The catalog of budget line items

“The Greenbook series” rewrote lsc-budget’s blocker to describe the real obstacle and closed with two items it explicitly did not address:

The Catalog of Budget Line Items and the per-district simulations were named in the old blocker and are not addressed here; the Catalog has an index page at /budget/catalog-of-budget-line-items and was not opened.

That sentence then survived into the rewritten string and sat there through the workbook attempt and the PDF-era measurement. It is the same shape as the string it replaced: a claim about what is in the way, written by someone who had not tried.

The precedent is by now this repository’s most reliable finding. tax-abstract sat declared for twelve phases behind a blocker nobody had attempted. lsc-budget was wrong in three ways. Both were found the same way — probe whatever path exists, not the one the blocker names.

Probe both, record what is there, rewrite the blocker again. Do not begin the extraction.

The Catalog is not blocked, and it is a better source than the workbooks.

The index is at /budget/catalog-of-budget-line-items and returns 200 to ohio-education-funding-corpus/0.1 (research) — the agent string cache.rs actually sends. No browser impersonation is involved, so the policy that keeps ofcc-projects declared is not in play here.

It is published per agency, one PDF each, and the education volume is what this repository wants: {year}-catalog-of-budget-line-items-edu.pdf. Editions run 2006, and 2008 through 2025. 2007 is absent and is a genuine 404: the site soft-404s with a 10,835-byte HTML body under a 200, and every edition claimed here was confirmed by content type and by reading its first page, not by status code.

Amended after extraction: there are eighteen distinct editions, not nineteen. This record originally said nineteen. The 2012 URL resolves and returns a PDF, and the extraction phase found it is the 2011 edition byte for byte — same SHA-256, same length. Confirming existence by content type was not enough; only a digest catches a document served twice under two names. It is the same pathology the-greenbook-series found in the workbooks, and wiring both would have put every FY2012 and FY2013 enacted appropriation in the fixture twice under two vintages that are one document.

It answers both bienniums the greenbook route cannot. Each entry carries four years of actuals and two of appropriation in one labeled table, so the coverage overlaps heavily:

• The 2009 edition carries FY2006 through FY2011, which is the FY2006-07 biennium the 126th’s greenbook has no line-item table for.
• The 2013 edition carries FY2010 through FY2015, which is the FY2012-13 biennium whose two workbook variants LSC serves as one file.
• The 2006 edition reaches back to FY2002, one biennium short of the greenbook’s FY1999 floor rather than past it.

And it fixes the defect that reverted the workbook attempt. That attempt failed because the variant carrying actuals supersedes the enacted column — the 132nd’s workbook labels FY2018 Actual and FY2019 Adjusted Approp. and states the enacted FY2018-19 appropriation nowhere, so the extraction produced zero appropriation rows for that biennium and did not fail. The Catalog prints both, in adjacent columns, each under its own heading. The claim “enacted appropriation” and the claim “what was actually spent” come from one document and are distinguishable in it.

It also carries two fields no other source here has:

• Legal Basis, naming the current section and the originating act — Section 265.10 of H.B. 96 of the 136th G.A. (originally established by H.B. 487 of the 129th G.A.).
• Purpose, in prose, including where a line item moved. Line 200408 Early Childhood Education records its transfer to the Department of Children and Youth and which act authorized it.

The per-district simulations are not LSC’s. LSC’s school funding page is /publications/school-funding-resources. It carries explanatory briefs — Base Cost Model, Targeted Assistance, Pupil Transportation Formula, Formula Funding Phase-in and Guarantees, School Choice Programs, Joint Vocational School District Funding — in sets dated Nov 2024, Jan 2023 and Feb 2021, plus “School Funding Complete Resource” editions for 2019, 2017, 2015, 2011, and an “Illustration of School Funding in Ohio” for Nov 2008. No simulations. The word does not appear on that page, on Budget Central, on the Catalog index, or on the 136th’s main operating budget page. Per-district simulations are the department’s, and dew-foundation is where they belong. The phrase is removed from the blocker rather than carried forward as a fourth thing nobody has looked at.

lsc-budget’s blocker is now about extraction rather than retrieval. Everything the corpus wants from LSC is reachable. What is not done is reading it, and that is a phase.

The four fiscal-period nodes are answerable from a better source than the index pages. FY2014-15, FY2016-17, FY2018-19 and FY2020-21 carry appropriating_bill as [unentered] with “Needs lsc-budget”. the-greenbook-series declined to fill them from the index pages that name the acts, because that would be a claim resting on a page this repository does not hold. The Catalog’s Legal Basis line is a per-line-item statement of the same fact in a document that can be committed and digest-pinned, which is the standard those nodes were held to.

The pre-2000 record is unchanged and the claim is now exact. The Catalog’s earliest edition reaches FY2002 and the greenbook’s earliest actuals are FY1999, so the Catalog does not extend the record backward — it thickens it. The Foundation Program era, DeRolph I and the equal yield formula still need the session laws. That is the one part of the original blocker that was true.

The 2008 and 2011 School Funding Complete Resources are a separate find, not scoped here. They are contemporaneous LSC accounts of the Evidence-Based Model and the Bridge Formula — eras the corpus documents in prose and cannot price. They belong to whoever takes stream D, and are recorded here so that work does not start by rediscovering them.

Wire the education volumes in this phase. Nineteen PDFs at a stable URL, one agency, no index-page scraping. Rejected on the same grounds the-greenbook-series rejected starting its own extraction, and the grounds held up: that record’s successor phase found two source defects that a row count would not have shown, and reverted rather than shipping a caveat. A phase that discovers a source and reads it in the same breath produces a half-wired registry and a blocker that is accurate about nothing again.

Take the whole-catalog PDF rather than the education volume. {year}-catalog-of-budget-line-items.pdf exists and is every agency in one file. Rejected: the education volume is the unit this repository reasons about, the per-agency split is the publisher’s own, and pinning a digest on a document that changes whenever any of a hundred agencies changes would make every unrelated edit look like a source revision.

Treat the Catalog as a replacement for the greenbook and workbook work. Tempting, because it covers both gaps and distinguishes actual from appropriated. Rejected: the Catalog is LSC’s standing reference and reports each line item’s history as of publication, while the greenbook is the analysis of a specific act as enrolled. A figure restated four editions later is not the same claim as a figure published at enactment, and the corpus’s existing appropriation nodes cite the latter. The two are complementary and the extraction should keep which document each figure came from — the discipline the workbook attempt was reverted for lacking.