Lifewise Academy has continued to present the narrative that its released-time religious program, which removes students from the school during the school day, improves attendance, behavior, and the school's overall culture. Lifewise Academy uses a study they commissioned and paid for as the basis for these statements. The majority of Lifewise programs operate in Ohio, and public data is available for attendance, behavior, and school performance. Comparing schools that have had Lifewise running for several years with those without Lifewise shows there is no improvement.

Discipline Statistics, In-School and Out-of-School Suspensions

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (ODEW) makes discipline data available for all public schools. The comparison was done by adding the number of students who received in-school and out-of-school suspensions for each school in the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years. Schools that had an active Lifewise program on or before September 1, 2023, were included in the Lifewise group. Then the average change from the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years was compared. The result shows that schools without Lifewise had a drop of 4.0 fewer students suspended, compared to 0.2 fewer students for schools with Lifewise. There is no data to suggest Lifewise improves school suspensions. Lifewise claims 18 fewer students with in-school suspensions when Lifewise is available to the school. Lifewise has not made the data it used available to the public for validation, but in Ohio, it's clear that the data does not support this claim.

The data from ODEW can be found at https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/download
Select "School Building Data" and then choose the years to download the data files.
The data used to calculate the stats can be downloaded here.

Stats for Schools with Lifewise