GOP explains giving every school kid a voucher
Every school-aged kid in Ohio would be eligible for a voucher to pay for private education under a plan unveiled by House Republicans Wednesday.
It’s called the backpack scholarship program, and it would direct the state treasurer to create “education savings accounts” for any student who wanted one starting in the summer of 2023. The accounts would be filled with either $5,500 (K-8 grade) or $7,500 (9-12 grade) in state dollars annually and could be used to pay for things like private school tuition, homeschool supplies, after-school care, advanced placement testing fees or educational thera
pies.
“This is a major shift in education policy ...,” said Aaron Baer, the president of the Center for Christian Virtue, which advocates school choice. “This is really opening up the market of opportunities for families.”
Edchoice for all
Ohio has five school voucher programs, and House Bill 290 would basically replace three of them: Edchoice, Edchoice Expansion and the Cleveland Scholarship program.
These voucher programs require kids to live near certain schools or have certain family incomes. This bill would eliminate those requirements.
“HB 290 would create a true money follows the child approach to education funding in Ohio,” bill sponsor Rep. Riordan Mcclain, R-upper Sandusky, said.
That’s why it’s called the backpack scholarship. The money would follow kids wherever they went like a backpack.
But those backpacks wouldn’t hold every education dollar a kid could get. Just like the current Edchoice scholarship program, the bill would leave the money from local levies and the federal government with public school districts.
Capturing all those local and federal dollars would require a massive rewrite of Ohio’s tax code and quite possibly a constitutional amendment. That’s far too big a lift right now, Baer said. Lawmakers have tried it in the past and been unsuccessful.
What would this cost?
The nonpartisan Legislative Services Commission hasn’t put its official number on HB 290 yet, but supporters of the backpack bill claim it wouldn’t have a massive impact on the state budget.
“There is no evidence in any school choice program that there is this mad rush,” Baer said. Private schools in Ohio don’t have the capacity to admit a bunch of new students.
But Steve Dyer, director of government relations for the Ohio Education Association, disagreed.
About 215,000 kids currently attend private K-12 schools in Ohio and about
69,000 (32%) use a school voucher to cover at least part of their tuition.
An analysis by the USA TODAY Ohio Bureau in September found that Ohio will spend about $628 million during the 2021-2022 school year on those voucher kids when all the vouchers, administrative fees and transportation costs were added up.
If you extrapolate those numbers out, Dyer said, you’re looking at a $2 billion price tag for just the kids currently in enrolled in private schools. Never mind the 80,000 students being homeschooled.
“Once this fiscal analysis comes out I think people might be changing their minds,” Dyer said.
Foxes guarding the henhouse
Another question Dyer and other public school advocates had about the bill was: “How are we going to make sure that this money is going to be spent on kids and education and not cars and boats?”
A 2018 investigation by Arizona’s auditor into a similar type of program found that parents there spent a collective $700,000 on fraudulent purchases like perfume, cosmetics and clothing.
Ohio’s bill didn’t include specific oversight requirements. Instead, it directed the treasurer to create an oversight plan. Mcclain said that could include things like fines and random audits.
“We want to make sure we use these dollars in an effective way,” Mcclain said.
Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper said what worried her more than misspending by individual parents was “people looking to make money” creating a bunch of “Bishop Sycamores.”
Bishop Sycamore was a school supposedly based in Columbus that made national headlines after its football team flopped on national television.
Its owners registered as a non-chartered, non-public school. In Ohio that means a school receives no public dollars in exchange for little to no public oversight. HB 290 would change that. For the very first time, parents could spend public dollars on these types of schools.
“There will be a lot of enterprising people starting up Bishop Sycamore type schools,” Bill Phillis, who runs the Coalition for Equity & Adequacy in School Funding. “Uncle Ted will hang out his shingle and say he will be able to operate a school program.”
Why act now?
School board meetings across Ohio and across the United States have grown increasingly contentious over the last year. Fights have broken out over mask mandates, transgender student athletes and whether a legal concept called critical race theory is being taught.
Baer said all this fighting over what happens in schools has pushed some parents to leave the public system for private education, and school choice organizations like his see an opening.
Ohio has grown increasingly proschool choice over the years, and the current Senate President is a long standing supporter of vouchers. But right now, parents are really engaged. Why not give them more options?
“If the public schools want parents to stop showing up to school board meetings, let them take a backpack scholarship to the school of their choice,” Baer said. “It seems like you don’t want these parents in your school anyways.”
Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.