Editor's note: This article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal.
From universal private school vouchers to stripping away diversity and inclusion requirements, censoring classrooms, and targeting LGBTQ students — some of Ohio’s education laws and bills mirror the goals outlined for a second Trump administration in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a Presidential Transition Project written by the Heritage Foundation that spells out the first 180 days in office for the next right-wing administration.
Even though former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, former Trump administration officials helped come up with the nearly 900-page policy book “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise,” which leans heavily on Christian Nationalism values.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, is the author of a foreword to an upcoming book about Project 2025 by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. The publication of that book has been postponed until after the 2024 Election. The book, now called, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” was originally titled, “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
Honesty for Ohio Education Executive Director Christina Collins told the Capital Journal that it’s as though the Ohio General Assembly has been bringing many of the policies outlined in Project 2025 to the Buckeye State already.
“It’s almost like Ohio knew what Project 2025 was going to go for, and that our legislature was like, let’s just get ahead of it. Let’s just start implementing,” Collins said.
Honesty for Ohio Education compiled a document explaining how Project 2025 would affect education and how it lines up with what is happening in Ohio.
“What’s embedded in Project 2025 with these Christian Nationalism values is one form of educating children,” Collins said. “It’s restrictive. It prevents the freedom of knowledge. It prevents the freedom of learning. It is not inclusive, and it is not an honest education.”
Project 2025 would eliminate the United States Department of Education and would eliminate the Office of Head Start, which means closing Head Start child care programs that served about 833,000 low-income children in fiscal year 2022.
“It’s almost like they’re taking everything that’s research based and just throwing it out the window,” Collins said. “We know that we should be going towards universal pre-K.”
Ohio State Rep. Phil Robinson, D-Solon, introduced a universal preschool bill in May.
How it’s happening in Ohio
Project 2025 would create universal school vouchers, something Ohio did last year through the state budget.
“Ohio is on the cutting edge of implementing universal vouchers,” Collins said. “Ohio is the Wild West when it comes to universal vouchers.”
Project 2025 would then take it a step further by expanding education savings accounts — something Ohio is also trying to do. Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, introduced House Bill 339 last year which would establish the noncharted educational savings account program.
The education savings account program started in August 2011 in Arizona and have grown in popularity in the past few years as more states move toward universal school vouchers. ESAs give families access to public per-pupil funds to be used for tuition for private schools, among other things. Arizona’s budget this summer faced a meltdown due to private charter school spending, which caused hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.
Project 2025 would require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents, similar to Ohio’s House Bill 8.
State Reps. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, and Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, introduced H.B. 8 last year and it passed in the House. The bill requires educators to notify parents about “any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex.”
“Embedded in Project 25, embedded in what Ohio has done in just the last two years, is just this real emphasis on anti-LGBTQ families, households and students,” Collins said. “Project 2025, Ohio’s efforts have worked really hard to try and not acknowledge that LGBTQ people — particularly transgender students recently — to try and not acknowledge that they exist and to try and dehumanize people that are in those communities, and this exacerbates those efforts to keep doing that.”
Pieces of Ohio’s controversial higher education bill Senate Bill 83 are sprinkled throughout Project 2025.
Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino’s Senate Bill 83 would ban mandatory DEI training unless it is required to comply with state and federal law. Project 2025 would strip DEI requirements.
SB 83 would define controversial beliefs or policy as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
The bill would allow students to “reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political or religious point of view.”
Project 2025 calls for “deleting” terms such as “sexual orientation and gender identity,” “diversity, equity and inclusion programs,” and “reproductive rights.”
LifeWise
The Heritage Foundation also appears to have ties to the Ohio-based religious instruction program LifeWise Academy. Joel Penton, the founder of LifeWise, has been on the Heritage Foundation’s podcast The Daily Signal and the Family Research Council podcast, a partner of Project 2025.
“We’re seeing these groups that are partnered, they are sponsoring each other, and they’re all working towards this common end, it seems, of injecting their values into all of public education,” Collins said.
LifeWise is a program that teaches the Bible to students with their parents’ permission off-campus during the school day under released time for religious instruction laws. It enrolled nearly 30,000 students across more than 12 states last year and is more than 170 Ohio school districts.
Ohio House Bill 445 would require school districts to come up with a policy to let students be excused from school to go to released time for religious instruction.
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