Injustice: The Disparate Impact of EdChoice Vouchers Across Ohio School Districts
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine just announced large, recession-driven cuts in statewide funding for public education at the same time more and more students in 140 of Ohio’s 610 school districts will be carrying EdChoice vouchers out of their local school district budgets to pay for private school tuition. Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program is funded through a local school district deduction, which sucks education program dollars out of local school district budgets. At this time when Ohio faces a sudden and serious revenue shortfall due to Covid-19 job losses and business closures, the Legislature must immediately protect extremely vulnerable local school districts by merging EdChoice and another Ohio voucher program—EdChoice Expansion, which is fully state funded. The EdChoice voucher program was created by the state legislature. The Legislature ought to pay for the vouchers out of the state budget for which the Legislature is responsible.
In February, the Ohio House passed legislation which would begin collapsing the two programs into a fully state funded Buckeye Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. While the Ohio Senate did not concur with the plan, the pandemic-driven fiscal emergency has now radically reshaped Ohio’s school funding calculus. The growth of EdChoice vouchers next year in the school districts shouldering the burden of the EdChoice program will catastrophically reduce local school budgets. The burden falls unevenly, because the state has designated only 140 of the state’s 610 school districts for the punitive EdChoice program, and 40 of those EdChoice districts will suffer the greatest impact.
Last week Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced an immediate state budget reduction before the end of the fiscal year (ending June 30, 2020) of $775 million, with $300 million of the cuts to be absorbed across the state’s K-12 public school districts. The Covd-19 pandemic has led to business shutdowns and job losses, which reduced Ohio’s state tax revenue through April by $776.9 million below fiscal year estimates.
The EdChoice voucher program is particularly burdensome for public school districts because the vouchers are funded by a method called “school district deduction.” Before the current school year, only 255 individual public schools had been designated for the EdChoice voucher program, but for the 2019-2020 school year, the state doubled the size of the program, for a total of 517 EdChoice Designated Schools. Legislators had been scheduled to designate 700 additional EdChoice school buildings for the program for the 2020-2021 school year. However, at the end of March,—under pressure to shut itself down due to Covid-19—the Legislature CONTINUE READING: Injustice: The Disparate Impact of EdChoice Vouchers Across Ohio School Districts | janresseger