Northern Local School District (Perry County)
A rural district in Perry County, in Ohio’s Appalachian southeast, and the origin of DeRolph v. State: the named plaintiff was a student at Sheridan High School in this district. verified
education-agency/northern-local-perry · 13 nodes point here · 1 correction
This district, in the current model Contents
The corpus says what Northern Local illustrates. The FY2027 model says what it is paid: $4,772 per pupil, held there by the guarantee.
The district is where the whole mechanism is visible in one place. Low assessed valuation per pupil means local millage produces little revenue; under H.B. 920 what it does produce does not grow with inflation; the charge-off nonetheless assumed a local contribution based on that valuation; and the resulting state aid was computed against a base cost the Supreme Court of Ohio found had no derivation. inference The building conditions the court described in DeRolph I were the visible end of that chain.
It is also the district against which to test whether anything changed. The Fair School
Funding Plan’s local capacity measure adds
resident income to valuation, replacing a
charge-off that saw property alone. The
substitution charges this district more. At FY2027 inputs the charge-off would ask $5,922.24
per pupil and local capacity asks $6,100.95, so the district loses $178.71 per pupil of
base cost aid to the change. verified regime_diff, pinned by test
A measure blending property and income cannot lower a charge on a district that is low on neither, and this district’s valuation per pupil is above the statewide median. verified see findings
It is at the 20-mill floor — exactly. TY2023 effective Class 1 millage of 20.000 against 31.35 voted operating mills. verified Reduction factors have absorbed more than a third of what its voters approved, and the district now sits on the side of the boundary where reappraisal raises revenue directly.
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 049056, with 298 public school students with disabilities in FY2021 and an IDEA Part B allocation of $483,451.88. verified Set against Upper Arlington — 1,121 students with disabilities and $1,490,233.42 — the pair gives the corpus its first like-for-like comparison on a single federal program, though on a federal formula rather than a state one.
And it is no longer property-poor by the standard measure. Assessed valuation per pupil of $279,983 in FY2023 exceeds Cleveland Municipal’s $184,904 and sits above the statewide median of $248,097. verified The archetypal DeRolph plaintiff district now looks comfortably wealthy on the metric the pre-2022 charge-off used — because valuation per pupil is a ratio, and a rural district with agricultural and utility property spread across 2,194 pupils scores well on it. Its economically disadvantaged share is 38.8% and its teachers earn $66,775 against Upper Arlington’s $91,750. verified
This is the clearest case in the corpus for why the FSFP local capacity measure added resident income to valuation. On property alone Northern Local is above median; on the outcome it spends $11,987 per pupil, the lowest of the three exemplars and roughly $3,700 below the statewide median. verified the figures inference the interpretation
And the measure it made the case for does not reach it. Of the four district exemplars, the
one local capacity charges less than the charge-off would is Cleveland
Municipal, at $207.58 per pupil gained — an urban district whose
resident income is low against a property base inflated by commercial value. Northern Local
loses $178.71, Toledo $56.75, and Perrysburg
$1,435.26. verified regime_diff, pinned by test
Across all 606 districts the comparison reaches, the only quintile that gains is the
richest. Mean effect per pupil by valuation quintile: −$118, −$232, −$294, −$365, +$632.
Losses deepen from the poorest quintile to the fourth and then reverse; 316 of the 606 lose.
verified regime_diff, pinned by test So which districts the income term reaches is a
different question from which districts are poor, and the answer is not that it reaches the
poor: this district sits in the worst-hit quartile at the 63rd percentile of valuation, and
Cleveland gains from inside a quintile whose mean is a loss. inference
The district was established on June 10, 1968. The Auditor of State’s audit for the year ended June 30, 2024 says so in its first note, and describes it as “a consolidated school district made up from three original high schools in the area, Glenford, Somerset, and Thornville, combined now to be Sheridan High School”, reaching into Perry, Licking and Fairfield counties. verified district audits The 1960 date other accounts give belongs to Sheridan High School, not to the district.
Properties Contents
| IRN | 049056 verified appears as "Northern Local" in the FY2021 IDEA Part B allocation list, and under that name and IRN in crates/foundation/fixtures/fy27-department-model.csv, which also gives its county as Perry. The department's own model carries 047498 separately as "Hardin Northern Local", so the collision this field was written to warn about is closed rather than outstanding, and the crosswalk it asked for is not needed to key a series. |
|---|---|
| Kind of agency | local |
| County | Perry |
| Established | 1968-06-10 |
| Typology | Rural. Typology code 2 — rural, average student poverty, very small student population. This node previously read "high poverty", which is the department's code 1, and the department does not place it there: its 2013 student poverty measure was 43.5%, below the 46.4% median of the code it was being assigned to and inside the average-poverty rural group. The characterization was entered before the code could be read. verified |
| FY2021 idea part b | Public school students with disabilities: 298. Non-public: fewer than 10 (suppressed). Allocation: $483,451.88. Proportionate share: $11,095.62. verified |
| FY2024 profile | Enrolled ADM 2,193.81; economically disadvantaged 38.81%; students with disabilities 15.22%. Classroom teachers' average salary $66,774.85. Assessed valuation per pupil (FY2023) $279,983.24; one mill raises $279.98 per pupil. Current operating millage (TY2023) 31.35; effective Class 1 millage 20.000 — AT THE FLOOR. Total operating expenditure per pupil $11,986.62. State revenue per pupil $6,423.28 (47.52% of total); local $5,277.43 (39.04%); total revenue per pupil $13,517.67. verified FY2024 District Profile Report |
| Roles | DeRolph plaintiff district (1991-2003) verified. Property-poor throughout the period covered inference. 20-mill floor status by fiscal period not yet determined and is a priority: it determines whether reappraisal reaches the district's revenue at all. open |
| 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-FY2024 actuals and balances
crates/dispersion/fixtures/f33-ohio-panel.csv FY2009-FY2024 revenue, federal basis
crates/dispersion/fixtures/mr81-sponsor-panel.csv 1998-2014 free and reduced lunch | |
Links Contents
Also mentions
Pointed at by
| Upper Arlington City School District | Peer of |
|---|---|
| FSFP Base Cost Calculation | mentions |
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph I, 1997) | Has as a party |
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph II, 2000) | Has as a party |
| Assessed Valuation Per Pupil | Measures |
| Effective Operating Millage | Measures |
| Enrolled ADM | Measures |
| General Fund Cash Balance | Measures |
| Classroom Facilities Assistance Program | Funds |
| EdChoice Expansion Scholarship | Diverts from |
| Local Property Tax | Funds |
| State Foundation Aid | Funds |
| Sheridan High School | Operated by |
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 1
It said
“The Fair School Funding Plan’s local capacity measure adds resident income to valuation, which should help a district whose community is poorer than its property base suggests — and Perry County is a place where that gap is real. Whether it did, and by how much, is unmeasured.”
It says
It was measured and it runs the other way. Local capacity charges Northern Local $178.71 per pupil more than the charge-off would have, so the reform costs the DeRolph district base cost aid rather than delivering it.
Settled by
regime_diff::at_fy2027 against the recognized TY2024 valuation base, the same comparison
the crate already ran for Ottawa Hills and Jefferson Township, now run for this district.
Pinned by the_reform_charges_the_derolph_district_more_and_helps_cleveland_instead.
What else it touched
It does not impeach the measure, and it does not say the charge-off was fairer. The failed step is the premise that this district is property-poor, which this node’s own findings had already withdrawn on the valuation figure without carrying the withdrawal into the question resting on it. It is also a fact about FY2027 alone: the corpus holds no valuation series reaching back to 1991, so nothing here bears on what either mechanism would have charged when the case was filed.
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.
findings — and is kept because what it is now an anchor case for is more useful: a plaintiff district whose property base moved out from under the claim the case rested on.