Perrysburg Exempted Village School District

An exempted village district, and the suburban counterpart to Toledo eleven miles away across the Maumee. verified

It is a better contrast case than Upper Arlington for one specific purpose: it is not extraordinary. Perrysburg spends $14,632 per headcount pupil, below the statewide median of $16,289, on 5,449 pupils with a 13.8% economically disadvantaged share and an 11.3% disability share. verified computed; see crates/dispersion/tests/expenditure_functions_fy25.rs It is an ordinary well-off Ohio suburb, which is exactly what makes it the right comparator when someone wants to know whether an urban district’s spending is unusual.

What the comparison actually shows. Toledo spends $6,172 more per pupil and puts a markedly smaller share of it in a classroom — 51.3% on instruction against Perrysburg’s 62.6%, 63.4% on classroom instruction against 73.1%. verified Perrysburg’s operating budget is more concentrated on teaching and less on plant and building administration, which is what a newer, denser, smaller physical estate looks like in a function table.

And where a widely circulated claim went wrong. A claim that Toledo devotes ~45% of spending to special needs against Perrysburg’s 14–16% was fact-checked and found false: the special-education instruction share is about 14–15% in both, and student support about 8% in both — 8.1% Toledo, 8.5% Perrysburg, reproducible to the tenth of a point from the department’s own file. verified see OCG fact-check RL-2026-021

The fact-check’s verdict is right. Its gloss is not: it reads Toledo’s higher special-education dollars per total pupil as a “modestly heavier student-need profile,” when Toledo’s disability share is nearly double Perrysburg’s. Per student with a disability the comparison reverses — roughly $12,600 in Toledo against $18,000–$20,900 here. inference A share whose denominator is the whole enrollment cannot compare two districts serving very different fractions of the population it is meant to describe.

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

What it is worth, what it taxes, and what has happened to it # ↑ Contents

All three were recorded as not held and all three are committed. Perrysburg’s assessed valuation is $270,202 per pupil, against Toledo’s $135,506 — twice as much. But it is not taxing itself less to get there: its effective Class I operating rate is 39.15 mills against Toledo’s 35.5476, the higher of the two, and H.B. 920 has removed about the same fraction of each district’s voted millage. Neither is on the twenty-mill floor. The disparity between the pair is the base, not the rate. verified crates/dispersion

And the years the node could not see are the equity claim in miniature — though not in the column it first seemed to be. From FY2010 to FY2024, measured net of the community-school deduct in both years, both districts lost state revenue per pupil in constant dollars — Perrysburg by 20.29% and Toledo by 15.06%. Only one of them replaced it: Perrysburg’s local revenue per pupil rose 22.3% in real terms while Toledo’s fell 8.14%, and Perrysburg’s enrollment grew 20% while Toledo’s fell 21%. The state’s real contribution retreated from both; the tax base decided who could follow, and the tax base is the whole of the difference. verified

This replaces a published pair — Perrysburg 22.75%, Toledo 34.3% — that read the survey’s state column as printed, which is gross of each district’s community-school deduct before FY2016 and net of it afterwards. Toledo has one of Ohio’s largest deducts and Perrysburg has almost none, so the uncorrected measure charged Toledo a third of its state revenue and Perrysburg nothing. Correcting it reverses the state half of the comparison: the wealthy district’s state revenue lost more ground against prices than the high-need one’s. The local half, which is the half the equity claim turns on, is untouched. verified crates/dispersion

Three cautions travel with that series. The survey’s state revenue column is every dollar the state sent, capital included, so one district-year of it is not that district’s foundation aid — Carey Exempted Village reports $21.0m of state revenue against $8.0m of current spending in a building year. FY2014 is absent from the archive. And the deduct column the correction above rests on is reported as a zero rather than as a missing value in FY2009 and FY2022, which is why the span starts at FY2010. verified

Perrysburg spends 73.11% of its operating money in the classroom, which puts it at percentile 95.0 of Ohio’s 606 districts; Toledo’s 63.43% is at percentile 18.5. That is the pair standing at the two ends of the relationship Progress (Value-Added) measures across the state. verified

The public school system dates from 1849, when voters first passed a $1,600 bond issue to build Perrysburg Union School. That is Historic Perrysburg’s account, which cites no record, and the Auditor of State’s audits give no organization date: they say only that the district is organized under Article VI of the Ohio Constitution and that “there is no authority for a school district to have a charter”. inference The exempted-village designation is a later classification of the same district, not a founding, so established carries the year the system began and nothing finer.