Cleveland Municipal School District

Urban districts complicate the property-wealth story that Northern Local and Upper Arlington tell cleanly. Cleveland’s assessed valuation is large in absolute terms, so a wealth measure based on valuation alone does not classify it as poor — but its enrollment and its residents’ incomes tell a different story, and its municipal overburden means property tax capacity is shared with city services that suburban districts do not carry. inference This is precisely the case the FSFP local capacity measure was designed to handle better than the charge-off did. Whether it does is unmeasured. open

The Cleveland Scholarship makes it the longest continuous case of a district funding students who attend elsewhere, which is why any analysis of scholarship effects should start here rather than with the 2023 expansion — there is three decades of series. inference

Effective Class 1 millage is 40.11 against 78.2 voted — comfortably above the floor. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

First hard numbers: IRN 043786, with 8,027 public school students with disabilities in FY2021 — more than seven times Upper Arlington’s count — and an IDEA Part B allocation of $12,818,292.57, plus 609 non-public students and a $903,930.07 proportionate share. verified The non-public count is the largest of the corpus’s three traditional districts and is a direct consequence of the Cleveland Scholarship having operated in this district for three decades. inference

The FY2024 figures confirm the urban complication and add a surprise. Assessed valuation per pupil is $184,904 — the lowest of the three exemplars, below Northern Local’s $279,983 and well under the statewide median of $248,097. verified Cleveland’s valuation is enormous in absolute terms and modest per pupil, because it is divided across 32,744 students. Every student in the district is economically disadvantaged: the reported share is 100%. verified

Yet its operating expenditure per pupil is $25,594 — the highest of the three, and roughly $10,000 above the statewide median. verified State revenue supplies 38.4% and local 31.4%, with the balance federal and other. The gap between those shares and the total is where high-poverty urban districts differ structurally from both wealthy suburbs and rural districts: categorical and federal streams do work here that the base formula does not. inference

The state funding series by year, which the survey held all along # ↑ Contents

The Census F-33 Ohio panel carries Cleveland in every one of the 15 years it holds, FY2009 through FY2024. verified crates/dispersion

State revenue per pupil rose a quarter in nominal dollars and lost an eighth in real ones: measured net of the community-school deduct in both years, which is the only way the survey’s state column is one quantity across FY2016, it goes from $8,772 per pupil in FY2010 to $11,011 in FY2024 — a nominal gain of 25.5% against 44.2% of price growth, so a real fall of 12.91%. Enrollment fell 32.25% from FY2009 to FY2024, from 49,952 to 33,841. And Cleveland’s share of what Ohio’s districts receive in state money fell with it, from 5.72% to 3.66% — the state did not redirect money away from Cleveland so much as Cleveland’s claim on it shrank with its roll. verified

This replaces a published figure — flat in nominal dollars, a real fall of 31.92% from FY2009 — that read the state column as printed. Before FY2016 the survey credits a district with the money it passes to community schools and from FY2016 it does not, and Cleveland’s deduct was 28.9% of its credited state revenue in FY2015, so the uncorrected series charged Cleveland that deduct once and called it a fall. verified crates/dispersion

The series also carries the FY2016 discontinuity Toledo records: state revenue per pupil falls from $12,591 to $8,534 in one year. Cleveland differs from Toledo in what happens next — it regains most of the lost ground by FY2018 and holds it, where Toledo does not — and a second large district behaving differently across the same break is evidence about its cause rather than a repetition of the observation. verified The cause remains the question that node opens.

The district dates from 1836, when the legislature incorporated Cleveland as a city and allowed it to organize a tax-supported public school system. That is the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History’s account, a secondary one; the incorporating act was not read. inference The “municipal” in the name is a later classification, not a founding. R.C. 3311.71 defines a municipal school district as one that “is or has ever been under a federal court order” and hands an existing district’s management to an appointed board, and the Auditor of State’s audit for the year ended June 30, 2022 recites that “in November 1998, the Mayor of the City of Cleveland was given appointment authority for the School District.” verified district audits So established carries 1836, at the year’s precision the source gives, and not 1998, which changed who governs the district rather than creating one. inference

Scholarship dollar amounts remain unpopulated. open