Carroll, Champaign, Hardin, Harrison, Holmes, Meigs, Morgan, Noble, Preble and Vinton counties did not have a single private school during the 2025 fiscal year. Most of those students simply do not have the option to use a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend a private school. Meanwhile, Ohio spent more than a BILLION dollars on those vouchers during the same school year, with almost half of that amount coming from the expansion of the EdChoice program, according to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal.

If you’re in the dark about what your tax dollars are funding with these vouchers, you’re not alone. State Senate Bill 443, which lawmakers are calling the “Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act,” would do something to change that.

“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,” said state Sen. Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township. “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.”

Blessing told the Capital Journal the bill would require the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to create a report card for non-public schools to “hopefully get an apples-to-apples comparison.”

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

No, until this point, institutions supported by vouchers funded by YOUR money have not been required to do that.

“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,” state Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, told the Capital Journal.

Lawmakers who know their responsibility is to be prudent stewards of our tax dollars, while developing legislation that serves ALL Ohio students, should have no trouble understanding the need for this kind of accountability and transparency. Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, may have a couple of nonsensical excuses about the timing of the bill or wishing to maintain the privacy of organizations the state now allows to operate in the dark, but the majority of lawmakers will understand hardworking but poor, rural and underserved Ohioans — and the public schools that work so hard for them — deserve better.