The neo-Nazi homeschooling couple from Upper Sandusky, Ohio could receive a huge taxpayer-funded windfall of up to $22,000 per year if Republican-backed legislation known as the “Backpack Bill” is passed by state lawmakers.
A new nonpartisan fiscal review of House Bill 11, which was co-sponsored by Republican lawmakers Rep. Marilyn John and Rep. Riordan McClain, concludes that the universal voucher system the legislation proposes would cost the taxpayer over $1.1 billion per year, despite those who support the bill claiming it would be budget neutral.
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The bill would provide state funding for homeschooled children as well as children attending non-chartered private schools that don’t have to follow state education guidelines.
This means that Katja and Logan Lawrence, who ran the neo-Nazi Dissident Homeschool Network channel on Telegram, could soon be taking in thousands in taxpayer money every year to teach their four children that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a “deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro.”
“Beginning in 2025, the bill’s Backpack Scholarship Program qualifies any public, nonpublic, or home-educated student enrolling in grades K-12 or the equivalent to receive a
scholarship funded through an education savings account… [these] funds may be used to pay tuition and fees to attend a participating nonpublic school or pay for various other educational goods or services. Under the program, students in grades K-8 receive $5,500 and students in grades 9-12 receive $7,500,” the report states.
Crucially, the new bill would not introduce any new oversights to the homeschooling regulations in the state—which are already so lax that the Department of Education concluded last month that the Lawrences were doing nothing illegal and could continue teaching their children a Nazi-inspired curriculum.
“This Backpack Bill is a black hole that will suck up more than $1 billion dollars right out of taxpayers’ pockets and public school funding and distribute it wildly all over the place to private schools, charter schools and, yes, home schools where a Neo-Nazi curriculum can be taught and amplified at taxpayers’ expense,” Ohio Rep. Casey Weinstein, a Democrat, told VICE News. “Considering Republicans miscalculated the cost of this bill by more than a billion dollars and considering they feel homeschooling standards and transparency don’t matter, they should take this bill back to the drawing board.”
In 2022, over 47,000 students were homeschooled in Ohio, according to the fiscal analysis carried out by the Legislative Service Commission, which assesses the cost to the state of new legislation.
Among them are the four Lawrence children, whose parents were unmasked last month as the couple running the “Dissident Homeschool Network,” from their home 70 miles north of the state capital Columbus, based on research from the anti-fascist research group known as the Anonymous Comrades Collective.
Beginning in October 2021, the Lawrences used the group, which amassed 2,500 followers, to share classroom resources for homeschooling, weaving Hitler quotes, antisemitic themes, and white supremacist ideologies into their math lessons and homework assignments.
Despite the outrage over the revelations that they were running a homeschooling network with the stated aim of ensuring their children “become wonderful Nazis,” the Lawrences appear to have no intention of stopping.
In the only interview they have given since being unmasked, the Lawrences defended their group as “just extra fun” and “so wholesome” and resolved to continue educating their children using a curriculum infused with Nazi ideology.
“I am deeply committed to giving my kids a positive, pro-White education,” Katja Lawrence told the Nazi-promoting website Justice Report in an interview published last month.
Ohio’s homeschool regulations only require parents to sign a form committing to teach their children for 900 hours per year and to provide an outline of the curriculum they intend to follow. But there is zero follow-up on these forms from superintendents or the Department of Education, and children do not have to complete any standardized testing as they do in other states.
The state already operates four scholarship schemes that provide funding for students who meet certain criteria to be educated outside of their school district, typically a nonpublic charter school, with EdChoice being far-and-away the largest. But none of the current schemes provides financial aid to homeschoolers. Homeschoolers in the state receive a tax break of up to $250 if they provide receipts showing they used the money to buy educational materials.
State Reps. John and McClain, who introduced the bill last month just weeks after the Lawrences were unmasked, did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.
The bill had its first hearing in front of the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee last week. A previous version of the bill was introduced in 2021, and while it had strong support from right-wing groups, it only received a single hearing. Last week House Speaker Rep. Jason Stephens said the current version of the Backpack Bill was among his priorities for the year.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine didn’t respond to VICE News’ question about whether he supports the Backpack Bill, but last week he said that rapidly introducing such a bill could have a big financial impact.
“We have people in the legislature who think that we can move immediately [to a backpack bill],” DeWine told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Again, the cost of that would be very, very, very significant.”
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