Halfway through its first school year, Ohio EdChoice is drawing praise and criticism for its effect on the state's education landscape.

The program provides tuition vouchers - up to $4,250 a year for elementary students and up to $5,000 a year for high schoolers - so that children in low-performing public schools can switch to private schools.

The state legislature set aside enough money for 14,000 vouchers, but only 2,914 students took advantage of them this year.

In the Cleveland area, 30 private schools, most of them religious, are honoring the nearly 200 EdChoice vouchers given to local students.

The students came from the Euclid, Barberton, East Cleveland, Painesville and Warrensville Heights school districts. More than 5,800 Cleveland students are covered under a separate voucher program.

Last fall, 104 Euclid children enrolled in private schools under EdChoice. As a result, the Euclid school district stands to lose more than $500,000 in state funding this year.

Superintendent Joffrey Jones expects those numbers to grow next school year when students from six Euclid schools are eligible, up from two schools now.

"We did not make staff reductions this year because we had insufficient time to react to the potential loss of students," Jones said in an e-mail. But he anticipates heavier recruiting by area parochial schools for next school year, making staff cuts likely.

Debbie Tully, an official with the Ohio Federation of Teachers, sees EdChoice as an attempt to entice people away from public education at any cost.

But House Speaker Jon Husted, the legislature's leading proponent of vouchers, said EdChoice serves as a tool for urban revitalization by keeping middle-class families in cities and strengthening the taxpayer base that funds public schools.

"We have school choice in Ohio if you can afford it," Husted said of parents who enroll their children in private schools. "If you don't have the financial ability to do so, you're trapped in whatever the public system offers you."

New Covenant Christian Academy in Walton Hills, which is part of the Bedford school district, enrolled 29 EdChoice students in the fall - the most of any local private school. That's a boon for the school, which has a total of 83 students, said Principal Douglas Reaves.

"We expected more students to take advantage of the opportunity," said Reaves, who thinks parents don't know enough about the program yet.

Reaves said a decision to move up the application deadline from summer to spring will boost the number of applicants at his school and others.

Achieve Inc., a bipartisan school-reform group, said that private schools in the EdChoice program should be subject to the same accountability standards that public schools face.

Achieve studied the state's K-12 system at the request of the Ohio Department of Education. Its recently released report recommends that private schools that receive public money through vouchers should be given an academic report card rating.

The report also recommends that EdChoice schools no longer be allowed to admit students based on academic performance, a system that can end up giving them the students who are least in need of help.

If the experience of other voucher programs is any indication, EdChoice is bound to grow. In Milwaukee, for example, fewer than 1 percent of eligible students enrolled in the first year, but now participation is at 20 percent.

J.C. Benton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education, said the state never expected to award 14,000 EdChoice scholarships in the first year. With 46,000 students eligible, the participation rate is more than 6 percent.

"That is impressive when you compare the percent of eligible students that participated in the first year of other voucher programs," Benton said.