Joseph Badger Local

Where the state aid comes from # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

The formula computes $6,257 per pupil. This district receives $6,847 because the temporary transitional aid guarantee holds it at what it received in FY2020 — a year Ohio froze funding under the Bridge formula rather than computing it. The formula produces 91% of that level.

• 19% of voted millage reduced away — H.B. 920's reduction factors have rolled back that much of what voters approved, so what a levy raises here is not what the ballot said it would.
• Enrollment down 7.1% FY2024→FY2026 — Its aid did not move with it, because the guarantee holds a fixed dollar amount enrollment does not enter — the next card shows what that is worth.

Ohio has three hold-harmless mechanisms anchored to FY2021, on three different bases: the guarantee above, this supplement, and a separate one inside transportation. They hold overlapping but different sets of districts — 17 draw this supplement while drawing nothing from the guarantee.

What a year of enrollment is worth here # ↑ ContentsFY2024-FY2026FY2024-FY2026 — fiscal years, July to June. Source: DEW calculator, ADM Data sheet; the last year is partly estimate.

Moving from FY2025 to FY2026 enrollment cost this district 14 pupils and $0 — nothing, because the guarantee holds its aid at a fixed dollar amount that enrollment does not enter.

These are not published FY2025 and FY2026 funding totals — the department publishes one calculator at a time and this site holds the FY2027 one, so no FY2025 payment figure exists here to show. Every row is the FY2027 formula held fixed and run at that year's enrolled ADM, which isolates the enrollment channel: two years of published totals could not, because the formula moved between them too.

The last row's enrollment is partly a departmental estimate. The FY2027 calculator is published before FY2026 closes, so FY2026 enrolled ADM is not a settled count — and it is the row the model's own answer sits on. Every figure on this page that divides by the current year inherits that, which is a different kind of uncertainty from the band below: the band is a forecast and says so, this is a published number that is not final.

This card holds the formula fixed and moves enrollment. The scenario for this district does the opposite — it holds enrollment at published FY2026 and moves the formula. The two were built a phase apart and neither said the other existed, which left one district's counterfactual on one route and one district's projection on another with no way to get between them.

Carried forward # ↑ Contents

By FY2032 this district is paid $503,753 more than its formula computes: $3,807,578 against $3,303,825. The flat line is what it receives, and it is flat by construction: the guarantee pays a fixed dollar amount that enrollment does not enter, so no forecast of its enrollment moves it and it has no band. The line that falls is what the formula computes at that enrollment. The gap between them is the guarantee, and on this projection it widens by $175,683 over the horizon.

“Current law” stops at FY2027. Three sections of R.C. 3317 — base cost, local capacity and targeted assistance — apply only for FY2026 and FY2027 by their own terms, and forty divisions of five more hand their values to a General Assembly that has not met. FY2032 here is this formula continued unchanged, which is the only tractable assumption and is not a forecast of what the law will say.

Why base cost is $9,935 per pupil # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

The largest part is teachers, at 51%: $2,817,267 of $5,524,998. Base cost is not a rate the state sets. It is assembled for each district from staffing ratios written into R.C. 3317.011, applied to this district's own enrollment and priced at statewide average salaries. 23 funded classroom teachers and 6 special teachers, across 556 pupils.

These figures are computed here, not quoted. Every other per-district number on this site is the department's published model passed through; this one is the site's own implementation of the statute running against this district's grade bands. The department publishes its own aggregate for the same district — $5,524,998 — and the two differ by $0.56, which is what twenty-two elements each rounded at the point the department rounds them adds up to. The reproduction is checked across all 609 districts before this site is allowed to build, and the method page sets out how it is done.

What the state actually pays toward this is the state share, not the whole of it: $1,561,301 of the $5,524,998 above. The rest is charged to local capacity, which is 60% assessed valuation. Changing the price inputs is the lever the cost input refresh scenario perturbs; H.B. 96 held them at FY2022 through FY2027.

Those two figures do not divide into the state share percentage, and putting them in one sentence invites exactly that. They are computed on different pupil counts — the share is paid on the current year's ADM, the base cost above is built on the enrolled ADM, and the two differ for 499 of Ohio's 609 districts. Divide them anyway and 125 districts come out below the statutory 10% minimum, as low as 6.7%, every one of them a district the model already flags as being at that minimum. How Ohio intends the floor to apply across the two counts is not something this site has established, so it says only that the ratio is not the percentage.

The categorical half, in its six parts # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

55% of this district's formula aid is categorical rather than base cost — $1,918,207 against $1,561,301. Its largest single program is Targeted assistance at $1,286,335.

Special education, by category # ↑ Contents

The weight is what the category multiplies: a Category 6 pupil generates 3.9554 times the statewide average base cost per pupil and a Category 1 pupil 0.2435 times it — a range of sixteen. Category assignment is not an administrative detail here, it is most of the money. This district's largest is Category 2 at $103,025, which is 45% of its special education aid from 65% of its special education pupils.

Targeted assistance, in its two tiers # ↑ Contents

Both tiers pay here, 89% capacity and 11% wealth. Statewide the split is 24% and 76%.

Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid, step by step # ↑ Contents

The squaring is the program. A district at twice the state's poverty rate scores four times the index, not twice — so DPIA is convex, and $525M distributed on a curve like that concentrates far more sharply than a per-pupil rate would. This district is above the state's rate, so the squaring works in its favor: its index is 2.12 where a linear one would be 1.46.

Gifted: two payments and three kinds of unit # ↑ Contents

Every one of this district's three unit entitlements is a floor rather than an earned amount — its own counts would buy less. That is deliberate: units buy people, and half a coordinator is already the smallest thing a small district can be funded for. It also means this part of its gifted money does not move when its gifted enrollment does. Statewide, 370 districts sit on the half-coordinator floor — three-fifths of Ohio — so for most of the state the coordinator line is a minimum rather than a measurement.

These six were one number on this page until recently — a residual, computed as core foundation funding less the state shareThe fraction of a district's base cost the state pays rather than the district, set by a measure of local capacity and floored at a statutory minimum. A district at the minimum is one the formula says could fund almost all of itself. of base cost. The residual is exact and it cannot be interrogated, which matters because the programs move for opposite reasons: targeted assistance rises as a district gets poorer in property, DPIA as its pupils get poorer. A total that adds them describes neither.

Position among Ohio's 609 districts # ↑ ContentsFY2024FY2024 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW District Profile Report.

Joseph Badger Local stands at the 76th percentile on tax base per pupil and the 76th on operating spending. The middle half of Ohio's districts is the shaded box, the line inside it is the median, and the whiskers reach the last district within one and a half times the box's width. Anything drawn past them is its own district. The colored rule is this one.

Both figures are the District Profile Report's, per enrolled ADM — the pupils this district teaches. The property tax page carries a second operating figure, from the report card, a year later and per unweighted ADM; the two are neither the same year nor the same denominator and do not reconcile by arithmetic. Which count each figure on that page divides by is tabulated there.

This card places the district against all 609 at once, which is the question "is this unusual". The other question — "unusual compared to whom" — is the comparison table, which puts this district's figures beside any one other district's.

Outside the formula # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

These are paid on top of formula aid and the guarantee does not hold a district at them. Every payment above this card is foundation funding, which is protected; this is not.

Transportation # ↑ Contents

That last factor is not a rate. A proration below one means the appropriation did not cover what the formula computed, so every district's special education transportation was scaled down to fit. This district was computed $30,470 and paid $27,955 — $2,515 short. The published figure is not what it was owed; it is what there was to divide.

Two things here have no counterpart in the formula. The state share floor is 50% against the formula's 10%, so for most of Ohio local capacity does not determine transportation aid at all — the state equalizes getting to school far harder than it equalizes what happens there. And the two supplements reward opposite things: one pays for filling buses, the other for having too few children per square mile to fill them.

Preschool special education # ↑ Contents

Each pupil generates a flat $4,000 whatever their category, plus the school-age weight at half against the average base cost. Here the flat part is $29,272 — 81% of the total — and it is the one payment in Ohio's school funding the state share does not reduce. For most of what this program pays, the wealthiest district and the poorest are funded identically.

That also flattens the weights. The same six make school-age special education steeply top-heavy — Category 6 is 15% of the pupils and 48% of the money — and here, halved and sitting on a flat $4,000, they produce something close to parity.

And this program is over its appropriation. Its sheet is the one place in the calculator that shows what a proration is, because it carries the appropriation limit in a cell beside the factor: $147,500,000. At the stated factor of 0.96854448 the program totals $148,408,184 statewide — $908,184 over. This district was computed $37,259 and paid $36,087, $1,172 short. The calculator is a projection published before the fiscal year, so the factor is presumably recalibrated before payment; as published, the factor, the limit and the total do not agree.

The performance supplement is the only part of Ohio's school funding paid on a measured outcome rather than on pupils, categories or a tax base — and it runs against the grain of everything else in the formula. Sorted by poverty, the mean payment per pupil falls from $54.74 in the least-poor fifth of districts to $23.31 in the poorest, and the share qualifying falls from 91% to 49%. Ohio's attainment measures track intake, so a program keyed to them follows intake whatever its intent — which explains the gradient without removing it.

Across the biennium # ↑ ContentsFY2025-FY2027FY2025-FY2027 — fiscal years, July to June. Source: DEW FY25 final payment report, FY26 and FY27 funding calculators.

Two measures of the same district in the same years, because they do not agree and neither one is the figure. Total state support is what the district is paid before transfers. Foundation aid is base cost, the six categoricals and the guarantee — the part this site models, and the only part the scenario page can move or project.

From the FY2026 model to the FY2027 model — the department's models of those years, not payments — total state support moves −0.8% and foundation aid −3.5%. On total state support that is the 8th-largest fall of 20 in Trumbull County, and the line that moved it most is foundation aid, at −$138,614. Every line, the phase-in and the county's other districts are on the Change tab.

The same steps for every district in Ohio, one provision at a time — the supplement H.B. 96 repealed, the new count in DPIA, reappraisal through local capacity and the phase-in — are on What changed.

The last column is the last year against the first. A two-year budget pays both of its years, so the biennium's whole departure from the year it is measured from is −$347,497 on total state support — each year counted against FY2025, not against the year before it.

What the change is made of

The five lines below sum to the total state support change exactly. The first is the whole of what this site's model computes; the other four are not modeled here at all.

Against America # ↑ ContentsFY2022FY2022 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances.

Against 10,382 school districts in every state, on the Census Bureau's own definitions rather than on each state's. Every other figure on this site is Ohio describing itself, which can say what Ohio does and not whether it is unusual.

An ordinary Ohio district is well above the national middle, and the shift is largest for ordinary districts rather than extreme ones. Ohio's median district sits at the 66th national percentile on local share; its quarter-poorest sits at the national median.

These are not the figures above. They are FY2022 against the model's FY2027, and they divide by the federal fall membership rather than by Ohio's enrolled ADM. A revenue-per-pupil figure here and a spending-per-pupil figure elsewhere on this page are different quantities over different counts in different years, and subtracting one from the other would mean nothing.

What this page is not # ↑ Contents

None of the figures above is money this district received. Every one of them is the FY2027 funding calculator's answer for it, published before the year it funds. What actually changed hands is on finances, taken from this district's own five-year forecast filing — audited actuals, on a different construction, in different years. Reading either as a check on the other is the mistake the two routes are kept apart to prevent.

And there is state money in neither. This district received $42,194 from the casino county student fund in FY2024. It is not an appropriation to the department, so no figure above computes it; it is booked outside the general fund, so no row on the finances route carries it either. It is on finances, in a card of its own.

None of this district's 3 buildings is designated for the traditional EdChoice scholarship in 2026-27. That is eligibility, not participation — nothing published says how many applied, or which district any scholarship was charged against. And it is not a charge on anything above: the scholarship is a funding unit of its own under R.C. 3317.022, computed beside this district's unit and paid directly, not deducted from it. Statewide, 513 buildings in 78 districts are designated.

This page divides by more than one pupil count. Base cost is built on 556 — a three-year average, because R.C. 3317.011 funds on the greater of that and the current year. The state share of it, and every categorical above, is paid on 538: the current year alone. Those are different numbers, as they are for 499 of Ohio's 609 districts. The corpus calls conflating them the single most common arithmetic error available in Ohio school finance, and the property tax page reconciles the two the Department of Taxation and the Department of Education each publish.

The position card below is two other years on a fourth count. Assessed valuation per pupil there is an FY2023 valuation and operating expenditure per pupil is FY2024 spending — two different years inside one card — and both divide by enrolled ADM FY2024, beside a model that funds FY2027. Finances shows FY2025 spending on the report card's unweighted headcount, and Outcome shows FY2025 spending on its need-weighted one. Subtracting any of them from any other produces a number that means nothing, which is why the site declares the denominator of every figure it draws, and why that declaration cannot check a sentence.

Every figure on this page is also a column in the district export, unrounded and one row per district. This page used to close with a thirteen-row table of the same numbers rounded, which was the better answer in the build where it was added and had become a restatement of ten figures already above it. If a fixed-shape table on every district was what you were reading, the CSV is where it went.