Eastland-Fairfield Career and Technical Schools
A joint vocational school district serving fifteen member districts across Franklin, Fairfield and Pickaway counties, and a sixteenth by contract.
education-agency/eastland-fairfield-ctc · 3 nodes point here · 4 corrections
A JVSD has no residents of its own in the ordinary sense. It levies property tax across the combined territory of its member districts and enrolls their students part-time or full-time, which means its funding depends on decisions made by districts it does not control, and its student counts must be reconciled against those districts’ counts to avoid double-counting. inference Any statewide per-pupil figure that sums JVSD and member district enrollment without reconciliation is wrong.
The most concrete difference is in the tax structure: under R.C. 319.301 the reduction-factor floor for a joint vocational school district is 2 mills, not the 20 mills that applies to city, local, and exempted village districts. verified A JVSD therefore reaches its floor — and begins capturing valuation growth — under entirely different conditions than the districts it serves.
An absence that confirms the point. This agency does not appear in the FY2021 IDEA Part B allocation list, which names 997 entities including every traditional district, community school, and county board of developmental disabilities in the state. verified Federal special education money flows to JVSD students through their member districts, not to the JVSD — so a JVSD is invisible in a dataset that otherwise covers everything. inference Any statewide roll-up built from that list silently omits career-technical provision, and the omission would be undetectable without knowing to look for it.
What this repository computed Contents
Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.
Why nothing here had ever found a joint vocational district Contents
The federal directory does not type one as a district. It types it 4, a regional education
service agency — the same code Ohio’s educational service centers carry. 100 agencies hold
that code and 49 are joint vocational districts; the other 51 are service centers. A reader
filtering on district type gets none of them and a reader filtering on 4 gets half a list of
something else. verified crates/project
Two independent routes split the hundred and select the same forty-nine: the name, because a service center says so, and the levy, because a joint vocational district charges property tax and a service center does not — so exactly 49 of the 100 appear in the Auditor’s district finances at all. verified That is the whole of Ohio’s joint vocational sector, nameable from fixtures this repository already reads.
The funding series and the enrollment Contents
Six closed fiscal years, FY2020 through FY2025, from the Auditor’s district finances: property tax from $16.0m to $25.9m, unrestricted state aid from $5.7m to $12.1m. State aid more than doubled while the levy rose by three fifths, so the state share of this agency’s revenue rose over the six years — a statement that needs both halves, and the node held neither. verified
Enrollment is two years of the Census F-33 panel: 1,160 in FY2023 and 1,354 in FY2024, with total revenue rising from $35.0m to $42.9m. verified
And the enrollment is exactly the trap this node’s description warns about. Current spending over that count gives $20,869 per pupil in FY2024 against a comparable-district median of $15,426 — thirty-five per cent higher, on a head count that is not full-time equivalent because these students are enrolled in their home districts too. The ratio is an artifact of the denominator, and it is what a roll-up that treated a joint vocational district as a district would publish. verified
How they are grouped for peer comparison, which the corpus had already decided Contents
typology records the grouping as unresolved. The corpus’s own F-33 panel settled it when it
was built and nobody read it back: all 121 joint vocational rows in the panel are outside the
comparable set, across 46 of the 49 districts and three fiscal years. They are not grouped for
peer comparison; they are excluded from it, and the per-pupil figure above is why. verified
The member list, narrowed Contents
A joint vocational district’s members are exactly the districts whose Table SD-1 rows carry its levy — see Twenty-Mill Floor, where that column pair is read. So a candidate roster can be tested: sum its members’ levies and compare against what the district itself booked in property tax, with the rollback and homestead reimbursements added back, because SD-1 reports taxes charged before those reductions and leaving them out biases every comparison by about an eighth.
Taken against the whole of the county its own name points at, 12 of 24 joint vocational districts reconcile in both quiet tax years. For those twelve the county is the membership. For the other twelve the sign of the miss says which way the roster crosses the county line: a county that sums high holds districts belonging to another joint vocational district, and one that sums low has members outside it. Portage Lakes is the method catching itself — its name carries a county word that is not its county, and it misses by 88%. verified
The threshold is not doing the work. The twelve run from 0.7% to 7.3% and the thirteenth is at 14.3%, with nothing in between, so the band sits in the widest gap the distribution has rather than inside a cluster — and a test fails if that stops being true. verified
This district is one of the thirteen. Against Fairfield County alone it misses by 71%; adding the seven Franklin County districts that carry a levy at two mills — and not the two at 1.8, which is a different joint vocational district — brings it to within a tenth. So fourteen districts in Franklin and Fairfield are members, and about a ninth of the levy comes from outside them. inference
The member list, filled Contents
The ninth is Teays Valley Local, in Pickaway County. The report card’s roster for the
district’s career-technical planning district names sixteen districts, and 15 of them carry
the levy in both quiet tax years. With Teays Valley added the roster falls short of the
district’s books by 7.5% and 3.9%, inside the band. Teays Valley’s levy is two mills, the rate
the seven Franklin members carry, which is a second witness: a joint vocational district levies
one rate across its territory. verified crates/project
The sixteenth is Bexley City. It is on the planning district’s roster and its SD-1 row carries no joint vocational levy, so it belongs by contract and not by statute. The district’s own audits say so: it serves “16 (15 statute and one contracted) school districts”. verified Auditor of State, FY2013 audit The district’s fiftieth-anniversary history names the same fifteen joining: the five founders, then Teays Valley, Pickerington and New Albany-Plain within three years of opening, then seven in the 1980s. Bexley appears there only as a district sending tuition-paying students in 1968. verified Wayback 20181011134351
When the district was organized Contents
The district was organized on May 13, 1965, more than three years before it opened, and under another name. The Eastern Spectator of May 20, 1965 reports that “the five-man board of the Eastern Franklin County Joint Vocational District held its organizational meeting last Thursday”, and that the district was “formed by action of the Canal Winchester, Groveport, Whitehall, Reynoldsburg and Gahanna Schools”. The board elected James Dugan its president. verified Eastern Spectator, May 20, 1965
The same paper had described the steps six weeks earlier. A county-wide plan among fourteen districts had failed, and five of the six districts that tried again stood firm. The county superintendent would take their proposal to the State Board of Education on April 12, the local boards would approve it once more, and only then would a governing board be appointed: three members from the Franklin County Board of Education and two from Whitehall’s. verified Eastern Spectator, April 8, 1965 The board that met on May 13 is that board: three of its members represent the county board and two the Whitehall board. verified An organizational meeting is therefore the last of those steps, and the district existed when it was held. Under R.C. 3311.18 the initiating unit, here the county board, sets the date a joint vocational district is established. No source read here gives that date, and it falls between April 12 and May 13, 1965. inference
The Eastland name came a year later. The board chose “Eastland Vocational” from a student’s entry for “the proposed Eastern Franklin County Vocational School”, and Dugan presented her prize. verified Southside Spectator, April 27, 1966 Voters in the five districts rejected the first bond issue and operating levy on December 7, 1965 and passed both on May 3, 1966. That second vote is the 1966 bond issue Whitehall’s history records. verified Eastern Spectator, December 16, 1965; May 4, 1966
Properties Contents
| IRN | 051003 verified crates/dispersion/fixtures/mr81-sponsor-panel.csv, where it reports as "Eastland-Fairfield Career/Tech Jt Voc SD" in October 2001. Absent from the FY2021 IDEA Part B allocation list, because federal special education money reaches career-technical students through their member districts rather than through the JVSD — which is why this took a child-nutrition return to establish. |
|---|---|
| Kind of agency | joint-vocational |
| County | Franklin and Fairfield |
| Established | 1965-05-13 |
| Typology | Not applicable in the standard department typology, which classifies traditional districts. How JVSDs are grouped for peer comparison was recorded here as unresolved; the corpus's own F-33 panel had already resolved it by excluding every one of them from the comparable set. verified see the findings |
| Roles | Career-technical provider to member districts verified. Subject to the 2-mill JVSD reduction-factor floor rather than the 20-mill floor verified. |
| Series in the repository | |
Per-agency series are held by IRN across four committed fixtures, not one path: verified
crates/foundation/fixtures/fy27-department-model.csv FY2027 formula run, 609 districts
crates/project/fixtures/district-finances.csv FY2020-FY2025 actuals and balances
crates/dispersion/fixtures/f33-ohio-panel.csv FY2023-FY2024 for this agency
crates/dispersion/fixtures/mr81-sponsor-panel.csv 1998-2014 free and reduced lunch | |
Links Contents
| Instance of | Education Agency |
|---|---|
| Subject to variant of | Twenty-Mill Floor |
| Levies | Local Property Tax |
Also mentions
Pointed at by
| Twenty-Mill Floor | mentions |
|---|---|
| IDEA Part B | Excludes |
| State Foundation Aid | Funds |
What this node used to say Contents
The corpus is not rewritten to have always been right. Each entry is a claim this node carried, what replaced it, and the thing that settled it.
Correction 1 of 4
It said
The FY2021 IDEA Part B list “names 979 entities”.
It says
It names 997. The count was made by hand. The list is now parsed into
idea-part-b-allocations.csv, and IRN 051003 is absent from all four editions it holds,
FY2021 to FY2024.
Settled by
Building the dew-idea-part-b connector for
#762.
What else it touched
One count. The absence it supports holds in every edition read, not only FY2021.
Correction 2 of 4
It said
“IRN, member district list, enrollment, and funding series remain unpopulated.” The node
said this while its own irn property carried 051003 and its own series_path named the
three fixtures the other fields are in.
It says
Three of the four are populated: the agency is one of Ohio’s 49 joint vocational districts in the federal directory, the funding series is six closed fiscal years of the Auditor’s finances, and the enrollment is two years of the Census F-33 panel. The member district list is still not held, and is now bounded rather than absent.
Settled by
Asking what the CCD types a joint vocational district as. It is 4, a regional education
service agency — the code Ohio’s educational service centers carry — so every reader here
that filtered on a district type had been skipping them, and every fixture that holds them
holds them under a code half of which is something else.
What else it touched
The node’s own account of a joint vocational district is unchanged and is confirmed by the numbers: the per-pupil figure its description warns about is thirty-five per cent above the comparable median, and the corpus’s F-33 panel excludes every joint vocational district for that reason.
Correction 3 of 4
It said
“The roster is not established, and the absence now has a size.” The member districts outside Franklin and Fairfield were recorded as unfilled, bounded at about a ninth of the levy.
It says
Fifteen members by statute, fourteen in Franklin and Fairfield and Teays Valley in Pickaway, and Bexley by contract. The fifteen reconcile against the district’s own books.
Settled by
Running the planning district’s roster, committed after this node was last revised, through the reconciliation the node already used. Bexley’s missing levy then matched the Auditor’s “15 statute and one contracted”.
What else it touched
established is now the only unfilled field. The county pairing’s count of twelve is
unchanged: it tests the roster a name gives, and this one came from elsewhere.
Correction 4 of 4
It said
“Bounded, not dated.” established was unfilled, with organization placed before the
September 1968 opening and probably by 1966, because the audits recite R.C. 3311.18 and no
date and the organizing resolutions were not found.
It says
Organized May 13, 1965, as the Eastern Franklin County Joint Vocational School District, when its five-member board held its organizational meeting. It took the Eastland name in April 1966.
Settled by
Searching for the district under a name it had already given up. A local weekly in the member districts’ area, digitized by the Internet Archive, covered each step from the failed county-wide plan to the board’s first meeting, all under the earlier name. Every source checked before had been searched as Eastland.
What else it touched
No field is unfilled now, and the last required-property omission leaves the lint baseline. The opening date and the five founders are unchanged; the bond issue the node had dated by Whitehall’s history is now the second of two votes.
Why this node is here Contents
A note from the corpus about itself rather than about Ohio, kept because provenance includes why something was written down.