On Tuesday, April 22, the Oberlin City Board of Education voted unanimously to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding and its lawsuit against the state of Ohio’s EdChoice program. This program, which was introduced in 2005, provides vouchers for students to attend private or charter schools in lieu of attending Ohio public schools.
The Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, which is an organization composed of local governments and school districts, filed these lawsuits as part of a coalition of school boards called “Vouchers Hurt Ohio,” seeking to block the program. The lawsuits claim that the Ohio EdChoice program is unconstitutional and hurts public schools.
The School Board’s decision to join the Coalition came after Member Janet Garett attended a national conference on public education in Columbus from April 4–6.
Garrett told the Review in an email that she attended two sessions on Vouchers Hurt Ohio, where she learned about the lawsuit. At that time, 300 of Ohio’s 600 school districts had already joined. She wrote that a common theme at the conference, even outside the two sessions, was that the EdChoice program hurt Ohio’s public schools by diverting funds to private and charter schools instead.
“[O]ur legislators are taking more and more of our education tax dollars and giving them to vouchers and charter schools that have no audits or oversight,” Garett wrote. “The voucher movement was started, not by families, but by billionaires with the ultimate goal of destroying public education and making parents pay tuition for their children to go to school like they do for college. … There was little discussion among the Oberlin [school] board members ahead of the vote [to join the coalition]. Everyone knew we needed to join the lawsuit.”
Oberlin School Board President Farah Emeka, OC ’97, expanded on this point that wealthy families are some of the main beneficiaries of EdChoice.
“[O]ne of the things that Vouchers Hurt Ohio kind of notes as an example is that there are a lot of families that have access to resources that use the vouchers to give themselves a discounted private school education for their children,” Emeka said.
As part of joining the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, Oberlin must pay a fee to the coalition of $2 for every pupil in the district. This works out to $1608 for the 804 students enrolled in the public school system for the City.
The EdChoice program was first enacted in 2005 and sought to provide students in low-performing school districts the chance to attend participating private schools; it was subsequently expanded twice. In 2013, the program was expanded to families who fell below a specified income threshold, irrespective of the district in which they resided. It was expanded again in 2023 to include all Ohio families irrespective of income level, with families able to receive a maximum of $6,165 for students in K-8 and $8,407 for high school students; all families could, however, receive a minimum of $950 for a high school student.
In January 2022, before the latest expansion of the program, the Vouchers Hurt Ohio Lawsuit was filed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas by the Coalition, which then represented over 100 Ohio school districts.
“The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system,” the lawsuit reads. “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 — otherwise available to already struggling school districts for the education of their students.”
The suit argues that the program results in state funds being given to private schools with little to no oversight or audits over the disbursement of the funds. This, the plaintiffs claim, is a violation of the Ohio State Constitution. Article VI, §2 of the Constitution requires the State to only fund a “a thorough and efficient system of common schools.” This, according to the plaintiffs, means a system of public schools, rather than a system of “publicly-funded, uncommon, private schools.”
Further, the plaintiffs argue that private schools are permitted to discriminate against various protected categories, opening the possibility of state-funded discrimination. It goes on to point out that the majority of the private schools receiving funds under the program are linked to religious groups. The same clause of the Constitution requires that “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.”
Supporters of the voucher system have argued in court that, contrary to the claim of the coalition, private schools are not the recipients of the funds of this program; as such, the State is not funding them in a way contrary to the Ohio Constitution. Instead, they argue that the funds go to students and families, not to the private schools themselves.
For Emeka and the School Board, concerns over the diversion of funds away from public schools is the main reason to join the lawsuit.
“At the core of what’s happening here is we’re trying to preserve public education in our state,” she said. “[EdChoice] is undermining it greatly, and the more this program expands, more monies will be pulled away from public school education, and it could really cripple our public school system.”
