BY PAUL SOUHRADA
The Associated Press
COLUMBUS -- With schoolchildren crowded into the Ohio Supreme Court chambers Monday, lawyers argued about the constitutionality of providing state tax money for some Cleveland-area students to attend private schools.
"There's no more fundamental choice a parent makes than where or how a child is educated," State Solicitor Jeffrey Sutton said in his opening remarks to the seven-member court.
The $8.7 million experimental program, now in its third year, provides grants of up to $2,250 for 4,000 children from low-income families.
Proponents say it provides hope for students stuck in the troubled Cleveland school system, and the competition will help the public schools improve.
Opponents say voucher programs hurt the public school system by
diverting students and public money to private schools. Opponents suing to stop the program include two past presidents of the Ohio PTA, two ministers, a Cleveland public school student and the Ohio Federation of Teachers union.
Mr. Sutton asked the court to overturn a state appeals court decision that said the program violates the constitutional separation between church and state.
Mr. Sutton said the voucher program gets around the constitutional problem by sending money to the parents and letting them decide where to send their children. He likened the process to a state worker taking his government paycheck and signing it over to a religious group.
Robert Chanin, a New York lawyer representing opponents, said the analogy would be more accurate if the state worker also received a list of 10 state-approved stores where he could spend his paycheck -- eight of which sold only religious articles.
He said only the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a program that gives unrestricted tax dollars to religion-affliliated schools.
Justice Alice Robie Resnick, one of two Democrats on the court, said she was troubled that 80 percent of the students in the program attend schools affiliated with churches.
David Young, a lawyer for the families fighting to save the voucher program, said that shouldn't matter -- the money goes to the students because they are poor, not because they belong to a particular religion. Other justices seemed more interested in the claim that the program violated the state constitution's "single-subject rule." The provision is intended to prevent lawmakers from attaching bills that may not pass to unrelated bills that are more popular. The voucher program was created in the state's two-year budget bill.
"I'm willing to concede that you can appropriate (money) for existing programs," said Justice Andrew Douglas, a Republican. That line of argument troubled David Brennan, an Akron entrepreneur who runs two schools in Cleveland that mainly serve students receiving vouchers.
Mr. Brennan worried that the court was looking for a way to decide the issue without getting into the religion argument. A decision based on the single-subject rule could not be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
