🚨OHIO is now using taxpayer dollars to build and expand private religious schools.

Not vouchers.
Not tuition reimbursement.

🚨Direct public funding for religious school construction.🚨

A new investigation by ProPublica details how Ohio lawmakers quietly approved millions in state grants for private religious schools—currently mostly Catholic—to renovate buildings, add classrooms, and expand campuses so they can enroll more voucher students.

And that distinction matters.

Right now, the focus on Catholic schools makes this policy easier to sell. Catholic education has a long institutional history, existing infrastructure, and broader public familiarity. It softens the constitutional alarm bells.

But this is not where it stops.

Once the precedent is set — once the state is openly funding religious school construction — there is nothing limiting these grants to Catholic institutions. The next wave will almost certainly reflect the evangelical Christian ideology that dominates Ohio’s legislature, not the religious diversity (or nonreligion) of Ohio’s actual constituents.

This is how normalization works:
• Start with the most “acceptable” version
• Establish the funding pipeline
• Expand it to match lawmakers’ beliefs

For decades, voucher programs survived constitutional scrutiny because the money technically flowed through parents before reaching religious schools. Ohio just blew past that safeguard.

Now the state is:

• Funding bricks and mortar for religious institutions
• Building a parallel religious education system with public money
• Doing so while public schools remain underfunded and overcrowded

Even experts who study school privatization are sounding the alarm:

“This is new, dangerous ground.”

The Ohio Constitution is explicit:

Public school funds may not be controlled by any religious sect.

Yet this policy does exactly that — and once it’s normalized, it won’t matter which sect gets there first.

This isn’t about “choice.”
It’s about state-funded religious infrastructure — and Ohio is being used as the test case.

If this goes unchallenged, other states will copy it.

They already are.

📌 Read the full investigation. Share widely. Talk about it.

Public education — and church-state separation — depend on people paying attention before this becomes the norm.

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