far, it has never been possible to build schools solely with public money.

“This breaks the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and former Ohio Democratic Party chairman. Pepper said courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they do not violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically goes through the parent channel on its way to a religious school.

But with this latest move, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious education system, Pepper said, adding that if no one pays attention, “the same thing will happen in other states — everyone learning from each other like a laboratory.”

The Ohio Constitution states that the General Assembly “shall provide for a comprehensive and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religion or other sect or sects shall have exclusive right or control over any part of the school funds of this state.”

But Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network — several of whose schools have received new grants — recently told the Lima News that one reason for spending the public money to expand private schools is that “we want to make sure that, from our perspective, Christian school options are available to every child who chooses a Christian school in the state.”

When vouchers were introduced in Ohio in the 1990s, as in many other places, they were limited in scope, available only to parents of children attending (often underfunded) Cleveland public schools. The idea was to give those families money they could spend on tuition at a hopefully better private school, giving them a choice.

For decades, the state has gradually expanded voucher programs to a broader group of applicants. And last year, lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine expanded the most high-profile of those programs, called EdChoice, to all Ohio families.

It was a final victory for school choice advocates in Ohio. The problem was that in many parts of Ohio and other states, especially in rural areas, parents couldn’t spend the new voucher money because private schools were either too far away or already overcrowded.

That has become a major political issue for voucher supporters in many states, with rural conservatives increasingly outraged that their tax dollars are being spent on vouchers for upper-middle-class families in far-flung metropolitan areas where private schools are more plentiful.

In April, the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Ohio affiliated with the Koch brothers’ advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, took note of the problem. In a policy memo, the institute said it was offering lawmakers “additional solutions to meet the growing demand for classroom space” at private and charter schools, “given the success of Ohio’s EdChoice program.” Among its recommendations: drawing funds from the Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, which provides grants from state money for building construction, renovation, and other “capital projects.”

Within months, the Legislature did exactly that. Under Huffman’s leadership, Republicans sneaked at least $4 million in private school funding into a larger budget bill. There was little debate, in part because budget bills across the country have become too large to consider every detail, and Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers in Ohio.

The grants, some of them more than $1 million, were then sent to various Catholic schools across the state, according to a report by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. ProPublica contacted administrators at each of those schools to ask what they would spend the new taxpayer money on, but they either did not respond or said they did not immediately know. (One of the many differences between public and private schools is that private schools do not have to answer public inquiries about their budgets, even if they are now publicly funded.)

The total grant amount of about $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But he noted that Ohio’s voucher program itself started out modestly three decades ago and is now a billion-dollar system.

“They come in with a few million dollars to fund infrastructure,” Phillis said. “That sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will go to building private schools.”