H.B. 96 (136th G.A., as passed by the House)

H.B. 96 as it left the House on its way to the Senate: the third of eight published versions, and the one contemporaneous commentary calls a bridge formula. verified That name is not the bill’s. Every occurrence of “bridge” in this document is a road; the mechanism is Section 265.235, headed OPERATING FUNDING FOR FISCAL YEARS 2026 AND 2027. verified

It completes the phase-in on paper and forbids it to pay # ↑ Contents

Section 265.220 sets the general and DPIA phase-in percentages to 83.33% for FY2026 and 100% for FY2027 — the same section, the same figures, as the introduced bill and as the enacted act. verified

Section 265.235(B) then provides that, “notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary”, the department shall not make payments to traditional districts under R.C. 3317.019, 3317.022 or 3317.0212, nor to JVSDs or community and STEM schools under their equivalents. verified R.C. 3317.022 is the phase-in interpolation itself. verified

So the percentages stand and reach nothing. A reader who searches this document for the phase-in finds it completed, and is wrong about what the House proposed. inference

What it pays instead # ↑ Contents

Division (C): each district and school receives its FY2025 state foundation funding, plus half the distance from that to the amount computed for the year — negatives excluded. verified Division (D) tops a district up to FY2025 funding plus its FY2025 supplemental targeted assistance where (C) falls short. verified

Three additions sit above that floor. An enrollment growth supplement (E) paying per enrolled pupil on a schedule that falls as growth rises — $150 at 3-5% growth in FY2026 and $50 above 10% — a base funding supplement (F) of $20 then $30 a pupil, and (G) a freeze of the statewide average base cost per pupil at its FY2024 value for the categorical sections that multiply it. verified

The shape it shares with the formula it replaces # ↑ Contents

base + fraction × (computed − base) is R.C. 3317.022’s own arithmetic. The House stage keeps the form and moves the base from the FY2020 funding base to FY2025 actual aid, and the fraction from a rising schedule to a flat one half. inference

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

The disagreement between the stages is not the dial anyone reads # ↑ Contents

Three stages of this budget are on file here and all three set the phase-in to 100% in FY2027. verified The difference between them is whether R.C. 3317.022 pays at all, which is a sentence in an uncodified section that names the statute by number and is findable only by looking for it.

This is why the corpus could describe the House stage accurately from a secondary source and still have no way to check the description: the summary said “held at FY2025 aid by a guarantee, with prescribed increases halved”, which is division (C) exactly, and nothing in the corpus pointed at division (C). verified

A hold-harmless at a later base is not a smaller version of a phase-in # ↑ Contents

Both formulas interpolate. The plan pays FY2020 base + pct × (computed − FY2020 base) with pct rising to 1; the House stage pays FY2025 aid + 0.5 × (computed − FY2025 aid). At pct = 1 the first reaches the computed amount and the interpolation ends. The second never does: one half is not a schedule, and a district’s floor is its own prior payment rather than a fixed year’s. inference

The consequence is the one the guarantee already demonstrates. A hold-harmless whose base is last year’s payment reproduces the distribution that produced it, so a district held there is funded by its own history rather than by its costed requirement — which is the property the plan was built to retire and which already holds 294 of 609 districts in FY2027. inference

The name is not a nickname — it is the regime this corpus already holds # ↑ Contents

Ohio ran a formula of exactly this construction for a decade. The Bridge Formula, enacted by H.B. 153 in 2011 as an explicit placeholder after the Evidence-Based Model was repealed, “distributed aid largely by reference to what each district had received previously, adjusted by caps limiting year-over-year gains and guarantees limiting year-over-year losses”. verified

Division (C) is that sentence with one cap and one guarantee: the guarantee is FY2025 aid, and the cap is half the distance above it. inference So the commentary’s name for this stage identifies a mechanism Ohio had already used and replaced, rather than coining a label for a new one — and the corpus’s own account of that regime supplies the objection. Its warning is that “when enough districts are on a cap or a guarantee, the operative distribution is the prior year’s distribution, and the formula becomes advisory”; under division (B) the formula is not advisory but unpaid, which is the same end reached by a shorter route. inference

Whether the drafters intended the reference, or whether commentary reached for the word because the mechanism is recognizable, is not in either document. open

The enrollment growth supplement pays less per pupil the faster a district grows # ↑ Contents

$150 a pupil at 3-5% growth, $100 above 5%, $50 above 10%, in FY2026. verified A district growing 11% receives a third of the per-pupil rate of one growing 4%, and nothing below 3% receives anything. Whether that is a cost-control on the total or a judgment about which growth is real is not stated in the section. open