Religion Is Key as Voucher Case Reaches Supreme Court

Growing up among Irish and Eastern European immigrants on this city’s Westside, Christine Suma attended only Catholic schools. As a mother she never even considered sending her 12 children to public school. The 46-year-old homemaker now has four children enrolled at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the same school she attended.

But there’s a difference. Back then, her parents paid all of her tuition. Now, the state of Ohio foots almost all of the bill for her children under the controversial “voucher” program. Those subsidies are the subject of a lawsuit with broad public policy implications to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court today.

Opponents of the 6-year-old program say vouchers for religious education cross the line the Constitution draws between the government and private acts of faith, and threaten the very notion of pluralistic public education.

The proponents say vouchers, worth as much as $2,250 yearly for each child, do not force recipients to choose any particular school.

“It’s my money and I want to spend it the way I want,” asserted Suma, who today will be among a group of parents from Ohio and elsewhere demonstrating outside the Supreme Court building in Washington on behalf of the program. “We’re not asking for anything abnormal. This is what should be normal.”

Both sides expect that the decision on the Cleveland voucher case later this year will mark a turning point in the nation’s ongoing discussion over ways to give families education choices beyond their neighborhood public schools. Eight states now encourage such alternatives through tax credits, and many others finance charter schools that operate independently of school districts. Publicly financed voucher programs, which help pay for private tuition directly, operate in Florida and Milwaukee in addition to Cleveland, but they have failed to take root elsewhere.

In 2000, voters in California and Michigan overwhelmingly rejected voucher proposals. Proponents say that’s in part because of the legal cloud they hope the Supreme Court will lift.

The Cleveland program stands out because more than 99% of its 4,474 beneficiaries attend religious schools. And voucher opponents--a coalition of teacher unions, education groups and free speech and civil rights groups--say that’s because the Cleveland program is tilted in favor of church-subsidized schools and helps many students who would attend them even without vouchers.

Statistics gathered by Policy Matters, a Ohio research group largely funded by a voucher opponent, show that only 1 in 5 voucher students this year previously attended the public schools; 1 in 3 attended private school the year before securing a voucher. And the rest entered the program as kindergartners.

When the Cleveland program was set up by the state Legislature, it was billed as an escape from financially and educationally bankrupt schools for low-income children from the predominantly African American district. Parents who won a lottery would have a voucher issued in their name that could be redeemed at a school of their choice. The school was to admit students without regard to their religion or race and agree to charge no more than $2,500.

Secular schools tend to charge more. Affluent suburban public schools with largely white enrollments did not allow the Cleveland students to transfer in. So of the 50 schools that now accept vouchers, all but one are religious.

Although 70% of the district’s students are black, only 50% of the voucher recipients are. Three-quarters of the recipients are considered low-income.

The pro-voucher Bush administration has weighed in on the state’s behalf with a brief by U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson. “Government aid to education that is provided on neutral terms without regard to religion and that . . . reaches a religious school only as a result of the truly private choices of individual parents” is constitutional, he said.

During a two-hour dinner discussion the other day with Suma and four other mothers who use public money to send their children to religious schools, they stressed morals and education, not religion, as their motivation.

“In the public schools, there are no values,” said Aventura Rodriguez, 59, as she stroked the hair of Elizabeth, a first-grader she is adopting.

Shirley Dunn, 50, drives her seventh-grade daughter Tenise across town to Luther Memorial, a Westside school operated by Lutheran churches. “The key issue is that I want the best possible education for my child,” she said.

A former aide to disabled people who herself is now disabled by heart problems, Dunn said she could not have afforded the $2,000 tuition at her daughter’s school without a voucher. Tenise attended public schools until the fifth grade, but then Dunn grew dissatisfied, worried that the curriculum was too lax.

“Tenise told me she wants to be a basketball player and when that’s over, a prosecuting attorney, and I’m trying to put her in a position where she can do that,” Dunn said.

But religion is hard to avoid in the classroom. Tenise and her classmates the other day gathered under a portrait of Jesus as they and their teacher discussed a speech they had heard by a noted African American neurosurgeon.

“He’s a man of faith and he shared that this morning with no apologies,” noted Margaret Stunkel, the 70-student school’s principal and part-time teacher. “He said you have to work hard to use everything God has given you, but also that you should care.”

Still, Stunkel said, religion is not the main motivator for the parents of her students, 83% of whom receive the vouchers and 27% of whom do not attend any church. “People tell me they choose Luther Memorial because it’s safe and they want their kids to get an education and not be diverted from it.” To maintain the proper atmosphere for learning, she said, students with behavior problems “can go elsewhere.”

Public school educators say they don’t have the option of sending difficult children away. As they talked about the vouchers, Suma, Dunn and the others shared horror stories--most of them second-hand--about the 77,000-student Cleveland public schools. They said they worried that the public schools were unsafe and too impersonal and uncaring in comparison to the private schools.

But, of the five, only two had had children in the public schools.

Meanwhile, there is wide agreement that conditions in the public schools and test scores have improved, which may be why taxpayers recently approved the first increase in their school taxes in 25 years. It also may be one reason why almost half of the money allocated for the program this year will go unclaimed.

An independent evaluation of the educational outcome of the program found that while voucher students enter kindergarten well ahead of their public school counterparts, the public school students nearly catch up within three years. National evaluations of charter schools and voucher programs have shown similarly mixed results, with no clear academic winner.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive of the Cleveland Public Schools, said the voucher program posed a “moral crisis” for her. “Our kids, who have the least, have the most taken away from them,” she said. She estimated that the voucher program has diverted at least $50 million from programs for low-income children during its existence.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has permitted a limited flow of public aid to parochial schools. Two years ago, the justices, on a 6-3 vote, upheld the use of federal funds to buy computers for religious as well as public schools. The key issue is “neutrality,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas. Because the education aid program neither favored nor disfavored religion, it was constitutional, he said.

A federal appeals court declared Cleveland’s vouchers unconstitutional. The case’s outcome in the Supreme Court probably depends on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the swing vote on most religion cases.

Two years ago, she voted to uphold the computer aid program but refused to sign Thomas’ opinion. If a state aid program results in “an actual diversion” of public money for “religious indoctrination,” it is unconstitutional, she said.

The upcoming legal battle was very much on the minds of teachers and students the other morning at Forest Hill Parkway, a public school in the Glenville area on the Eastside.

In Robert Bernetich’s bright and lively fifth-grade classroom, things quickly got into high gear after he reminded them that “our first priority as always is learning.”

Bernetich reviewed the elements of poetry and then asked his students to recite ones they’d brought in. They did so, reading poems by Adrienne Rich, Langston Hughes and others. Then the veteran teacher of 22 years asked the class to write poems of their own. He gave them a moment of silence to collect their thoughts, put on some soothing music and they began.

Deonte Richardson crafted a funny ditty about kids who play all day and was the first to volunteer to read his work aloud. But his thoughts also drifted toward the meaning of the sweatshirt he wore, which on the front said, “Every Child Counts” and on the back said “Say No to Vouchers.”

“The vouchers are so people can go to different schools . . . but when I found out they’re taking other people’s tax money, I didn’t like it,” said Deonte, an honor student who plays saxophone and drums and loves to write.

But Shirley Dunn, who lives nearby even though she sends her daughter across town to Luther Memorial, rejects that idea.

“Why should there be a problem here?” she asked. “I don’t feel my daughter and I are taking anything away from the public. Why are we such a threat? I really, really, really want to know?”

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Times staff writer David G. Savage contributed to this report.