Barry Alcock: Our pockets can’t handle wave caused by school vouchers
It’s brief but to the point letter to the editor in the Columbus Dispatch, pointing to one probable outcome for voucher expansion in Ohio.
If you think your property taxes are going sky high now, just wait until universal private school voucher expansion hits exponential growth as predicted by Senate President Matt Huffman in the Dispatch article “1,000 applications a day: Ohio’s new universal voucher program exceeds cost estimates” (Sept.13, 2023).
One billion in public tax dollars paying for private and religious school tuition will turn into 2 billion… 2 billion to 4 billion…4 billion to 16 billion and so on.
Our precious property taxes cannot fully fund public, private, religious and charter schools; four separate systems of education in Ohio.
Our country was founded on the principle of separation of church and state. Ohio’s constitution states that public tax dollars are for one system of common public schools only.
Local public-school districts, including Worthington, Columbus, Bexley, Westerville, Reynoldsburg, Gahanna Jefferson and South-Western City Schools are joining 250 public school districts in the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit against the state of Ohio.
Hundreds of Ohio public school districts are seeing the writing on the wall; the state paying billions of dollars a year for private school tuition will bankrupt local property taxpayers and bleed Ohio’s public-school districts dry.