Window closing or door opening?
How does the Supreme Court case of Carson v. Makin affect the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit to end the EdChoice voucher program?
Last month the Supreme Court issued several landmark decisions that will shift the legal framing of several fundamental issues in American life. There was the Bruen decision that vacated a New York State law that allowed for the denial of a concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit to a potential gun owner and a day later the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that vacated Roe v. Wade. While not diminishing the significance of these rulings and the major divisions that Americans have over them, less focus was given to a third decision that was arguably just as pivotal. In Carson v. Makin the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts held that the Maine tuition assistance program could not have a non-sectarian clause in its criteria that would prohibit one or all religious schools from being included as options for parents seeking to benefit from it.
In recent newsletters the Vouchers Hurt Ohio organization has sought to temper reactions by its supporters who might have felt that Carson had sunk the chances of their current lawsuit against Ohio's EdChoice scholarship program. The school districts that are parties to the lawsuits, which now include Toledo according to a recent VHO announcement, have consistently blamed EdChoice for robbing public school districts of the financial resources they need in order to provide a proper education to their children. Much of the grassroots support for VHO's lawsuit is from parents, teachers and administrators that see school vouchers not only as a financial drain on public education, but as an engine for religious dogmatism being sustained using public cash.
Now these school board officials and their various supporters among educators and parents are making an abrupt volte face. Their lawsuit, they say, has nothing to do with the issue of public funds for religious institutions, but rather with the Constitution of the State of Ohio. In the words of their leader Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding:
"The SCOTUS decision is very limited in scope and does not address the central issues of our challenge in Ohio based on the Ohio Constitution. . . The EdChoice private school voucher program is unconstitutional because it creates a separate system of schools when the Ohio Constitution clearly calls for a single system. It makes segregation worse, siphons money away from an underfunded public common school system, and increases the reliance on local property owners and taxes to pay for public schools."
So is Phillis right? Technically the lawsuit still has life so long as it can prove that the language in the Constitution referring to "a system of common schools" means what they say it does, which is a system that is not only publicly funded and managed but also is the unique system with such status.
Cleveland Heights-University Heights Schools is a participant in the lawsuit filed in February challenging the EdChoice scholarship program. “Our lawsuit does not single out religious schools, which was the main issue in the SCOTUS case,” claimed Phillis in the same response to Carson.
The actual text of the lawsuit refers to religion in four places, albeit obliquely as an area of likely discrimination by participant schools of the EdChoice program in addition to other factors like race, sex, sexual orientation and disability. Therefore Phillis may be correct in indicating that the lawsuit as it is currently worded can proceed.
Heintz’s war on the 45-thousand-aires
However this does not mean that VHO’s supporters in our school district are resting on their laurels. Heights BoE member Dan Heintz has been using his official Facebook page as a soap box to rail against the voucher program and school choice as much as ever. He recently shared a post bemoaning the fact that EdChoice allows for households earning up to 250% the federal poverty level to be eligible for the program. This to anyone seems like a lot; Heintz’s point being that it’s actually very well off people that are benefiting from the program. Only he doesn’t actually put a dollar figure on the issue.
Let’s explore what this means in the context of our community. The federal poverty level is governed by household size and starts with one person that earns $13,590 and rising with each person by increments of $4,720. This means that a single parent household with one child can only earn $18,310 or less to qualify as being in poverty, and up to $45,775 to still qualify for EdChoice in Ohio. Of the three municipalities making up CHUH school district, the median household incomes are
Cleveland Heights: $59,086
University Heights: $80,817
South Euclid: $60,368
Looking at those figures, one should notice that a household could easily be earning at or above 250% of the federal poverty level and still be earning thousands of dollars less than the median household income of any of the district municipalities. Let’s also consider that fair market value for rent is $893/month, or a yearly cost of $10,716. Perhaps next time Member Heintz should actually look at what the actual poverty figures are and what they mean in our local economy rather than wave them around like a bloody glove.
Another aspect of the issue that Heintz harps on is that the EdChoice program is increasing segregation and excluding non-white students, and he often cites CHUH and Richmond Heights as two examples of districts where white students have disproportionately opted for EdChoice over their local schools. However, in the graphic below that he shared it is shown that statewide the opposite phenomenon is occurring. The following allotments show how many of the scholarships went to each group while their share of the total statewide student population is in parentheses:
35% black (17%)
11.59% to Hispanics (6.7%)
7.77% multiracial (5.9%)
43.42% white (67.6%)
1.73% Asian/Pacific Islander (2.8%)
0.08% American Indian/Alaskan Native (<1%)
So contrary to the narrative that this is some backdoor mechanism to funnel public money to fund better schools for whites only, EdChoice has as of 2021 become disproportionately a program that serves non-white students.
The vitriolic anger that Heintz and other VHO supporters pour on the families that avail themselves of the EdChoice program may be intensifying due to their frustration with current setbacks and the need to externalize the blame. Recently CHUH announced that it would hire 50 tutors at $25 per hour to teach “pandemic-affected learners” for up to five hours every day, for a maximum annual gross income of $23,125. At that level they are just above the poverty level for a three person household and safe from being judged as freeloading scum that get “comfort, not access” according to Dan Heintz.