On 25th Anniversary of Ohio’s “DeRolph” Decision, Expansion of Vouchers Has Only Exacerbated School Funding Inadequacy and Inequity

Today is the 25th anniversary of the original Ohio Supreme Court decision in DeRolph v. Ohio. A quarter of a century ago, the Court declared Ohio’s method of school funding unconstitutional because state dollars were inadequate and inequitably distributed. The case was brought back to the Ohio Supreme Court and upheld three more times, but in the ensuing 25 years, Ohio’s flawed school funding system has never been legislatively remedied.

Because state funding was deemed inadequate and inequitably distributed, the Court declared that the entire system was overly reliant on local property tax levies which Ohio requires school districts to put on the ballot. The Court also charged the Ohio Legislature to discontinue a long practice of what the justices called “residual budgeting” and instead to base the per-pupil funding level on what school districts must actually spend to fulfill the state’s commitment, as defined in the state constitution, to a “thorough and efficient’ system of common schools. What is residual budgeting? It is the Legislature’s practice of dividing up the state’s revenues in each biennial budget across all the functions of government, and spending what’s available for K-12 education without consideration of the actual costs of teachers and school counselors or special education or school transportation, or the needs of English learners or the importance of enriched curriculum or school libraries or music and art classes.

The problem in March 2022, on the 25th anniversary of the first of four Supreme Court decisions in DeRolph v. Ohio, is that the legislature has neither chosen to fund public schools sufficiently nor to compensate for differences across local school districts in the amount and type of local property that can be taxed. Ohio school funding remains inadequate and inequitably distributed. School funding continues to depend too much on each school district’s capacity to put school millage on the ballot and on parents’ willingness to mount major political campaigns to pass these levies every few years.

Part of the problem has been a long legislative commitment to tax cuts. In an April 2021 report for Policy Matters Ohio, Wendy Patton examined Ohio’s chronic disinvestment in state funding for public education: “On average, local governments paid for the greater part of school funding in each of the last 40 years but three, 1987-1989. At times, the gap narrowed between state and local share, but the 2006-07 budget halted that progress by eliminating major business taxes and phasing in big state income tax cuts. Gov. Ted. Strickland made positive steps using federal stimulus…. But Gov. John Kasich promptly reversed that effort with a $1.8 billion cut to school funding imposed over the two-year budget of 2012-13. School funding has lagged ever since. By 2020, the state share of school funding had fallen to its lowest point since 1985.” In the most recent FY 2022-2023 state budget, passed by the Ohio Legislature in June 2021, the Ohio Legislature again cut income taxes, this time by $1.7 billion over the biennium.

The new FY 2022-2023 state budget raised some hope for school refunding reform. In the budget, the Legislature passed a brand new Fair School Funding Plan designed to meet the mandates of the Ohio Supreme Court’s four DeRolph decisions. The new plan was developed through a study in which experts tried to figure out a base cost per pupil that would reflect the real costs for school districts. Over a six-year phase-in, the Fair School Funding Plan was supposed to guarantee adequate funding, equitably distributed. Legislators promised it would end residual budgeting and end what, 25 years ago, the Court had condemned as overreliance on local property taxes.

But problems became apparent as last summer wore on.  The Ohio Senate refused to pass a law implementing the plan in full, and merely chose to fund the first two years of the plan because state senators said they did not want to tie the hands of future legislatures. It soon became apparent that there was no long-term commitment among many in the Ohio Legislature fully to implement the plan. The Ohio Senate also left out an important provision in the original Fair School Funding Plan—the inclusion of a cost study of the real needs in districts serving concentrations of children living in poverty while at the same time refusing to begin a phase-in of “disadvantage aid” until the second year of the biennium, with a zero percent increase for FY 2022.

The most serious threat to fair school funding in the new Ohio budget for FY 2022 and FY 2023 is that the budget alarmingly expanded school privatization, with the added investment in vouchers and charter schools coming out of the state’s public school foundation budget.  In the budget the Legislature raised the state budget for charter schools from $30 to $54 million per year. Legislators also allowed charter schools to locate in any or all of the state’s 610 school districts, while in the past, charter startups had been limited to a group of eligible districts.

But the biggest threat to fair public school funding cames from the myriad ways the budget expanded the state’s investment in one of its largest school voucher programs—EdChoice.  Each K-8 EdChoice voucher grew from $4,650 to $5,500; each high school voucher grew from $6,000 to $7,500.  The legislature altogether removed any cap on the number of EdChoice vouchers, which had previously been limited to 60,000 total.  Students qualify for EdChoice if they live in the attendance area of a public school that ranks in the lowest 20 percent on the State School Report Card Performance Index, but under the budget, all siblings of students who currently have a voucher qualify, wherever they live.

And there’s more. While there used to be a 75 day window for submitting an application for an EdChoice voucher, there is now “a rolling window with no closing date.” Alarmingly, in the new budget the state has begun phasing out the requirement that students must have attended a public school in the year prior to qualifying for an EdChoice voucher. High school students had previously been able to apply for a voucher without prior public school enrollment, but that requirement will have been phased out for all K-12 students by 2026.

A quarter of a century after the Ohio Supreme Court declared Ohio school funding unconstitutional, over 100 public school districts recently filed a second lawsuit declaring that EdChoice vouchers deprive Ohio’s public school districts of essential revenue. Much of the substance of the new lawsuit traces Ohio’s school funding problems to the same old issues—inadequate and inequitable school funding and the resulting overreliance on local property taxes.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs declare: “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools. Because private schools receiving EdChoice funding are not subject to Ohio’s Sunshine Laws or most other regulations applicable to public schools, these private facilities operate with impunity, exempt from public scrutiny despite the public funding that sustains them.”

The plaintiffs continue:  “Because public funds are finite, funding EdChoice Program Vouchers out of the foundation funding designated for public school districts inevitably depletes the resources designated by the legislature for educating Ohio’s public school students. H.B. 110 (the state budget bill) initially incorporated the salient features of the …Fair School Funding Plan  …. However, due to the ballooning effects of the EdChoice program, the enacted version of H.B. 110 funded only up to one-third of the increases required by the proposed Fair School Funding Plan over the next two fiscal years.” “(T)he Fair School Funding Plan was not fully funded due to the ballooning costs of the EdChoice Program. Only 16.67% of the Fair School Funding Plan is being funded through Fiscal Year 2022 and 33% of the Fair School Funding Plan will be funded through Fiscal Year 2023, as specifically delineated in H.B. 110.  This means the General Assembly will meet only a fraction of its constitutional obligation, by the standards it has adopted, to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools for Fiscal Year 2022.”

On this 25th anniversary of the DeRolph decision, Ohio’s legislators continue to flout their responsibility as defined by Article VI, Section 2 of the 1851 Ohio Constitution: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but 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.”

If you are interested in further exploring Ohio’s school funding dilemma, sign up to attend an Ohio League of Women Voters webinar tonight, March 24, 2022 at 7:00 PM: Fair School Funding: The Unfinished Agenda and How to Win.  Register here.

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Ohio House Passes Emergency Amendment Which Would Solve Some EdChoice Voucher Problems

Ohio’s House Speaker Larry Householder is leading his chamber expeditiously to address the crisis over school vouchers which emerged last weekend, when negotiations between the Ohio Senate and the Ohio House entirely broke down over the state’s EdChoice voucher program. The Ohio House passed an emergency amendment to Senate Bill 89 on Wednesday afternoon to redesign the EdChoice program. The new House amendment will be sent back to the Ohio Senate for consideration next week.

Speaker Householder has expressed growing concern about injustice, not only in the state’s EdChoice Voucher program, but also in the mass of punitive school turnaround policies Ohio has been imposing on its poorest school districts. Given decades of research correlating standardized test scores with the aggregate income of families and neighborhoods, Householder seems to recognize that state must grapple with the underlying causes—poverty and the urgent need for equitable school funding reform. He is pushing the state to support rather than punish its poorest school districts.

The Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock describes Householder’s comments earlier this week at a Columbus, Ohio Associated Press event: “‘It’s become a class problem,’ Householder said. ‘And I don’t mean classroom. I mean a class problem.’  For years, low-performing schools were in Appalachia or urban areas where most of the kids were African American, Householder said. People didn’t seem to care that public schools were deemed failing and losing money when the students enrolled in private schools, he said. This year, 700 new schools—up from the current 500—are considered failing, many of them from wealthier, white areas. ‘When all of a sudden there were 1,203 schools on the list and some of them are from the wealthiest suburbs in the state of Ohio, suddenly alarms went off and now we’ve got to fix this,’ he said.  ‘That’s a class problem.'”

Householder is pushing against a state senate, however, whose members are currently being actively lobbied by Betsy DeVos, who is said to be calling in favors. When the amended Senate Bill 89 goes back for consideration in the Ohio Senate next week, agreement with the House’s new amendment is not to be taken for granted. On Wednesday afternoon, Hancock quoted State Senator Matt Huffman recommending that the Ohio Senate not concur with the House’s newest amendment.

It appears this battle will not be resolved quickly.  Householder is a Beowulf on a quest to protect our public schools from Grendel—the monster of test-and-punish, state takeover and underfunding. A long and ugly battle is to be expected.

Background

A debate over one of Ohio’s four statewide voucher plans—EdChoice Vouchers—collapsed into rancor and chaos last week with House and Senate battling back and forth and unable to move forward. Last Friday, the Legislature finally agreed to a 60 delay, during which the Legislature would grapple with problems in the program, before allowing families to sign up for EdChoice vouchers for next year.

On Monday, this blog covered last week’s ugly debacle in the Ohio Legislature over explosive growth during this school year of EdChoice, due to changes made in the program during the budget conference committee last summer. The number of public schools where students are eligible to claim EdChoice vouchers increased during this 2019-2020 school year to 517, from 255 in the 2018-2019 school year. And the budget bill established that the number of qualifying schools is now scheduled to grow to more than 1,200 public schools in the 2020-2021 school year.

Here are two of the most serious problems which need to be addressed in Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers:

First: Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers are currently “performance-based,”meaning that they are available to students who live in the attendance zone of a “Designated EdChoice Public School.” A public schools is designated for EdChoice if the state’s report card awards the school a grade of “D” or “F”—a term that denotes a “failing” school—for two years running in any one of six report card categories: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing, Graduation Rate, Improving At-Risk K-3 Readers and Prepared for Success.  The algorithms which determine the grades are not public, and there is consensus across the state and even in the Legislature that the report card system is seriously flawed.

Second:  Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers are funded through a public school district deduction. EdChoice counts the voucher student as enrolled in the local public school and then extracts $4,650 for each elementary school voucher and $6,000 for each high school voucher right out of the local public school district’s budget. But a serious problem arises because in Ohio, state funding is allocated at different rates from school district to school district, and in many cases the vouchers extract more dollars per pupil from the local school budget than the state awards to that district in per pupil state aid.  Added to this: Until this year, to qualify for a voucher, an Ohio student must have been enrolled in the public school in the year previous to applying for the voucher. But surreptitiously inserted into the state budget last summer was an amendment providing that high school students may now receive a voucher even if they have never been enrolled in a public school. These provisions added together have burdened many Ohio school districts with more dollars lost to to EdChoice vouchers than the per-pupil amount they receive from the state.  Much of the money is flowing away from local school districts to students who have always been enrolled in private and religious schools and never attended a public school in the district from which the EdChoice dollars are flowing.

What Does the Emergency Amendment, Passed by the Ohio House on Wednesday, accomplish?

The House amendment passed on Wednesday ends the performance-based EdChoice vouchers and moves all students accepting a new voucher to a new program—Buckeye Opportunity Scholarships—an income based voucher program with students qualifying at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

The House amendment does not fully end the school district deduction funding for the vouchers. First time voucher applicants who qualify for the new Buckeye Opportunity Scholarships will receive income-based vouchers fully funded by the state.  Students who currently have an EdChoice voucher (and their siblings) will keep the voucher, paid for by the school district deduction until they graduate from high school. However, if the family’s income falls at or under 250 percent of the federal poverty level, these students will be transferred (beginning in the 2021-2022 school year) to the new program paid for at full state expense.  On Wednesday afternoon, the Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock explained: “The House plan also will try to get as many kids off of performance-based vouchers as possible by checking family incomes to see if they qualify for income-based vouchers and moving them over to that system… (This) will make a difference for local school districts. Performance-based vouchers are paid for by local school districts in the form of a deduction….”  The House’s failure fully to eliminate the school district deduction, which school districts fear will continue to drain millions of dollars annually out of their local budgets for vouchers, remains a cause for alarm.

The amendment the House sent back to the Senate on Wednesday night would also establish a formal Educational Assssment Study Committee to review serious problems with the uses of statewide standardized testing and with the state school district report cards which rate and rank schools and school districts based primarily on the standardized tests. The committee would be expected to report out by October 1, 2020.

Important Reforms Omitted from the Proposed House Amendment

Public school officials and public school advocates had hoped the House would address several additional problems with the current EdChoice program—issues that the House chose not to address in its proposed EdChoice overhaul:

First:  The House amendment ignores the need for hold-harmless funding for school districts with unexpected and sudden costs during the current 2019-2020 school year from last summer’s expansion of EdChoice. School districts hit hard during this school year by the last summer’s expansion of the EdChoice program had hoped for passage of $30 million (to be distributed across affected school districts) to cushion the unexpected collapse of their local school district budgets during the current school year. Such hold-harmless funding was discussed by legislators in both chambers last week. And the Cleveland Municipal School District had expected similar relief for explosive voucher growth this year through the school district deduction.  The House amendment does not provide this hold-harmless funding.  (A more modest $10 million to help some school districts damaged in the current school year was passed last week in a separate bill.)

Second:  The House amendment does not require that to qualify for a voucher, students must have been previously enrolled in a public school before they are granted tax dollars to escape that public school—the very purpose for which the Legislature said it created the program. Today, the vouchers are being awarded to students who have always attended private and religious schools.

House Passes A Second Very Positive Amendment to Senate Bill 89

On Wednesday, the Ohio House passed another very welcome emergency amendment to Senate Bill 89: to end Ohio’s state school district takeovers established without adequate public hearings in the summer of 2015. The House amendment would end the state takeovers and the top-down, appointed Academic Distress Commissions in Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland. Elected representatives from Lorain and Youngstown spoke passionately for the need to restore local control and community engagement in their school districts, which were thrust into chaos in recent years by their Academic Distress Commissions and their appointed CEOs.

EdChoice Voucher Negotiations Break Down in Ohio: Four Questions Must Be Addressed in 60-Day Delay

Rancor and confusion over the issue of EdChoice private school tuition vouchers filled the chambers of the Ohio Legislature all last week. In anticipation of the February 1st date when families were supposed to start signing up for vouchers for next school year, the Legislature set out to address problems with Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program, problems created when changes were surreptitiously inserted into the state budget last summer during last minute hearings by the conference committee.

Last week’s negotiations about the voucher program broke down entirely on Thursday night and Friday, however.  The Legislature has now delayed the EdChoice voucher sign-up process; it has given itself two months to address big problems in the program. Here is how the Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell describes the chaos in Ohio:

“Ohio’s controversy over tuition vouchers sparked anger, political posturing and suspense in Columbus this week, with no clarity for anyone. That won’t come for two months.  Parents won’t know until April if their children are eligible to receive a tax-funded voucher toward private school tuition.  Vouchers applications that were supposed to start Saturday won’t. Private schools won’t know if they will receive any state tuition help. And about 1,200 public schools across Ohio don’t know if they will remain on a state list of underperforming schools which lets students use vouchers that are then billed to the district. Even state legislators can’t say what form Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program will take for the fall. After the Ohio House and Senate proposed drastic changes this week to rework which students would be eligible for vouchers and who would pay for them, negotiations fizzled. By Friday, with Saturday’s start of the voucher application looming, both houses voted to delay any applications until April 1, while they search for a compromise.”

One interesting detail about the huge fight in Columbus about school choice right now is that it is taking place among Ohio Republicans. The Ohio Senate has a Republican supermajority; the Ohio House recently dropped from a supermajority to a 61.6 percent Republican majority. Democrats are surely deeply involved, however. Ohio Democrats reliably support the institution of public education in this fight: They insist that public tax dollars ought to be spent on Ohio’s public schools, which everybody agrees remain underfunded.

Today’s debate, however, is about more than whether we ought to have vouchers. After all today in Ohio, we do have vouchers—five kinds of vouchers. There is the original 1996 Cleveland Scholarship program. Additionally there are now four statewide Ohio voucher programs:  Peterson Special Education vouchers, Autism vouchers, EdChoice vouchers, and a newer program, EdChoice Expansion vouchers.

As I listened to the January 31, 2020 Friday afternoon hearing in the Ohio Senate, what I heard were all sorts of arguments about a number of important policy questions. The debate was confusing, just as the whole week’s policy debate in and outside the legislature has been complicated and confounding. Legislators and advocates across Ohio are arguing about four different questions, but the debate has grown increasingly chaotic as people conflate the questions, their answers to the questions, and the intersection of the issues involved.  Here are the four questions:

• Should Ohio pay for private school tuition vouchers out of the state’s education budget when the state should be spending the money to support what everyone agrees are underfunded public schools?
• As far as the operation of the EdChoice voucher program goes, should qualification for the vouchers be based on the grades Ohio has been assigning to schools on the state report cards or should it be based on family income alone?
• As far as the operation of the EdChoice voucher program goes, should the state fully fund the vouchers or should the state be deducting the price of the vouchers from local school district budgets?
• As far as the operation of the EdChoice voucher program goes, what should the state do to hold harmless the school districts which lost millions of dollars during the current school year when an unexpected and explosive number of students already in private schools claimed vouchers which legislators had surreptitiously—in a brand new state budget—permitted them to claim through a local school district deduction?

This blog has not been neutral about the EdChoice vouchers. This blog has extensively covered problems with this program: here, here, here, here, and here.  I am a committed advocate for Ohio’s public schools, and my own opinions will certainly shape how I answer each of the four questions. I will, however, sort out the issues one question at a time, because I think advocates as well as legislators need to consider carefully their answers to the four questions one at a time.

Should Ohio pay for private school tuition vouchers out of the state’s education budget when the state should instead be spending the money to support what everyone agrees are underfunded public schools? This blog has consistently opposed school privatization and the diversion of tax dollars out of public schools into vouchers and charter schools.  Further Ohio’s state constitution provides for the common good by establishing a comprehensive, democratically governed system of public education—publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public.  Justice in education—the distribution of opportunity for all children and not just for some—can best be achieved systemically.  The public schools are the optimal institutions for balancing the needs of each particular child and family and at the same time securing the rights and addressing the needs of all children. In her presentation to the Ohio Senate last Friday, Senator Teresa Fedor enumerated all the reasons why Ohio ought to support its public schools and not divert tax dollars through tuition vouchers to private and religious schools. I encourage you to watch her presentation at about 45 minutes into the video.

But whether or not Ohio ought to have five massive school voucher programs is not the issue this week for Ohio and its legislature.

The Three Questions Regarding the Operation of the EdChoice Program

The current challenge for the Legislature is repairing the damage for public schools caused by Legislature’s surreptitious expansion last summer of the EdChoice voucher program in amendments added during the Ohio Budget Conference Committee. These changes did not become known until August, just as the school year was beginning when the Ohio Association of School Business Officials warned school treasurers that districts had begun experiencing budget deductions due to the expansion of the program a month earlier. The fine print of the biennial budget established that the number of public schools where students are eligible to claim EdChoice vouchers increased during this 2019-2020 school year to 517 from 255 in the 2018-2019 school year. And the budget bill established that the number of qualifying schools is now scheduled to grow to more than 1,200 public schools in the 2020-2021 school year.

Should qualification for the vouchers be based on the grades Ohio has been assigning to schools on the state report cards or should it be based on family income alone?   It has become a cliche in Ohio that vouchers provide escapes from “failing” schools for the children trapped in those schools.  I continue to wonder whether the legislators and state officials devising the state’s letter grades for public schools ever visit and observe the schools being graded. Public schools across Ohio’s 610 school districts work with children bringing a range of challenges. Nationally, the failure of the No Child Left Behind Act to close test score gaps ought to have taught us all that punishments and threats don’t enable educators to close test score gaps. The academic research is long and very clear. The test scores on which the Ohio’s report card system mostly depends correlate highly with aggregate family and neighborhood income. (See here, here, and here.) That is why the exurban, high-income school districts uniformly earn the Legislature’s plaudits and the state’s high grades.  A punitive system like Ohio’s, which threatens low scoring schools with low report card grades, more vouchers, and more charter schools, only reduces resources for the schools with the greatest challenges.

Legislators say they agree that the state’s school report cards—on which the EdChoice system identifies the schools where children can qualify vouchers—are deeply flawed and must be reconsidered.  The Ohio Department of Education awards letter grades for public schools in six categories: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing, Graduation Rate, Improving At-Risk K-3 Readers, and Prepared for Success.  The grades are calculated with algorithms unknown to the public. If a school is rated D or F for two years running in any one of the categories it becomes a “School Choice Designated School.”  And because of a hold-harmless period between 2014 and 2017, the years for which schools are held accountable by EdChoice in the current (2019-2020) school  year and the next (2020-2021) school year are 2013-2014, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019.

In a statement on Thursday night, House Speaker Larry Householder rejected conditioning vouchers on the school district report cards. The Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell explains: “Householder… criticized state report cards whose grades are used to label schools as underperforming, saying state grades should be constructive, not a ‘gun to the head’ of schools. He singled out the K-3 Literacy grade, which measures how well schools help struggling young readers, as a grade that needs to be eliminated. ‘K-3, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world.  Why was it put there? It’s simple. It created more opportunities for private schools to take public school kids out of the system… A lot of these performance standards have been put in place because these people in competition with public schools have lobbied for more and more difficult standards. Instead of trying to outdo your competition by being better, they’re trying to outdo the competition by making them worse.'”

Should the state fully fund the vouchers or should the state continue deducting the price of EdChoice vouchers from local school district budgets?  EdChoice, one of the Ohio’s four statewide voucher programs, takes the money through the deduction method, counting the voucher student as enrolled in the local school and then extracting $4,650 for each elementary school voucher and $6,000 for each high school voucher right out of the public school district’s budget. But a serious problem arises because in Ohio, state funding is allocated at different rates from school district to school district, and in many cases the vouchers extract more dollars per pupil from the local school budget than the state awards to that district in per pupil state aid. Added to this: Until this year, to qualify for a voucher, an Ohio student must have been enrolled in the public school in the year previous to applying for the voucher. But, secreted into the state budget last summer was an amendment providing that high school students may now receive a voucher even if they have never been enrolled in a public school. All of these provisions added together mean that many Ohio school districts are now losing more dollars to EdChoice vouchers than the per-pupil amount they receive from the state of Ohio, and much of this money is flowing away from school districts to students who have always been enrolled in private and religious schools and never attended a public school in the district from which the EdChoice dollars are flowing.

The Legislature’s explosive expansion of the number of qualifying schools in the EdChoice program has combined with the school district deduction funding of the program to create an existential crisis for a number of the state’s local school districts which are suddenly watching millions of dollars drain out of their budgets. The Legislature has saddled school districts with a school privatization program whose size the Legislature has no incentive to control.  Money quietly washes out of local school district budgets, but the state has no record of the amount and leaves the school district with no control over what is happening to their local budgets. If the state were to take over full funding of the EdChoice program, the Legislature would at least be forced in a democratically transparent budget allocation to assume control over the cost by limiting the number of the vouchers and setting the amount it would be prepared to allocate.

The Statehouse News Bureau‘s Karen Kasler quotes House Speaker Larry Householder endorsing the idea of replacing the school district deduction with direct state funding as a fairer way to fund the EdChoice program: “These Opportunity Scholarships would be funded directly and entirely by the state, instead of being deducted from state aid paid to local districts…. This approach has a lot less impact on local school districts and puts the focus where it belongs: For a more equal opportunity for all of Ohio’s 1.8 million school kids, regardless of their ZIP Code.”

What should the state do to hold harmless the school districts which were harmed financially during the current school year when an explosive number of students already in private schools claimed vouchers paid for by the local school district deduction?  In my school district in Cleveland Heights-University Heights, the district recently distributed a brochure explaining that EdChoice vouchers cost the district $4.2 million for us last fiscal year and an estimated loss of $6.8 million this fiscal year.  Each time a student secures an EdChoice Voucher, that student can keep the voucher, paid for by the school district deduction, every year until the student graduates from high school.  The school district’s information handout continues: “The CH-UH City School District will ask the community for a new 7.9 mill operating levy in March. The current funding issues with EdChoice are the major reason for this millage. In fact, the District would not need to ask for a levy until 2023 if it weren’t for the way EdChoice was funded, and the millage would be significantly less.”

The Legislature has been meeting this week about the future of the program, but many school districts like mine across the state are demanding to be held harmless for losses already incurred from the sudden changes imposed in the state budget last summer. In the video of Friday’s Ohio Senate hearing, 38 minutes into the hearing, a you can watch State Senator Sandra Williams discuss this problem.

In the original Senate plan to amend the EdChoice Program, passed last Tuesday, $30 million was promised to help the school districts which experienced sudden explosive increases in voucher use during the current 2019-2020 school year. The Senate had also allocated $7 million to repair losses to funding for the Cleveland schools in the recently passed state budget. After the Senate’s original plan was sent on to the House and the House plan sent its amendments back to the Senate late Thursday, the hold harmless funding was omitted. Advocates must demand that the House leadership adheres to its promise eventually to restore hold harmless funding into the eventual redesign of the EdChoice program. The Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell reported: “The House measure does not include about $7 million toward the Cleveland Scholarship, a Cleveland-only voucher program, or $30 million for school districts with large voucher increases this ongoing school year… Householder said he would support that money being included in a final compromise.”

What Should the Legislature Do about EdChoice Vouchers?

Should Ohio be spending money on vouchers when everyone agrees our state’s public schools are underfunded? Of course not. Our state ought to be funding a thorough and efficient system of public education as the state constitution prescribes. Funding for public education is particularly important in this year when a new funding plan is being considered and when state dollars for public school per-pupil basic aid have been frozen.

But it is a reality that Ohio will continue to have vouchers after 60 days of legislative negotiations on the operation of the EdChoice program. Given that reality, our legislature must stop the bleeding caused by the injury of explosive growth in the EdChoice voucher program in the state budget last summer.

• The Legislature needs to adopt House Speaker Larry Householder’s plan to decouple EdChoice vouchers from the flawed school report cards that the legislators say they will extensively revise at some point due to longstanding problems.
• The Legislature should fully fund the EdChoice program out of the state budget to take responsibility for and establish transparency about the expense of this program. The Legislature must ensure that the budgetary burden of EdChoice vouchers is not thrust onto local  school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty, the very school districts which already need smaller classes, more social workers, school librarians, art and music programs, and advanced curricular offerings.
• And certainly the Legislature must respond to Senator Sandra Williams’ plea to return the money stolen by the EdChoice voucher program out of this year’s local school district budgets without warning.