Columbus, Ohio (AP) – Ohio, signaled on Wednesday that a judicial decision in which the state voucher system of the state is declared unconstitutional is quickly filed, a decision that was celebrated by public school representatives and condemned by a prominent Christian educational organization.
The Republican Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement that he was confident that the state would ultimately win. He assured Ohio families that the order of the judge enables the program to remain in operation while the lawsuit is argued: “Therefore, the parents do not have to panic or take care of other options while the legal proceedings are taking place.”
The judge of Franklin County Common Pleas, Jaiza Page, made a summary judgment on Tuesday in a lawsuit from 2022, which was summarized by hundreds of public school districts and, together as vouchers who injured Ohio, as well as some parents, students and a fair school financing group.
The plaintiffs had argued that the 28-year-old school voucher schedule in Ohio, known as Edchoice, has created a constitutional system separately financed private schools over time and led to a renewed registration of some districts, since mainly non-minoric students apply the program.
Page, a democrat, agreed that the program violated the determination of the constitution of Ohio, which requires “a thorough and efficient system of joint schools”, but rejected the claims that it had violated the same protective clause.
She used her 47-page decision to tell the history of Ohio in the financing of schools, and found that in the case of statehood, evidence of 2023 was submitted to the draft law in which a universal voucher program was determined that did not allow public schools, including religious, for every family in the state that enabled lessons to un public schools.
Page in particular rejected the generally used legal argument of the “school selection”, on the specification of voucher programs comprises the expenditure decisions of individual parents and not from the state.
The judge found that this argument had failed in this case. She said that families are not the final decision-makers of the EDCHOICE program: “The ultimate decision to accept potential students and thus receive the Edchoice funds is in the private school.”
The Ohio Christian Education Network, the rapidly growing educational arm of the Center for Christian Virtue, expressed powerful disagreements with the decision.
“This decision is poorly justified and ignores the mountains of the previous school selection both at the state and federal level,” said Troy Mcintosh, the executive director of the network, in a statement. “The fact is that this decision is not only an improper legal decision, but that almost 100,000 students from Ohio are thrown out of school that they have attended.”
The Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, praised the decision as a victory for the almost 90% of K-12 students who attend public schools in Ohio.
“Although this legal victory is probably the first step in a much longer procedure by the appeal courts, the judgment on Tuesday is an enormous victory for public school educators in Ohio, school communities and students who have seen critical resources that have been derived from our public schools for years to finance private school lessons for mostly sweet families whose children have never been set up their statements in the region”.
