By John Schaaf, Kentucky Lantern
Many Kentucky churches are losing members and money, but they’re hoping taxpayers will vote to bail them out of their financial problems.
Church lobbyists pushed Amendment 2 onto the November ballot, and if their scheme passes, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will flow into questionable religious schools operated in church basements across the commonwealth.
Judging by what’s happening in other states, Kentucky would likely pay churches at least $8,000 in public money for each child in their schools, but many of the “teachers” in the schools will be untrained volunteers recruited from church congregations.
Unfortunately, the schools will have no accountability when those “teachers” fail to teach and students fail to learn.
Paul Prather, the insightful writer who is pastor of Bethesda Church in Montgomery County, recently discussed data showing that only about 5% of Americans regularly attend church. (“Regularly” means attending services at least three out of four weeks.)
As in the rest of the country, few Kentuckians regularly attend church, and even fewer put their children in church schools. However, if Amendment 2 passes, politicians will force every Kentucky taxpayer to pay for two school systems — one public, and one consisting of schools run by Baptist and Catholic churches.
The churches, which pay no taxes to anybody, will use taxpayer dollars to teach their religious doctrine to students they choose to allow into their schools.
That’s right — the “school choice” behind Amendment 2 belongs to the church schools, which can choose the children they want and reject the ones they don’t want.
Even worse, a church school could accept a child’s voucher money, then for reasons real or contrived, they could kick the child out a month or two into the school year and keep the tax dollars they already collected.
Sadly, there are examples of this failed voucher scheme across the river in Indiana and Ohio, and in other states like Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.
Indiana and Ohio give tax-funded vouchers to just about anybody, regardless of income, so the vast majority of voucher money is enriching well-off families whose children already attend church schools.
In the 2023–24 school year, Indiana paid $439 million in tax dollars to private schools, with church schools grabbing 98 percent of that amount, and almost 70 percent of it paid for students who previously attended private school without a voucher.
Like Indiana, Ohio’s spending on private schools grew dramatically after politicians opened the voucher program to everybody, regardless of income. In just four years, overall spending on vouchers nearly doubled, going from $557.5 million to a projected $1.05 billion in FY 2025, and close to 100 percent of the money goes to church schools.
Arizona opened its taxpayer-funded voucher program to everybody in 2022, helping create a $1.4 billion budget hole that caused severe cuts for state universities and cancellation of road projects, school construction and water infrastructure projects.
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As in the other states, more than 70% of Arizona voucher recipients were already enrolled in private schools (90 percent in church schools) and had been paying for it without a handout from taxpayers.
Florida spends really big on vouchers — $3 billion in the 2023–24 school year, with 82% of voucher recipients attending a church school.
In Wisconsin this year, taxpayers will pay $12,731 for each voucher student in grades 9–12, and 96% of the money goes to church schools.
With politicians diverting more than $700 million per year to private schools, Wisconsin’s local school districts are frequently forced to ask residents to raise their property taxes to make up for lost state contributions.
Kentucky voters should consider these examples of taxpayer dollars flowing into unaccountable and mediocre church schools when deciding Amendment 2.
