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Counterfactual: H.B. 96 with FY2024 Cost Inputs
Am. Sub. H.B. 96 as it might have been written: the phase-in completed exactly as enacted, and the base cost reference year refreshed to FY2024 rather than held at FY2022. One provision, one lever, and no bill anyone introduced.
draft-legislation/hb-96-with-refreshed-inputs · 1 node point here
This draft, in Change the formula Contents
1 of this draft's 1 provisions bind a lever in the FY2027 model, so they can be run across all 609 districts. There are none it cannot run, which is a property of a one-clause draft rather than of drafts.
The FY2026-27 operating budget took the Fair School Funding Plan’s phase-in to 83.33% in FY2026 and 100% in FY2027 while holding the base cost inputs at FY2022 rather than refreshing them. verified The two dials are separately addressable, so the act is simultaneously describable as full implementation and as a real-terms reduction, and both descriptions are arithmetically correct — they differ in which parameter they hold fixed.
This draft holds the other one fixed. It is H.B. 96 with the phase-in schedule untouched and a single provision changed: the reference year the statewide average salaries are priced at moves from FY2022 to FY2024.
The road not taken is a real one. H.B. 33 refreshed the reference year from FY2018 to FY2022 two years earlier, and statewide average base cost moved from roughly $7,352 in FY2023 to roughly $8,240 in FY2025. inference So a refresh was an established practice of the immediately preceding budget, and freezing was a decision against it rather than an omission. inference That is what makes this a counterfactual and not an invention: the alternative was on the table, had been done once, and was declined.
What the provision changes, and what it does not Contents
Base cost is built by applying statutory staffing ratios to enrollment and pricing each funded position at a statewide average salary for a reference year, times 1.16 for benefits, plus average employer-paid insurance. verified Moving the reference year changes exactly those price terms. The ratios, the minimums and the ADM definitions are untouched, which is what makes it a single-parameter perturbation rather than a re-specification of the formula.
It does not stop at base cost. Special education, English learner and career-technical funding
are each weight × statewide average base cost per pupil × count × state share, so a provision
moving that multiplicand moves them too. verified
What it would not do Contents
Nothing to the phase-in, the minimum state share, the guarantee’s rule, or any channel outside the foundation formula. A district’s scholarship and community-school deductions are unmoved and unmodeled, so a district’s net position can differ from its formula payment in either direction.
What this repository computed Contents
Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.
The provision prices, and it is the only provision, so the draft’s cost is its cost. Run
with cargo run -p project --bin edfund-project -- --base-cost 1.0395, where the scale is the
one that reproduces the department’s own FY2027 model for a classroom-teacher refresh to
FY2024 — a $465.0M statewide computed increase in base cost alone.
foundation aid $7,281M -> $7,502M +$220.5M
total state support $8,071M -> $8,278M +$207.5M
districts 342 up, 0 down, 267 unmoved
on the guarantee 294 -> 253
guarantee cost $879M -> $729M
verified crates/project/tests/a_draft_cannot_hide_what_it_did_not_price.rs. The figure is
$207,501,067 on total state support and $220,525,319 on foundation aid;
crates/scenario-delta pins the same run at $220.6M within a $1M tolerance, from a uniform
scale rather than this one, so the two agree to the significant figures either supports
Two figures, because a refresh reduces the supplement it lifts districts toward Contents
The provision is worth $220.5M of foundation aid and $207.5M of total state support, and
the $13.0M between them is the formula transition supplement [K]. That device tops a district
up to its FY2021 base from a total that already contains its foundation aid, so raising base
cost moves a district toward the base [K] was holding it at and [K] falls by the same sum.
Fourteen districts are held there entirely and gain nothing at all. verified
Both numbers are right and they are not the same quantity. A cost to the state is the second; a change in what the formula pays is the first.
The bill computes $497.1M and delivers $207.5M Contents
Base cost alone rises $465.0M; the categoricals priced in the statewide average carry it to $497.1M. Counting them is a deliberate divergence from the department’s own simulator, which holds the statewide averages fixed — correct behavior for a tool where a user changes one district, and wrong here, where a provision of a budget act moves all 609 at once. Recorded at “Scenario models Ohio”.
42% of the computed increase reaches a district. The rest is absorbed by four mechanisms that are not interchangeable and must be reported apart:
- The guarantee, which is most of it. 253 districts are held above their formula amount both before and after, so their payment moves by exactly zero — not approximately. A floor that rises to meet the formula is a top-up that shrinks by the same sum.
- The minimum state share. 138 districts keep a tenth of any base cost increase, because state aid is the residual after local capacity and their residual is floored.
- The ADM denominators. Base cost averages three years of enrollment while the state share is paid on the current one, which costs a shrinking state a further $7.6M.
- The formula transition supplement, which falls by $13.0M as districts are lifted toward the FY2021 base it was topping them up to. This is the only one of the four that is a payment rather than a limit on one, and it was absent from the model entirely until the hold-harmless inventory found it.
Forty-one districts change which mechanism pays them Contents
The guarantee falls from 294 districts to 253. Those 41 are lifted onto the formula, and they are the only districts for which this provision changes the kind of thing that determines their aid rather than the amount. verified
The per-pupil spread is structural, not chosen Contents
Kelleys Island Local $1,467 per pupil
College Corner Local $ 883
Vanlue Local $ 876
Bloomfield-Mespo Local $ 675
Jefferson Township Local $ 571
Every one is small. The six-teacher special minimum binds in 155 of 604 districts, so a minimum that funds more positions per pupil also pays out more per pupil when the price of a position rises. verified A refresh is therefore progressive twice over — through the state share residual and again through the small-district minimums — and the freeze H.B. 96 enacted is regressive on both.
Nothing is unpriced, and that is a property of this draft rather than of the class Contents
One provision, one lever, complete coverage. A real budget act would not do this: it would also move special-education weights, transportation reimbursement and the scholarship deduction, none of which the five levers reach.
Properties Contents
| Provenance | counterfactual |
|---|---|
| Designation | None. The act being rewritten is Am. Sub. H.B. 96 of the 136th General Assembly; this draft claims no designation of its own, because there is no such bill and a number is the one thing a reader will believe without checking. |
| General Assembly | Not applicable. Were the provision introduced it would have belonged to the 136th, which sat 2025-2026. |
| Sponsors | None. |
| Status | Never introduced, and not proposed by anyone. It is the alternative the enacted act declined, reconstructed from the practice of the budget two years before it. verified that H.B. 33 refreshed the reference year; the reconstruction itself is a construction |
| Text read | No external text exists to pin. The enactment being rewritten is read from LSC Budget Analysis — H.B. 96 (FY2026-27), with the stage caveat that record carries — figures circulating for H.B. 96 belong variously to the executive proposal, the House-passed version and the enacted act, and only the last is what this draft departs from. verified |
| Question | What would the FY2026-27 budget have paid Ohio's districts had it refreshed the base cost reference year, as the budget before it did, while completing the phase-in exactly as enacted? |
| Provisions | One provision. 1. Base cost reference year: FY2022 → FY2024. Amends the salary figures R.C. 3317.011 prices funded staffing positions at. Binds Base Cost Per Pupil; run as Policy::base_cost_scale = 1.0395, the uniform scale sized to the department's own $465.0M computed increase. Runnable. verifiedEverything else H.B. 96 enacted is carried forward unchanged and is not a provision of this draft — the phase-in at 83.33% then 100%, the 10% minimum state share, and the temporary transitional aid guarantee on its enacted rule. |
| Not priced | None. Both the count and the reason are stated rather than left to inference: this draft has a single provision and it binds to an existing lever, so the cost above is the whole of it and not a priced subset. The comparison worth carrying is that a real budget act would not have this property. The runnable surface is five levers, and an act that also moved special-education weights, transportation reimbursement, the scholarship deduction or the capital channel would leave each of those recorded here and uncosted — two of them outside the model altogether rather than merely unlevered. verified |
Where this appears on the site Contents
The pages outside the corpus that link here, and the section of each the link sits in.
Links Contents
| Instance of | Draft Legislation |
|---|---|
| Redrafts | Am. Sub. H.B. 96 (2025) — FY2026-27 Budget |
| Follows the practice of | Am. Sub. H.B. 33 (2023) — FY2024-25 Budget |
| Alters | Base Cost Per Pupil |
| Priced by | FSFP Cost Input Refresh vs. Freeze |
| Measured against | Fair School Funding Plan |
| Alters | FSFP Base Cost Calculation |
| Sourced from | LSC Budget Analysis — H.B. 96 (FY2026-27) |
Pointed at by
| Fund the Plan and Retire the Guarantee | Shares a provision with |
|---|