FSFP Base Cost Calculation

The teacher ratios are the core, and they are graded by grade band: one funded classroom teacher per 20 kindergarten, 23 in grades 1-3, 25 in grades 4-8, 27 in grades 9-12, and 18 in career-technical programs. verified Special teachers — art, music, physical education, electives — are funded at one per 150 students with a floor of six per district. verified Support staffing follows the same pattern: one guidance counselor per 360 students in grades 9-12 with a minimum of one, one librarian or media staff per 1,000, one student wellness and success staff per 250 with a minimum of five. verified

Each funded position is priced at a statewide average salary plus 16% for benefits — 14% retirement contribution and 2% federal payroll taxes and workers’ compensation — plus the average employer-paid insurance cost. In FY2022 that made a funded teacher ($62,696.18 x 1.16) + $14,265.53 = $86,993.10. verified

The salaries are FY2018 averages. verified That is the whole argument in one fact. The build-up is only a costing if the prices are current, and pricing FY2022 staffing at FY2018 salaries produces a number that describes what the staffing would have cost four years earlier. Teacher salaries rose from $62,353 in 2018 to $67,654 in 2022 — 8.5% — while the model kept using the earlier figure. inference Fordham — the department’s own pair is $62,696.18 and $68,022.22, an 8.5% rise either way H.B. 33 updated the reference year to FY2022; H.B. 96 held it there. inference The reference year, not the phase-in percentage, is the parameter that decides whether this component means what its name says.

The minimum staffing floors have a distributional consequence that is easy to miss: because a district gets at least six special teachers and five wellness staff regardless of size, small districts carry much higher per-pupil base costs — above $8,000 for the roughly one-sixth of Ohio districts under about 700 students. inference Fordham

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

What the stale input year looks like on the ground. FY2022 base cost priced a teacher at the FY2018 statewide average of $62,696. By FY2024, the lowest-paying of this corpus’s three exemplar districts — Northern Local, rural and property-modest — paid an average classroom teacher $66,775. Cleveland paid $81,621 and Upper Arlington $91,750. verified Even after H.B. 33 refreshed the inputs to FY2022, the formula prices staffing below what the cheapest district in this set actually pays, and H.B. 96 holds that reference year through FY2027. inference

A district is funded for the staff the ratios say it needs, at a price no district in the sample pays. That gap is not a criticism of the model’s structure — the build-up is sound — but it is the difference between a costing and a costing-shaped number. inference

What the staffing floors are worth, now that something computes them # ↑ Contents

The description above records the floors’ distributional consequence on Fordham’s account and as an inference. It is measurable, and the measurement is larger than the account.

Seven divisions of R.C. 3317.011 take the greater of a funded position count and a fixed number. Across the department’s FY2027 model those floors add $189,474,883 to aggregate base cost and the two ceilings beside them take $2,328,808 back, for a net $187,146,075 — and because R.C. 3317.017 computes local capacity from valuation and income rather than from base cost, the state pays five sixths of it rather than its state share of it: $156,371,578 of aid. verified crates/project The largest single floor is not the six special teachers the description names but the five student wellness and success staff, at $47.3m; the most widely felt is the one EMIS support employee, which binds for 554 of 609 districts and is therefore not a small-district provision at all. verified crates/project

They are why the smallest districts are not on the guarantee # ↑ Contents

Strike every floor out of the section and 46 more districts fall onto the temporary transitional aid guarantee, 294 becoming 340, of which 42 are in the smallest two enrollment sextiles. verified crates/project The asymmetry that makes this work is that the guarantee’s anchor is a FY2020 figure produced under the Bridge formula and contains no part of a section enacted for FY2022: the floors sit on one side of the comparison only.

This is half of an answer to something the corpus had measured and not explained — the guarantee rate by enrollment sextile is non-monotone, lowest among the smallest districts and highest in the third sextile. The floors account for about half of that shape.

The residual was recorded here as “not size”, on the reasoning that this section holds base cost’s only size-dependent terms. The reasoning holds and the conclusion did not: base cost is not the only place the plan measures size. The other half is targeted assistance’s capacity tier, which compares two whole-district totals and so reads enrollment — strike both terms out and the first-to-third gap closes from 53 districts to zero. verified crates/project

The shape is a decay and not a cliff, and one floor cannot bind # ↑ Contents

Every floor is the greater of a quotient and a number, which meets the quotient exactly at the threshold, so nothing steps. The jump in aggregate base cost at each threshold is inside the grain of the department’s own two-decimal rounding of funded position counts. verified crates/foundation What the floors do instead is separate the marginal pupil from the average one: in the smallest enrollment sextile one more pupil adds 0.64 of what the average pupil costs, rising to parity at about 2,000 pupils, and 313 of 608 districts are funded for a marginal pupil worth less than 95% of their average. verified crates/project

And R.C. 3317.011(F)(6)(c) states a floor of one leadership support staff member that can never be the operative term — its own input at (F)(6)(a) is already floored at two administrators, so the quotient it is compared against is never below one, at any enrollment. verified crates/foundation Small districts’ leadership support is nonetheless raised, by $6.1m, and that is the administrator floor at (F)(3) flowing through rather than this provision. It is the only bound in the whole modeled formula that cannot bind, and no other is reachable and unreached — the census is on the Fair School Funding Plan node. verified crates/project

Nothing committed says where the numbers came from # ↑ Contents

The section states each floor as a bare integer inside the division that applies it. LSC’s greenbook for H.B. 110, the act that enacted it, restates all seven in a parameter table and derives none of them. verified crates/project The drafting tradition had the other shape available: the Evidence-Based Model’s school nurse wellness coordinator factor was zero below 418 pupils — a size cut-off written to exclude small districts rather than to protect them. verified crates/project

The one floor a published count can be set against # ↑ Contents

Whether the floors are set in the right places was left open above for want of a district’s actual staffing. The District Profile Report names personnel as one of its five families, and opening it settles how much of the question it can carry: its personnel block is seven columns and one of them is a count — FTE administrators, which the department defines as twelve EMIS position codes that together are the section’s superintendent, treasurer, other district administrators and building leaders, and nothing else. verified There is no teacher FTE and no category finer than that, so six of the seven floors meet no column, and the question for them moves to EMIS staff reporting, which the corpus has not cataloged. inference

For the one floor it can see, both sides are FY2024 — the report’s count against the four administrator elements funded at the report’s own enrolled ADM. Ohio’s 606 traditional districts employ about twice the administrators the build-up counts, and 47 employ fewer than it funds, 44 of them under the 1,500 ADM threshold at which the two-administrator floor stops binding. verified crates/project The gradient runs against a cliff story: the median employed-to-funded multiple is 1.52 below the threshold and 1.84 above it, and 1.23 in the smallest enrollment sextile against about 1.8 from the fourth up. verified crates/project The floor does not put small districts above their funded count; it brings the funded count closest to payroll exactly where it binds, and employed administrators per thousand pupils fall monotonically from 12.3 in the smallest sextile to 7.2 in the largest, so real staffing has the fixed component the section models. verified crates/project

The height of that component is about right and its shape is not. A line through the districts under the threshold has an intercept between 2.6 and 3.8 administrators depending on where it stops, every one under the section’s four; but the section funds exactly two other administrators at every enrollment under 1,500, and what districts employ beyond a superintendent, a treasurer and their funded building leaders doubles across that range, from about three to about six. verified crates/project The plateau the floor writes has no counterpart on payroll. Funded is not employed, and none of this is an audit: the finding is the gradient, not the level, and why the smallest districts sit closest to their funded count the report cannot say. inference

The two sides by sextile # ↑ Contents

The medians above are a summary of a shape, and the shape is the finding. Drawn as one band per sextile of enrolled ADM, the smallest sixth is funded for 5.23 administrators and employs 6.25; the largest is funded for 20.69 and employs 39.00; and over the 606 districts 1.9664 are employed for every one the four elements fund. verified crates/project The band is narrowest at the bottom and widens upward, which is the gradient stated as a picture: the ends of a row are one measure at two points, so on a logarithmic axis the row’s length is the multiple and its position is the level.

The chart marks 1,500 pupils on the enrollment axis, because “narrowest where the floor binds” is a claim about a position on that axis rather than about the picture as a whole. It draws one of the seven floors, and the six the report has no column for are named beside it rather than left out: a chart of one floor captioned as a chart of staffing would overstate what the profile report supports, and the negative is the more careful half of this section. inference

Statewide average salaries used, all FY2018 verified:
  Superintendent $115,615.69   Other administrator $95,727.51   Principal $91,720.36
  Teacher $62,696.18           Counselor $63,263.80             Librarian/media $68,139.33
  EMIS support $53,695.26      Bookkeeping/accounting $45,387.82
  Administrative assistant $44,955.10   Clerical $32,997.90
  Average annual employer-paid insurance $14,265.53
Statewide per-pupil amounts verified:
  Building $1,129.78   Supplies and academic content $220.35   Athletic co-curricular $163.28
  Academic co-curricular $42.13   Technology $37.50   ITC support $31.00
  Building safety and security $23.29