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Attorney Stephen Dyer’s 10th Period post: A higher proportion of Islamic private school tuitions are subsidized by taxpayers than Catholic school students.
Attorney Dyer provides a chart in his attached post that shows the amount of tax money various categories of religious schools received in 2018-2019 compared to 2025-2026.
Taxpayer subsidization of religion should be of grave concern to all taxpayers. Taxing all citizens to subsidize the religious dogma of various religious sects is not only unconstitutional, it is counter to the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.
Religious people who demand that their neighbors support their religious view seem to have no faith in their religion; otherwise, they would cover the total cost of their religious endeavors.
State Data: A higher proportion of Islamic private school students’ tuitions are subsidized by taxpayers than Catholic school students’
Non-Catholic Christian schools have more than 90% of their students’ tuition subsidized by taxpayers -- the state’s highest subsidy rate.
Stephen Dyer
Oct 19, 2026
I’m always reticent to write these kinds of posts. Because some may think I’m anti-religious schools.
I’m not.
However, it’s important to see just how much of our public tax dollars are flowing to outwardly religious schools because that is in direct contravention of the Ohio Constitution.
Just as a reminder, the Constitution states the following:
“… no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”
So my issue isn’t which religious sect gets a higher percentage of their students’ tuitions subsidized by taxpayers; it’s that any gets subsidized — as anyone who can read the plain language of the Constitution should.
Anyway, caveats aside, here’s where the state’s EdChoice subsidy gets divided1:
View Chart Here
As you can see, while Catholic schools have received the most money, the highest percentage of religious schools that get public subsidies are non-Catholic Christian schools, followed by Islamic schools, followed by Catholic and Jewish schools2.
What else you’ll notice is that a quite large percentage of the tuition subsidy program (more than $8.50 of every $10 ) is going directly to religious schools.
Seems like a problem. Constitutionally speaking.
1
This is looking and voucher funding and overall enrollment, as reported by the State, in both the 2018-2019 and 2025-2026 school years. The intent was to compare voucher payments before and after the state essentially put vouchers everywhere in 2023. I compared the schools listed by the state with the Private School Universe Survey from 2023-2024 (the latest available). That survey lists what religious sect each school is designated. Then I filled in some of the blanks (for example, St. Xavier is a Catholic school, but it’s not in the PSUS because only schools that respond are included).
2
Just as a reminder, the state pays schools directly after the schools accept applicants into them. The state is funding school choice, not parental choice.
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