In an unprecedented move that shatters the historic wall of separation between church and state, Ohio has passed legislation to fund the construction and renovation of religious schools. It also directly violates the explicit language of the Ohio state constitution.

ProPublica reports on the latest move to defund public schools and divert money to religious schools.

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.

They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.

“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.

With this latest move, though, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious system of education, Pepper said, adding that if no one takes notice, “This will happen in other states — they all learn from each other like laboratories.”

The Ohio Constitution says that the General Assembly “will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Yet Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network — several of whose schools received the new grants — recently told the Lima News that part of the reason for spending these public dollars on the expansion of private schools is that “we want to make sure that from our perspective, Christian school options are available to any kid who chooses that in the state.”

Ohio started funding vouchers in Cleveland only. They were supposed to “help poor kids escape failing public schools.” Initially, vouchers were only for kids already enrolled in public schools and only for kids from low-income families.

When they were implemented in the 1990s, vouchers in Ohio, like in many places, were limited in scope; they were available only to parents whose children were attending (often underfunded) public schools in Cleveland. The idea was to give those families money that they could then spend on tuition at a hopefully better private school, thus empowering them with what was called school choice.

Over the decades, the state incrementally expanded voucher programs to a wider and wider range of applicants. And last year, legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine extended the most prominent of those programs, called EdChoice, to all Ohio families.

Now, vouchers subsidize the children of families who never attended public schools, including affluent families. They have become a welfare program for families who previously paid their full tuition. As in every other voucher state, most students who take vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Encouraged by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers political advocacy group, the Ohio legislature added the religious school funding bill to the state budget.

Led by Huffman, Republicans slipped at least $4 million in grants to private schools into a larger budget bill. There was little debate, in part because budget bills across the country have become too large to deliberate over every detail and, also, Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers in Ohio.

According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission report, the grants, some of them over a million dollars, then went out to various Catholic schools around the state. ProPublica contacted administrators at each of these schools to ask what they will be using their new taxpayer money on, but they either didn’t answer or said that they didn’t immediately know. (One of the many differences between public and private schools is that the latter do not have to answer questions from the public about their budgets, even if they’re now publicly funded.)

The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.

“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”

The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.

“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”

The only statewide evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program was published in 2016. The evaluation was funded by the choice advocacy group, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. TBF has a special relationship to Ohio Republicans in the legislature because it originated in Ohio and maintains an office in Ohio. It also authorizes charter schools in Ohio.

The evaluation concluded that students who left to use vouchers in a private school performed worse than their peers who remained in public schools.

So, the Republican supermajority has known for at least eight years that vouchers don’t “save” poor kids; in fact, those kids are likely to fall farther behind. Now that the Republicans have adopted universal choice, they know that they are helping kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. So now, it’s a logical step to throw in millions more for construction and renovation of voucher schools.