CLEVELAND (JTA) — A district judge has upheld the constitutionality of Cleveland’s pilot voucher program which grants parents tax-funded tuition vouchers to send their children to private and parochial schools.
Jewish and civil rights groups have expressed mixed reactions to the decision.
The Cleveland program grants 1,500 disadvantaged Cleveland children up to $2,250 per year per child. The money can be used in the school of their choice, including private and parochial schools, and participating public schools in adjoining districts.
While similar voucher programs are being tested around the country, Cleveland’s program is the only one that allows money to go to religious schools.
The decision, handed down by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Lisa L. Sadler, marked a major step forward for school choice supporters, and dealt a blow to the program’s opponents, who have included teachers unions and civil rights advocacy groups.
“For a long time I’ve thought that vouchers were the way to go,” says Rabbi Samuel J. Levine, educational director at Fuchs Bet Sefer Mizrachi. “Vouchers have worked in other countries which value the separation of church and state,” he adds, citing England and the Netherlands as countries that have successfully implemented voucher programs.
He emphasizes that the voucher issue is not a private school vs. a public school issue, but rather an issue of choice. The Cleveland program and others across the country, he says, will level the educational playing field, allowing children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds access to private schools — schools that they otherwise could not attend.
Currently, Fuchs Bet Sefer Mizrachi and other area Jewish day schools do not fall under the scope of the Cleveland voucher program, and Levine doubts that any future voucher program will affect the Jewish day schools because most of them already are filled to capacity, or near capacity. Nevertheless, the voucher issue is important, he says, because it helps those children who need help. “If this is a program to benefit children who are economically deprived, I say, `More power to it.'”
Some observers, however, say that the Cleveland initiative, as well as the growing debate nationally, clouds the real issue at hand: the demise of many urban public schools.
“We were bitterly disappointed” in the judge’s ruling, says Christine Link, executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “This is a crucial First Amendment case. It won’t just mean a chipping away of the wall separating church and state. It will destroy the wall.”
Echoing the sentiments of many teachers unions, she says the ruling would destroy the Cleveland public school system and lead to a two-tier system of education.
In handing down the decision, Sadler said it was impossible to gauge the effect the voucher program will have on those children who stay in the Cleveland public school system to receive “a fair education opportunity.”
The program will transplant $5.5 million from the cash-strapped Cleveland public school system to private or parochial schools. Already, Ohio spends more than any other state on assistance to parochial schools, in the form of economic assistance covering needs such as transportation and textbooks, Link notes. Throughout the 1960s, the ACLU challenged unsuccessfully the legality of reimbursing for such costs.
Both supporters and opponents agree, however, that the ruling was just the first round of a court battle that many expect to be appealed as high as the U.S. Supreme Court. Shortly after the verdict, the ACLU filed an injunction to halt the vouchers.