Lawmaker wrongly tries to silence schools

School districts shouldn't be punished for exercising their rights, including challenging state laws they believe to be unconstitutional. State Rep. Jamie Callender, R-Concord, apparently disagrees. He introduced a bill that would withhold all state funding from the roughly 330 public-school districts — a little over half the school districts in the state — that are part of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. That organization has sued the state over its ever-expanding voucher program. (According to Vouchers Hurt Ohio's website, the following Lorain County districts are members of the organization: Amherst Schools, Columbia Schools, Elyria Schools, Firelands Schools, Lorain Schools, Oberlin Schools, Sheffield-Sheffield Lake Schools, Vermilion Schools and Wellington Schools.) After the inevitable blowback, Callender told the Ohio Capital Journal that he would amend the bill so that only money the districts were spending on the litigation would be withheld. The money would be held in escrow until the districts bend to Callender's will. "It's ludicrous that they think they can file a lawsuit using school funding dollars," Callender told the Capital Journal. No, what's ludicrous is that an elected state representative would introduce a bill seeking to silence public schools. Last year, a Franklin County judge ruled that the state's EdChoice voucher program, which funnels about $1 billion per year into private schools, was unconstitutional. The state has appealed. We imagine the case eventually will end up before the GOP-dominated Ohio Supreme Court, which tends to be, let's say, deferential to Statehouse Republicans. Callender doesn't have to agree with the lawsuit or the ruling, but he should recognize that school districts are well within their rights to challenge state laws. His initial bill would have been incredibly damaging to the school districts that are part of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. Even without the bill, many of those school districts, including Amherst Schools, Elyria Schools and Lorain Schools, have begun to implement cuts to balance their budgets. Consider Elyria Schools, which district Treasurer Colleen Aholt told us Wednesday gets about 51 percent of its $90 million annual budget from the state. Losing around half of its funding would savage the district's ability to educate its roughly 6,500 students. That was obviously the point of the legislation. Were it to have become law, every district involved would have faced the painful choice of losing desperately needed state funding or dropping out of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. While Callender's promised revisions to the bill, which hadn't appeared on the General Assembly's website as of Wednesday afternoon, wouldn't be as painful, the clear aim is still to punish member districts. Elyria Schools Superintendent Ann Schloss told us that the district spent $11,482 on its annual membership dues for Vouchers Hurt Ohio last June. Even losing that amount of money would hurt the district, which earlier this month announced about $9 million in cuts, including plans to lay off teachers. Twice last year voters rejected a levy that would have generated the district's first new property-tax-driven operating money in 15 years. (Had the levy passed, more limited cuts still would have been necessary, in part because the state cut the amount it was sending Elyria Schools by about $2 million annually.) "It just continues the all-out attack on public education," Schloss told us when we asked her about Callender's bill. Unfortunately, she's correct. While Republicans have been throwing more money at the voucher program, they have done so at the expense of public schools. Yes, as Callender pointed out to the Capital Journal, the state did increase its funding for public schools in the most recent biennial state budget passed last year. However, it was below the level prescribed under the so-called Fair School Funding Plan, which lawmakers abandoned. (In July, the left-leaning Policy Matters Ohio estimated that the new funding formula "shortchanges Ohio's public schools by $2.86 billion in needed funding over the next two years.") The Fair School Funding Plan became state law, ironically enough thanks in part to Callender, in 2021. It was intended to address problems with funding of public education in Ohio. Since 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled four times that the state's over-reliance on property taxes to fund public schools was unconstitutional. Meanwhile, state lawmakers have been tinkering with how property taxes work. Those changes will see some districts get less money and make it harder to renew existing property tax levies. We understand homeowners' complaints about high property taxes, which have been driven in part by rising property values. Those complaints have led to an ill-advised citizen-led campaign to outlaw property taxes altogether through a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution. That proposed amendment could appear on the November ballot. Callender should focus more on helping school districts deal with their financial challenges rather than trying to intimidate them.