Overview:
Nearly, 8,000 Cleveland students use a voucher to attend private schools and 13,000 attend charter schools.
Ohio’s much-debated school voucher program was pitched 30 years ago as a modest approach to giving students in Cleveland’s struggling schools other educational options.
Today, over 8,000 Cleveland students use vouchers to attend private schools. The program has also gone statewide, and in fiscal year 2025 nearly 166,600 students received a voucher from one of Ohio’s five different programs. Those programs, in total, cost taxpayers over $1 billion.
As spending on vouchers has increased, so has the public debate around them.
Public school advocates blame vouchers for funneling money away from public schools toward private schools that aren’t held to a uniform standard. Proponents say that families deserve choice and that the competition from vouchers can improve public education.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit is winding its way through the courts about the constitutionality of one of Ohio’s largest voucher programs, EdChoice.
That lawsuit was brought by a group that includes some of Ohio’s biggest school districts but excludes the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) because Cleveland students use a different voucher program, known as the Cleveland Scholarship. Even if EdChoice is found to be unconstitutional, the ruling likely wouldn’t directly impact the Cleveland Scholarship.
Cleveland’s program was at the center of national debate in the early 2000s when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality. It was the first program to allow students to use public money toward tuition payments at religious schools.
Who is eligible for a voucher in Cleveland? And who is using them?
The Cleveland Scholarship is available to any family in the city as long as their child is in grades K-12 and lives in the school district. That includes families whose children currently attend private schools.
In the 2025 fiscal year:
- 2,499 high school students received vouchers, which is around 13% of all high school students in Cleveland.
- 5,845 students in grades K-8 received vouchers, which is around 16% of all K-8 students in Cleveland.
Out of the total 8,344 students using the Cleveland Scholarship, around 3% meet the state’s designation of “low income qualified” — though not all families report their come to the state. That means for the vast majority of voucher participants, their household income is greater than $66,000 for a family of four.
In 2025, Cleveland students who received a voucher used it at 93 different private schools spread across Cuyahoga, Lorain, Summit, Lake and Geauga counties. That includes religious schools.
During the 2025-2026 school year, the voucher amounts were:
- $6,166 for K-8 students
- $8,409 for high school students
Families with K-8 students who are considered “low income qualified” by the state do not have to pay any tuition not covered by the scholarship. The vouchers can only be put toward tuition payments; they do not cover other school-related expenses like uniforms or registration fees.
There are also 555 Cleveland students who received either the Autism Scholarship or the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship in 2025. Those scholarships are reserved for students with autism or individualized education plans and, depending on the child’s disability needs, can go up to $32,000.
Cleveland was the birthplace of Ohio’s voucher system
Ohio was the second state in the country to offer families vouchers to send their children to private schools. The effort began in Cleveland in the mid-1990s.
At the time, it was championed by George Voinovich, a former Cleveland mayor, governor and senator. He publicly positioned the issue as a way to help the Cleveland kids CMSD was failing to serve. But in private correspondence with Catholic bishops, he made clear that vouchers were also a way to bolster financially strapped parochial schools, reporting by Propublica revealed in 2025.
In 1995, the state legislature passed legislation to pay for the first set of vouchers in Ohio, a $5.5 million pilot program intended only for Cleveland students.
After a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case found the program to be constitutional, the legislature moved to expand the program statewide in the 2006-2007 school year. That year the EdChoice program became available to students attending low-performing public schools statewide.
In 2013, Ohio’s EdChoice Expansion made vouchers available to families throughout the state based on their income.
Since then, legislators have expanded the program and poured money into it. Three years ago vouchers became an option for nearly every Ohio family regardless of income or the public district where they live.
How can families apply for vouchers?
Families interested in applying for the Cleveland Scholarship must submit an application from Feb. 1 to April 30. If there is still funding available, a second application window can be opened.
Students must first be accepted to a nonpublic school of their choice before applying for a scholarship. The voucher can be renewed every year until a child graduates from high school as long as they take all the tests required for their grade, according to the state.
If tuition is more than the voucher, families can be required to pay the difference unless they are considered “low income qualified” and their student is in grades K-8.
Families interested in a school voucher program can access the Ohio Department of Education & Workforce Parent Portal for more information and to apply.
Vouchers aren’t the only way Cleveland families opt out of traditional public schools
In Cleveland, there are also around 50 charter schools serving around 13,000 total students, according to state data.
These schools, which are also called “community schools,” are tuition-free public schools. They receive taxpayer money on a per student basis like CMSD does but instead of being operated by the school district, they usually have either a private for-profit or nonprofit operator.
When it comes to charters, much like vouchers, Cleveland is also unique. It’s the one of the only places in Ohio where the school district shares some of the money raised by local property taxes with some charter schools. This year, the total shared could come close to $10 million.
The choice — to share local property tax dollars with charters — dates back to the Cleveland Plan, which was implemented by former district CEO Eric Gordon in 2012. At the time, the thought was that collaborating with charters would increase high-quality options for families and increase more oversight of charter schools.
CMSD shares its levy money with two different categories of charter schools: sponsors and partners. Both types include a basic agreement where the charter school gets access to levy funding and in exchange CMSD can lump that school’s test scores into the district’s state report card. But with sponsored schools, the district has a greater level of oversight. There are currently eight charter schools the district either sponsors or partners with.
Recently, board members have questioned CMSD’s decision to partner with charter schools, but they haven’t made any decisions to change the current system. The district’s levies since the Cleveland Plan have been written so that even if CMSD dropped all agreements with charters, it wouldn’t receive any of the funding set aside for them.
Vouchers and charters impact funding for CMSD
The biggest way vouchers and charter schools impact public school funding is enrollment.
In Ohio, school funding follows the student, so when students opt out of traditional public schools, the district doesn’t get those dollars.
Even the charters that CMSD shares levy funds with don’t contribute to the district’s overall enrollment numbers, though their test scores are listed on its state report card.
Those who oppose vouchers point out that while the state legislature has opened more and more channels to funnel public money to private schools, it has also consistently reduced the share of funding that public schools receive from the state.
Since Ohio’s public education funding formula was declared unconstitutional in 1997, the share the state kicks in to school districts has fallen from 42% of their funding to 37%, which represents millions of dollars for a district like CMSD.
In a similar time interval, spending on vouchers has increased from the first $5.5 million pilot program run in Cleveland in 1995 to over $1 billion spent on vouchers statewide in 2025. (Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation.)
How transporting students to their chosen schools works
CMSD doesn’t receive per-pupil funding for the thousands of Cleveland students receiving vouchers or choosing charter schools. But it is responsible for serving some of those kids — that includes by providing transportation.
For this school year, that meant transporting nearly 4,300 nonpublic and charter school students on their schools’ schedules, requiring CMSD to enter contracts with van and cab companies.
The choice to hire those companies came partly from CMSD’s struggles to provide timely and reliable transportation to all of its students with yellow school buses, something made more challenging by trying to service nonpublic schools with buses.
But transporting nonpublic and charter school students via van and cab is expensive.
The state reimburses CMSD for around 65% of what it spends on transportation and 84% of what it spends on transportation for special education students, which leaves a gap that the district covers with local tax dollars.
This school year, it cost CMSD nearly $7.3 million to transport nonpublic and charter students. That’s in addition to around $800,000 CMSD paid directly to the families of charter and private school students it deemed “too impractical” to transport.
