COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Around the country, advocates for Christian education have been finding legal ways to tap taxpayer money used more typically for public schools. One new approach in Ohio is benefiting schools tied to a burgeoning conservative political group and facing objections from defenders of the separation of church and state.

In President-elect Donald Trump, backers of school choice have gained an ally in their efforts to share taxpayer money with families to pay for things like private school tuition. Trump has cast school choice as a way to counter what he calls leftist indoctrination in public classrooms and is expected to seek a boost for the movement at the federal level.

The Ohio case shows how governments can push the envelope to funnel money to private schools.

The state has put a small part of its budget surplus toward competitive grants for expanding and renovating religious schools. Most of the winning construction projects are associated with the Center for Christian Virtue, an Ohio-based advocacy group that’s seen its revenues balloon amid the state’s push to expand religious educational options.

Ohio last year established a universal voucher program that provides tuition to nonpublic schools, including religious ones, to any family in the state. Backers of the construction grants say they can help address a capacity problem created by the vouchers’ popularity, particularly in rural areas.

The nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State has objected to the capital investments in religious schools, calling the practice unconstitutional and unprecedented in scope. Where voucher programs involve spending decisions made by individual parents, the group argues the new program involves the government paying the schools directly.

“The religious freedom of taxpayers is violated when their taxes are forcibly taken from them and devoted to religious instruction of a faith to which those taxpayers do not subscribe,” said Alex Luchenitser, the group’s associate legal director.

The One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund originated in the Republican-led Ohio Senate.

Spokesperson John Fortney rejected the claim that helping religious schools directly is unconstitutional. “This is laughable and a lie that the left is using to yet again vilify parents who send their students to a school of their choice,” the Senate GOP spokesperson said in a statement.

Around the country, expanded school choice programs have benefited religious organizations seeking to increase their educational offerings. Of the 33 states with private school programs, 12 allow any student to apply for public money to subsidize private, religious or homeschool education, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University.

The CCV and its education policy arm, Ohio Christian Education Network, advocated for several years for Ohio’s primary voucher program, EdChoice, to apply to religious schools.

In an interview, Ohio Christian Education Network Executive Director Troy McIntosh said Ohio’s voucher expansion didn’t create new demand. It merely made the options families already wanted affordable. He said Ohio lawmakers had “a compelling interest” in addressing the capacity issue with the new construction grants.

“Parents who had children were paying taxes, but they were all going to schools that that parent would rather not be in,” he said.

A total of $4.9 million from the $717 million One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund went to religious school construction grants. Those include one new school campus, the retrofit of an old building into a new school, a cafeteria expansion, and dozens of new classrooms, according to grant applications obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.

Six of eight schools to receive grants are part of Ohio Christian Education Network, which has grown from roughly 100 schools to 185 schools over the past three years. The network opened its first new school in 2022. The other two schools that received grants are Catholic.

Another Ohio program allows nonprofits to take financial advantage of expanded school choice through entities called “scholarship-granting organizations,” or SGOs. These groups can collect money for private school scholarships, and donations of up to $1,500 per household are made effectively free through a tax writeoff. Public records show Corrinne Vidales, an attorney and lobbyist for CCV and legal counsel to OCEN, was pivotal in laying the groundwork for the arrangement.

“We think SGOs will be great for the students of Ohio and would like to be instrumental in whatever way we can,” she emailed a member of Republican Attorney General Dave Yost’s staff in July 2021.

In a separate email exchange, Vidales said the center had reserved the name “Ohio Christian Education Network” some years earlier but not used it. They kept it active, she wrote, “for a purpose like this.”

Once a fringe anti-pornography group called Citizens for Community Values that was best known for its role in Ohio’s 2004 gay marriage ban, the group known today as the Center for Christian Virtue has remade itself over the past eight years and profited in the process.

Along with the school choice measures, the group lobbied for bills requiring public schools to keep transgender students out of girls’ restrooms and girls’ sports and to ban gender-affirming care. IRS filings show annual contributions to the center grew nearly tenfold, from $412,000 in 2015, to $3 million in 2021, to $4.4 million in 2022. That was the year it established its own scholarship-granting organization.

In 2021, the group purchased a $1.25 million building on Columbus’ Capitol Square, within sight of the Ohio Statehouse.

While CCV now boasts of being “Ohio’s largest Christian public policy organization,” McIntosh emphasized that the center’s bottom line is not fed by taxpayer money. While that is true, the impact of the SGO tax writeoff to Ohio’s budget has been estimated at as much as $70 million a year, including via direct revenue lost to cities, towns and libraries.

Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said it’s clear that expanded school choice is redirecting money from public education to private schools and their operators. The union supports long-running litigation alleging EdChoice has created an unconstitutional system of separately funded private schools.

“It’s just patently evident that the profit motive is running through this movement,” he said.

Last year, after Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to protect abortion access in the state constitution, CCV President Aaron Baer blamed the public school system for undermining conservative values.

“The fact (is) that now every kid is eligible for a scholarship to get out of the public schools, right, and for us we need them to get into a real education, and a real education is a Christian education,” Baer said in a podcast.

Baer said he was aware such a statement would face criticism.

“But how in the world do you understand what’s going on around you, how things work, why things work, if you don’t understand who made them, and what He made them for?” he said. “And so for us, getting kids out of the public education system, getting them into church schools — that means starting more church schools — is huge.”

According to state business filings, CCV incorporated two for-profit entities this summer: the Ohio Christian Education Network LLC and the United States Christian Education Network LLC.

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