Your tax dollars funding fast cars and tuition breaks for millionnaires
Private school shows how taxpayers will reduce tuition for millionnaires and invest a larger share of funding for the private school students than the 1.5 million students attending public schools.
Sometimes, you should just shut up.
Leave it to Rev. James Singler and Principal Barbara Seislove of Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Cuyahoga Falls, though, to gloat just a little bit too much.
See, the Immaculate Heart of Mary mascot is a mustang. So these two thought it’d be really cute to do a vertical video of them playing with their newer Ford Mustangs (one is a red convertible even!).
Let’s get past the idea of a Catholic priest and Catholic school administrator showing off their Ford Mustangs and whether that’s what Jesus would have done.
Let’s, instead, look at their finances, such as we can.
Here’s how much money and how many of their students are now being subsidized by Ohio taxpayers through the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy:
That’s right.
Those two 18-23 model Mustangs1 were likely purchased right around the time the Immaculate Heart of Mary started collecting $1.5 million a year of your tax dollars to unconstitutionally subsidize the tuitions of effectively all their students — all of whom who were already in the school.
Wanna know something else? I started pulling on this loose thread, and wowza did it unwind an EdChoice smoking gun. See, their tuition also went up dramatically. Because they don’t have to report these things publicly, I had to do a little Googling to find these data. But here they are2:
So that’s confirmation of what those of us fighting these unconstitutional subsidies have said: Subsidies lead to higher tuition.
However, what I’ve discovered at Immaculate Heart of Mary School is that the tuition hike does not mean the parents have to pay the school more, or even pay the same as they always have.
Nope.
In fact, the school, when it did its presentation to parents about EdChoice in 2023 explained it this way: “No matter what your family’s scholarship package will look like, each family will NOT pay more than their current tuition rate as charged through FACTS at re-enrollment (February 2023).”
So if parents aren’t covering the now 26-40 percent additional tuition hike, “Who is then,” you ask?
Well …
YOU ARE!
Helpfully, the school explained how this would work for those receiving the full tuition subsidy and those receiving the minimum (families making more than 750% of poverty … millionnaires, for all intents and purposes).
Here are the actual slides from their presentation:
So taxpayers are now allowing this private school to, um, TURN A PROFIT!
That’s right.
Turn.
A.
Fucking.
Profit.
WWJD, amirite?
But don’t worry. Rich people make out too, as the school gleefully declares.
So millionaires get a $1,254 tuition cut, even with a 26% tuition hike and the school, once again, gets to turn a fucking $4,629 profit!
Want some more outrage?
The reason the school increased tuition above the $5,020 prior to EdChoice was to game the system. So they could turn a profit!
Sorry, “reinvest” the money.
The full tuition reimbursement amount would have been more than the school’s posted tuition. So they simply increased it, allowing their parents to get the full per pupil funding from the state, and cleaned up.
But they didn’t think to do this scheme on their own. You know who asked them to update their tuition rate to a higher one?
THE FUCKING STATE!
IT’S THERE IN BLACK AND WHITE!
STATE OFFICIALS KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN AND THEY WANTED IT TO HAPPEN! SO THEY TOLD PRIVATE SCHOOLS TO INCREASE THEIR TUITION SO YOU WOULD PAY THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE AMOUNT!
Helpfully, once again, as if to rub salt in the wound of our overburdened taxpayers, the school actually posted what percentage of their students’ funding would now come from you, the taxpayer.
Before:
After:
Look at that shit! Can you believe it?
Look at how little the Parish investment is in their kids now versus prior to lawmakers deciding to send $1.5 million a year of our money to the school?
Look at that!
I mean.
Look at that!
I remind you that this is just one private school. There are now more private schools receiving unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies than there are public school districts. So this is definitely happening all around the state.
Final outrage (I promise): We have no right to know how that money is being spent, which means we have no idea whether that excess taxpayer money is going to pay for Mustangs or new learning tools for the kids. Because not a single penny of any tuition subsidy since they started shoveling it out in 1997 has ever been audited.
What’s the bottom line here?
I think it’s best put this way:
The state is now subsidizing about 80 percent of an Immaculate Heart of Mary School student’s education.
Wanna take a gander at how many kids attending Ohio public school districts have 80 percent of their educational cost picked up by the state?
Not one.
Not a single Ohio public school student has 80 percent of their funding picked up by the state. The closest are students in Scioto County’s Washington-Nile Local School District at 77 percent. Kids in only 13 of 612 school districts receive more than 70 percent of their funding from state sources.
So the state is now picking up a larger percentage of funding for private school kids than they are for ANY of the 1.5 million kids attending local public schools.
And it’s not like the parents at Immaculate Heart couldn’t pay the freight before EdChoice came around. The school demonstrated in its own pie chart that even its poorest parents could pick up 61 percent of the cost!
You know how else I know that?
Because their enrollment was the same before and after EdChoice!
Yet here we are with taxpayers subsidizing this school to such a degree that they are making between $430,000 to $840,000 a year3 in taxpayer-funded profit to “reinvest.”
SIDEBAR: Can you imagine if state leaders took this approach to public school students? And how much it would reduce our property taxes if they did?
I digress.
Can I prove that any of that “reinvestment” paid for a couple of sick Mustangs for the Principal and Parish priest?
No.
Would it shock me if it did?
Um.
No.
Best guess looking at the front grills.
Here are the links: https://5ff.994.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/0217097Flyer_TuitionExplanation.pdf https://clevelandmagazine.com/articles/cleveland-private-schools-a-report-card-on-100plus-elementary-and-middle-schools/ https://www.ihmgradeschool.org/sites/default/files/editor/Changing%20Tuition%20Presentation.pdf https://ihmgradeschool.org/sites/default/files/editor/FACTS%20Tuition%20Schedules%20%26%20Fees%202025-2026%20%26%20Cost%20Summary.pdf
On the school hypothetical, it’s based on 3 students. There are 305 students at Immaculate Heart of Mary. So I multiplied the amount they’d save on 3 students by 100 to get these low and high estimates.