In unprecedented move, Ohio funds construction of private religious schools

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private religious schools to facilitate them build novel buildings and expand campuses, a nearly unprecedented event in state-of-the-art U.S. history.

One sec Many states have recently enacted large-scale education 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 the Ohio 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 boost 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, said Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and Republican, he told the Columbus Dispatch.

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

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

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

“It’s new, dangerous territory, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior researcher at the Education Law Center and author of a novel book on the history of billionaire voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to build their schools, Cowen said, or held fundraisers or asked the diocese for facilitate.

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 received novel grants, recently said: News from Lima that one of the reasons for spending 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 a given state.”

When vouchers were introduced in Ohio in the 1990s, as in many other places, they were circumscribed 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 novel voucher money because private schools were either too far away or already overcrowded.

This in turn happened a massive political liability for voucher supporters in many statesand rural conservatives are increasingly outraged that their taxes are being spent on vouchers for upper-middle-class families in far-flung metropolitan areas where private schools are more common.

In April, the problem was recognized by the Buckeye Institute, a conservative, Ohio-based think tank affiliated with the Koch brothers’ political activist group, Americans for Prosperity. In a note on policyThe institute said it is offering lawmakers “additional solutions to address the growing need for classroom space” at private and charter schools, “given the success of the Ohio EdChoice program.” Among its recommendations: drawing money from the Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, which provides state grant money for building construction and renovation, as well as 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 huge 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 novel 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 amount of grants this year, about $4 million, may seem compact, 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.”