The order was never the states

Two records reached the same wall from different directions. State Foundation Aid could not say whether thirty vanished appropriation lines were abolished or consolidated. “The directory cannot say why” established the same about districts, and more sharply: the federal directory has a code for a consolidation, Ohio has never filed it in 17,618 agency-years, and all 341 departures are filed as “closed with no effect on another agency’s boundaries” — which is false for the three that demonstrably transferred.

Both records said the same thing about the remedy: it needs Ohio’s own territory-transfer orders under R.C. 3311. Neither had read R.C. 3311.

Wire R.C. 3311.22 and R.C. 3311.06 through the existing ohio-laws connector, so the mechanism is a committed primary source rather than an assumption about one.

Correct both the module note and the decision record that named the wrong custodian, and correct the successor claim for Newbury.

Do not commit the auditor’s reports in this phase. They are the way in and they are a different kind of source — a state officer reciting a local body’s act — and bringing them in deserves its own decision rather than a paragraph at the end of this one.

The order was never the State Board’s. R.C. 3311.22 provides that the educational service center governing board “shall at its next regular meeting that occurs not earlier than thirty days after the adoption … adopt a resolution making the transfer effective”. The State Board appears twice in the section and neither appearance is an approval:

• as an appeal body, reachable only “if the transfer is opposed by the board of education offered the territory”, and
• as a place a boundary map is filed afterwards — “the educational service center governing board offering the territory shall file with the county auditor and with the state board of education an accurate map showing the boundaries of the territory transferred”.

West Geauga’s board accepted Newbury unanimously. No appeal arose, so no State Board instrument was ever created. The corpus was not meeting a closed door; it was knocking at the wrong one.

The negative is measured, and it has a positive control. Fifty-eight meetings of adopted State Board minutes across 2014-2017 and 2019-2020, plus 4,981 board-book PDFs spanning 2014-2021, contain zero occurrences of “Bettsville”, zero of “Ledgemont” and zero of 3311.22. “Newbury” appears only in early 2014, concerning an earlier abandoned consolidation.

What makes that a finding rather than a shrug is that the same corpus does carry State Board territory-transfer resolutions for other district pairs, under R.C. 3311.24 and 3311.06 — Little Miami to Loveland, Medina, Akron to Tallmadge. The instrument detects the thing being looked for. This repository has now built the same argument three times: the CCD’s unused code 5 over a completely enumerated population, the casino floor with the lottery as its control, and this.

A claim this repository published is wrong and is withdrawn. Both the module and the decision record said Newbury’s territory “split between West Geauga and Chardon”. It did not. The resolution transfers all of Newbury to West Geauga, and the F-33 panel already committed here says the same: West Geauga gains 208 pupils in FY2021 and Chardon loses 110 in the same year. A survivor that shrinks did not receive anybody.

It came from a judge’s failure-mode analysis — offered there as an example of enrollment absorption getting the sign wrong — and was carried into a docstring and a test as though it were a finding. The fixture that contradicts it was sitting beside the code the whole time. The test that named four survivors now names three.

The way in exists and is not the one anybody was looking for. All three resolutions are recited, by date and issuing body, in Ohio Auditor of State reports on the receiving districts: North Central Ohio ESC on 24 June 2014 for Bettsville, Geauga County ESC on 27 January 2015 for Ledgemont and on 20 August and 1 October 2019 for Newbury. Those reports serve as PDFs to this project’s own user agent. That is one hop from a corpus node, which is the standard the-directory-cannot-say-why said could not be met — so that rejection has expired and is marked expired rather than quietly dropped.

And the proposing body’s own record is silent, which is the trap to carry. Geauga County ESC’s final audit spans both Newbury resolutions and never says “Newbury”; its FY2015 audit spans the Ledgemont resolution and never says “Ledgemont”. The act surfaces in the receiving district’s audit and nowhere in the proposing body’s. A rule that looks where the order was made finds nothing and concludes wrongly that nothing happened.

Commit the auditor’s reports now and close the question in one phase. Rejected, narrowly. It is the right next step and it is a different source class — a state officer’s recital of a local body’s act, where every other primary source here is the acting body’s own document. That distinction deserves a decision record of its own, and the three resolutions are not going anywhere.

Publish “the orders are not published” as the finding. Rejected, because it is false. The orders as executed documents sit in ESC minute books that were not obtained, but their content is retrievable today from the auditor. Writing the stronger negative would have been the unmeasured kind this repository keeps warning about — a statement about one afternoon’s fetching rather than about Ohio’s record-keeping.

Report that the ESC minute books are unreachable. Rejected for the same reason. Geauga’s sit behind a vendor WAF that refuses every non-browser client, and North Central Ohio’s published archive begins in 2022 — eight years after the Bettsville resolution. Neither is a fact about Ohio; one is a content-delivery configuration and the other a publication start date, and both are remediable by a records request under R.C. 149.43.

Leave the Chardon claim and footnote it. Never seriously. It is a claim about which children went to which district, it is wrong, and the evidence against it was already in this repository.