Ohio bill would require increased accountability for schools using private school vouchers

A new bipartisan bill would require more transparency for Ohio private schools receiving Education Choice and Education Choice Expansion vouchers. 

Ohio Sens. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, and Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township, recently introduced Ohio Senate Bill 443, also known as the Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act. 

“The key point with this piece of legislation is that if you are going to take state dollars, there has to be a degree of transparency and oversight,” Blessing said. 

“This is a cornerstone of conservative philosophy in this state, where we have a program … and we have oversight over something like that. This is no different.”

The bill would require Ohio’s auditor to audit the funds of each school that is using EdChoice and EdChoice expansion vouchers each fiscal year. 

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce would be required to create a report card for chartered non-public schools in order to “hopefully get an apples-to-apples comparison,” Blessing said. 

Schools accepting EdChoice vouchers would have to submit weekly attendance records, conduct criminal background checks of its employees, report the tuition and fees charged by the school in a five-year cost trend, report how many of their students have an Individualized Education Program, and publish their dropout and graduation rates. 

“The current voucher system is doing two things — providing tuition coupons for wealthy Ohio families to be able to send their children to private schools, and it’s underfunding Ohio’s public school districts with drastic ramifications for Ohio students,” Smith said. 

Lawmakers increased the EdChoice expansion eligibility to 450% of the poverty line in 2023 through the state budget — creating near-universal school vouchers.

This means K-8 students can receive a $6,166 scholarship and high schoolers can receive a $8,408 scholarship in state funding under the expansion. 

Ohio spent more than a billion dollars on private school vouchers for the 2025 fiscal year, the second full year with near-universal eligibility. Nearly half of the money — $492.8 million — was from the EdChoice expansion. 

“Why on earth would we spend billions of Ohioans’ hard-earned money on schools that don’t have to provide that level of transparency and accountability — it doesn’t make any sense,” said Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. “It’s what taxpayers deserve, that there would be accountability and transparency into all schools that receive public dollars.” 

Students in some counties don’t have the option to attend a private school. 

“Many of us barely know what vouchers are because we simply don’t have private schools,” said Ohio Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County. “Our best schools are our only schools, and those schools are our public schools.”

Carroll, Champaign, Hardin, Harrison, Holmes, Meigs, Morgan, Noble, Preble and Vinton counties had zero private schools during the 2025 fiscal year.

Pizzulli said rural Ohio is frustrated with how schools are funded.

“We see our tax dollars supporting a voucher system that largely benefits areas with access to private schools, while communities like mine receive no or little practical benefit at all because those options don’t exist,” he said. “When vouchers were expanded, many of us were told, well, private schools would begin magically appearing and popping up all over the state, that simply has not happened.”

Nonpublic Ohio schools had 181,244 students enrolled in fiscal year 2025 — a 4.6% increase compared to fiscal year 2024. 

“What frustrates us is seeing our taxpayer dollars increasingly flow towards families who already had the means to afford private tuition, and so we’re just asking for fairness,” Pizzulli said.  

The lawmakers stressed Ohioans deserve to know how their tax dollars are being used. 

“The taxpayers deserve to know where the money is going, who is benefiting, and whether the investment is producing results,” Pizzulli said.  

Cleveland Heights Teachers Union President Karen Rego said her district is expected to lose $7 million over the next two years in layoffs and other cutbacks. 

“I don’t know where that’s going to happen, we feel very stretched thin already, and to lose staff members that we’ve lost this year, and the possibility of losing more next year is a really tough pill to swallow,” she said. 

Rego is not against people choosing what school they go to, but wants to see more accountability as far as how the taxpayer money is being spent. 

This bill is being introduced late in the General Assembly — any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered.

“If it goes nowhere in this General Assembly, or even next, that isn’t the point,” Blessing said. “We have identified a major problem here. We also have a solution.” 

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, questioned how serious the senators are about this bill since they waited until now to introduce it. 

“Once that money goes to those private organizations, we don’t audit that, and I think if we’re going to come up with a scheme where something like that would happen, we need to make sure that the privacy part of it for people — kids and families going to school, and the people running the school — all of those things are intact,” he said. 

More than 300 public school districts are suing over EdChoice. A trial judge ruled last summer that the program was unconstitutional, but a hearing was held earlier this month before the 10th District Court of Appeals.

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