Cleveland’s school voucher program has been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, the Washington Post reports.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals -- noting that 96 percent of the nearly 4,000 Cleveland students using vouchers attend church-subsidized religious schools -- has ruled that the Ohio city's funding of religious school tuition violates the separation of church and state.

A spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Betty D. Montgomery said the voucher program would keep running while appeals are pending. With courts around the nation debating the legality of school vouchers, the issue probably won’t be settled until the U.S. Supreme Court steps in, the Post reports.

Under Ohio law, the voucher program is limited to $2,500 per child per year. This relatively low amount means most families of the 3,886 children receiving vouchers can't afford to go to nonsectarian private schools because tuition is more expensive at these schools. The court concluded that the tuition restrictions unfairly favored religious schools, because these institutions often have lower overhead and income from private donations that lower tuition, the newspaper reports.

The three judges on the Sixth Circuit panel who made the decision said most of the schools in question mix religious beliefs with secular subjects, and quoted sections out of some school handbooks. In the handbook for the Calvary Center Academy, students are required to "pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands," the Post reports.

Cleveland is one of only three areas in the country that have such publicly-funded voucher programs. The other two are the state of Florida and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Maine and Vermont pay private school tuition for those students living in extremely rural areas, but don't pay for religious school tuition.

A report prepared by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers reviewed the Cleveland voucher program and others like it, concluding that "evaluations of voucher students’ achievement show no or only small improvements relative to comparable public school students."

The "School Vouchers: The Emerging Track Record" report is highly critical of voucher programs, claiming they take money from public schools, encourage segregation, and waste money.

Full text of the article is currently found at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A57581-2000Dec11.html