Change the formula

What you are looking at # ↑ Contents

Each district is one point. On the pair the page opens with, that is what the formula computes for it across the bottom and what it is actually paid up the side, both per pupil — and nothing can fall below the diagonal. That is not a trend in the data, it is the rule. A district receives the larger of its formula amount and its guarantee, so a point on the line is paid by the formula and a point above it is held above the formula, with the vertical distance being the guarantee itself.

That is what makes the picture worth having. A district on the line travels up it when the formula gets more generous. A district above it travels sideways — its formula amount rises, its payment does not, because the guarantee absorbs the difference — until it reaches the line, and only then does another dollar of base cost reach it. A flat trail is a district your settings do not reach.

The other axes answer the next question, which is who those districts are. Valuation per pupil, the disadvantaged share and enrollment are properties of the district that no lever here moves, so against one of them a district can only travel in the aid direction — which is exactly what makes the pattern legible. Base cost per pupil does move with its lever; state share and local capacity are as the department published them.

What the reach view holds fixed, and one thing it deliberately does not # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

Ohio's formula contains statewide constants — the average base cost per pupil, the statewide poverty share, the median weighted wealth — that are computed once over all districts. The department's own calculator warns that they are not recalculated when a district's data changes. That is right for a tool where you change one district and everything else stays put. It is wrong here, where every lever moves all 609 at once and the statewide average is the first thing that would move.

So this model diverges from the department's on purpose. The cost input refresh lever scales base cost and the $812.5M of categorical funding priced in it — special education, English learners and career-technical are each a weight times the average base cost per pupil, so they rise mechanically when it does. The refresh priced in Counterfactual: H.B. 96 with FY2024 Cost Inputs — 3.95% on base cost — delivers $197.0M through base cost aid and $23.5M more through those three. Until recently this page delivered only the first.

Three things are still held still, for three different reasons. The two biggest categoricals — DPIA and targeted assistance, $1.89B together — divide a district's figure by a statewide one, so under a change that moves everything the numerator and denominator move together and genuinely cancel. Gifted is priced in stated salaries rather than in base cost; a refresh would move those too, but by their own amount, and scaling them by this factor would be a guess wearing the shape of an identity. And the weighted half of preschool special education, $45.7M, is denominated the same way but sits outside foundation funding — outside everything on this page, not held fixed within it.

What the levers move away from # ↑ Contents

Current law here is Am. Sub. H.B. 96 as enacted — signed 30 June 2025, phase-in at 100% in FY2027, base cost priced at FY2022. It pays $7.28B across 609 districts, $879.0M of it guarantee money. Both views of Change the formula start from it, so the act itself is their zero rather than one of their scenarios.

In Who it reaches, every trail starts at the act's own position for the district, so with the controls untouched there is nothing to see moving — which is the correct answer, and the shape of the state is there either way.

The bill's earlier stages are not lever positions. The corpus holds the executive proposal and the House-passed substitute, and neither can be dialed from here: a stage that suspends the formula and pays from a different base is a different formula, not a setting of this one. What each would have cost is on its own page, reported rather than run — and the three stages compared are on the act's page.

The corpus's worked scenarios start from the same act. Each argues one change in prose, with the figures it produced committed beside it; this runner is where you set your own.