Writer opposes school vouchers

To the Editor:

I want you to imagine for a moment that you had the power to selectively determine whether your individual tax dollars were used to pay for the maintenance of county or township roads, support the Council on Aging, or provide resources to your local volunteer fire department. In this scenario, you could determine that if you didn’t use particular roads, know anyone who participates in services for our retired community, or truly believe that a house was going to catch on fire in your neighborhood anytime soon, you could ask the government for a personal refund or direct those funds to a project of your own choosing.

I recently listened to a brief presentation from leaders of an aspiring local, religious charter school that made a similar sales pitch to area residents at a youth basketball game.  Their main idea was that taxpayers should be able to selectively redirect their tax dollars, in the form of vouchers, to schools of their choosing. Instead of paying money to support their local public school, they could apply for a voucher that funneled those resources to a private religious school that would be under far less scrutiny than the typical regulations that public schools face.  The message sounded quite convenient and even quite empowering. The problem is that this mechanism is counterproductive to the values, principles, and goals of American democracy in its simplest form.  The argument is designed to sound enticing and make citizens feel better about abandoning their civic duties to their communities.

You can most likely see the fallibility and satire embedded in the examples about individuals choosing to remove their tax dollars from projects that support public roads and infrastructure, vital services for our vulnerable populations, and emergency services for our own families and for our neighbors.  Why do we allow these same types of false assumptions to exist and perpetuate about how we choose to support our local public schools?

We already have the legal tools available to us as citizens to promote change in our local communities. We have the chance to vote to approve or decline levies, we have the choice to seek public office or invest our trust in elected officials to govern in our name, and we have the solemn obligation to protect our local institutions of public trust—namely our local public schools.  If we have concerns about how schools are operated, we should be encouraged to address those issues at local school board meetings or be empowered to seek a position on the elected boards themselves.  This is incredibly important to consider because Ohio was historically a cradle for public education having been carved out of the Northwest Territory and required to reserve actual public lands and resources for the development and sustainability of public education.

For the past three decades, political leaders in Columbus have slowly created a voucher system that has eroded public trust in public education and has drastically reduced resources to sustain public education.  Recent expansions of the EdChoice voucher program have cost the Ohio General Assembly nearly $750 million in 2023-2024, up from $400 million the previous year.  Additionally, the governor’s recent budget proposal includes provisions to allocate more than $1.25 billion on educational vouchers for the 2026-2027 school year, while reducing funding for traditional public schools by over $100 million.  This would lead to approximately 360 school districts (59 percent of all Ohio public school districts) seeing an overall decrease in taxpayer funding from the Ohio General Assembly. In case you’re wondering, our local Van Wert County schools are included in those districts that would stand to lose significant funding from Columbus.  The governor and key statewide legislators expect our local public schools to do more with less funding while private and parochial schools benefit from expanded bailouts.

Many rural taxpayers have ignored the voucher scheme in the past, confident that their local school districts were immune from the poaching of public funds from their local district’s coffers. They have largely attributed the voucher program as something that is for “urban districts” or merely offers alternatives to traditional public schools akin to open-enrollment policies from school to school. Meanwhile, Ohio legislators have expanded voucher accessibility to families that earn up to 450 percent of the poverty level.  That means that a family of four that earns $140,000 will automatically qualify for $6,166 for K-8 educational vouchers and $8,408 for high school.  A program that was initially marketed as allowing students and families to “escape failing schools” has transitioned into a taxpayer-funded program to subsidize private and parochial schools across the state of Ohio. 

According to Policy Matters Ohio, only 3,000 of the 69,000 voucher recipients in 2023-2024 attended a private or parochial school the previous year.  That means that your public tax dollars are being overwhelmingly used to subsidize the tuition of currently enrolled students.  Across the state, only 17% of those voucher recipients qualified as low-income in 2023-2024 as opposed to 68 percent of voucher recipients in 2022-2023.  These private and parochial schools have been historically concentrated in or near urban areas, but the overall expansion of the Ohio General Assembly’s voucher program has affected the amount of resources that are available for public education.  While 90 percent of Ohio’s students are being educated in public schools, an increasing amount of YOUR tax dollars are being siphoned away to subsidize and support private and parochial schools. 

As fewer funds are appropriated for public education in the statewide budget process, you can expect local school districts to increase the frequency with which they have to approach voters about levies for general operating expenses, renovations and additions, and services that impact the entire district community.  We live in a part of Ohio that takes tremendous pride in the success of our local school districts. Do we want to endure years of increased local taxes to support our local public school districts because state legislators have already spent our hard-earned tax dollars on bloated subsidies for private and parochial schools?  A family’s decision to send their children to a private or parochial school should not mean that our local districts have to do more with less financial resources.  It’s time that we stand up for our local schools, our local communities, and our children’s educational future. Please contact your state representative, state senator, or the governor’s office and join me in taking a stand against increased voucher subsidies on the public’s dime.

James Lautzenheiser

Convoy