FSFP Transportation

Almost nothing about it resembles the rest of the formula.

Two competing bases, and the district is paid the greater # ↑ Contents

$1,337.175 per weighted rider, or $6.867 per bus mile across a 180-day year. 350 districts are paid on the mile base, so the MAX is not a formality — it flips for more than half the state, and which one won is invisible in the amount. A district paid on miles gains nothing from carrying more children on the same routes; one paid on riders gains nothing from covering more ground. verified

Non-public riders count double, and so do their miles # ↑ Contents

public + 2 x non-public + 1.5 x community or STEM weights the ridership, and R.C. 3317.0212(E)(1)(b) has put the same two multiples, since H.B. 45 of 2023, on miles driven — so the premium survives whichever of the two bases wins. Non-public riders are 4.5% of riders and 8.5% of weighted ridership. The weight is the Fair School Funding Plan’s own, and the only reason given for it anywhere is the department’s: these riders are “typically higher” cost to carry. verified Why the premium is 2.0 rather than the community school 1.5 is stated nowhere. open

The state minimum share is 50%, against the formula’s 10% # ↑ Contents

The minimum is statutory and it is five times the formula’s. verified

Two supplements pulling opposite ways # ↑ Contents

An efficiency supplement pays up to 15% more for filling buses, ramping across a riders-per-bus index from 1.0 to 1.5. A density supplement pays for the absence of the thing efficiency rewards: (28 - riders per square mile) / 100 against the mile base, times 0.55. 406 districts draw the first, 388 the second, and 200-odd draw both — which is coherent, since being efficient with the buses you run and having few children per square mile are different problems. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

The private and charter channel is wider than the weights, and one part of it is not # ↑ Contents

in the formula at all

The 1.5 and 2.0 weights on riders and miles carry $82.2m of the $608.9m school bus payment — the mile split prices that. They are not the whole channel. Two other devices reach the same pupils, both funded from the same GRF line item 200502 as earmarks rather than as formula output:

• Payment in lieu of transportation, R.C. 3327.02. Where a district declares a pupil impractical to transport, it pays the parent instead. Division (G) has non-public and community schools receiving these payments directly and either passing them to the parent or buying transportation with them. Historically a $5,000,000 earmark, halved to $2,500,000 in one biennium. verified the section and the greenbooks
• Nontraditional school transportation, a $650,000 earmark reimbursing districts for carrying community and chartered non-public pupils on days the district itself is closed. It exists because the calendars differ, which no weight can express. verified the greenbooks

And R.C. 3327.02(D) pegs its ceiling to the same lagged statistic the rates are. The payment is “not less than fifty per cent, and not more than the amount determined by the department as the average cost of pupil transportation for the previous school year”. So the endogenous, one-year-lagged response to what districts spend — the thing that makes the transportation rates move without an act — governs this payment too. A fuel year reaches the parent’s cheque by the same route and on the same delay. verified the section inference that the two averages are the same statistic

The predecessor formula did it with a third device again: a nontraditional rider adjustment of (nontraditional riders / total riders) × 0.1 × base payment, a proportional uplift rather than a per-rider weight. Ohio has compensated this cost under every formula and has never used the same instrument twice. verified the greenbooks

Where the 2.0 came from, and the only body that said why # ↑ Contents

The weight’s justification stood unanswered on the ground that the tests measure its effect and not its origin. Four committed documents settle the origin and one of them gives a reason — though not the body that legislated it. (crates/project)

It is not inherited. The non-traditional rider adjustment above is the last thing Ohio paid for these riders before the plan, and H.B. 59 removed it for FY2014 — “by removing the formula adjustments for (1) nontraditional ridership […] As a result, funding is based only on the greater of per rider or per mile costs for each district.” Nothing replaced it: the FY2016, FY2018 and FY2020 analyses do not mention it. So eight years separate the repeal of the old device from the enactment of the new one, and the old one did not distinguish a non-public rider from a community school rider at all — one count, one rate, a share of the payment rather than a weight on a pupil. verified

It originated with the Fair School Funding Plan, already at 2.0. The plan as Callender and Sweeney introduced it in February 2021, four months before H.B. 110 enacted the formula, carries both multiples verbatim, and the bill’s own strike-and-insert shows what they replaced: “(1) Multiply Calculate the sum of the following:”. Prior law took one rate times one count; the plan turned that product into a weighted sum of three. An un-enacted bill cannot establish what the law is, and that is not what it is doing here — it establishes drafting, which is the question. verified

No legislative analysis gives a reason, and the weights appear twice in fifteen. Across the twelve greenbooks, H.B. 96’s greenbook, the redbook for the same biennium and the enacted comparison, the transportation weights are mentioned only in H.B. 110’s — once as item (4) of a six-item list of changes, once inside a calculation box. Neither says why, and the two later acts that amended this section did not restate them. The same analysis discusses non-public transportation at length three pages on — pickup windows, mass transit transfers, compliance deductions — and never joins any of it to the multiple. verified

The department gives a reason, five times, and it is about cost. Every edition of the line-by-line explanation that describes this formula, FY2022 through FY2026, says: “Community school, STEM school and nonpublic riders are weighted to reflect the typically higher costs that districts incur to transport these students.” That is a stated rationale from the payer, repeated without a word changing for five years. verified

So the question closes on the existence of the premium and narrows to its size. The department’s sentence is one sentence for both weights. It explains why a premium exists; it cannot explain why the premium on a non-public rider is a third larger than the premium on a community school rider, and it names neither multiple. Nothing in the statute, the plan bill, any analysis or any edition argues the difference. The corpus had guessed at the reason — Ohio’s R.C. 3327.01 duty and less efficient routes — and the guess is the right kind of reason and is nowhere asserted by a source. What remains open is 2.0 against 1.5, not 2.0 against 1.0. open

And the 2.0 was legislated twice — the second time by an act nobody would look in. The plan bill’s mile base is a bare product, and H.B. 583 — the plan’s own corrections act, September 2022 — reprints the section with the mile base still bare, at the very address (E)(1)(b) the weighted version now occupies. The weights reached miles driven in Am. Sub. H.B. 45 of the 134th General Assembly, effective 7 April 2023: not H.B. 33 or H.B. 96, but a lame-duck appropriation act introduced as a five-page tax amnesty and turned into a budget vehicle by the Senate Finance substitute of December 2022, the first version to carry the change. Its enrolled text shows the insertion as strike-and-insert — “(b) Multiply Calculate the sum of the following: (i) The product of the statewide transportation cost per mile by the district’s total and the number of miles driven for school bus service in as reported for qualifying riders”, with the 1.5 and 2.0 clauses following — and it rewrote the division for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, so the weighted miles first paid in FY2023 and H.B. 33 carried them forward under new year labels. The same clause created the reporting duty: a district that reported one mileage total now reports miles by the enrollment of the riders carried. verified crates/project

Its analyst noticed; its analyses did not. None of the fifteen committed analyses describes the mile weights under LSC’s own mile-side wording either. The two documents that do are not among them: H.B. 45’s fiscal note, which says the bill “applies the same weights of 1.5 and 2.0 to the number of current year miles driven to transport them” and prices it only jointly with a disadvantaged pupil impact aid phase-in change, about $48m in FY2023 for the two; and LSC’s January 2023 Members Brief on the pupil transportation formula, which writes “weighted miles driven (for FY 2023 only)”. Neither gives a reason, so the mile premium, like the rider premium, was enacted without one on record. verified the fiscal note and the Members Brief, read at retrieval and not committed

A proration on the special education line # ↑ Contents

[J] is max(state share, 50%) x reported cost x 0.91746. A factor below one means the appropriation did not cover the computed entitlement, so the published amount is not what a district is owed but what there was to divide. See appropriation proration factor. verified

The appropriation does not cover the entitlement, and this is the arithmetic # ↑ Contents

Special education transportation is prorated at 0.917459740976215 because the money ran out. What that costs is computable:

$182,630,489    paid
$199,061,039    computed entitlement
$16,430,550     cut to fit

Set that against the line item. GRF 200502 is enacted at $959,429,701 for FY2027, up 8.8% on FY2026’s $882,035,414 — and traditional districts alone claim $925,120,619 of it once the special education entitlement is counted before proration rather than after. That leaves $34.3m for everything else the line funds: community school and JVSD transportation, bus driver training, the nontraditional earmark and payments in lieu.

An 8.8% increase is not generous against that. It is why the proration exists, and it is why the two earmarks that reach private and charter pupils are the smallest and most exposed part of the channel. verified the figures inference what the headroom must cover

440 of the department’s 611 districts sit on it — 72%, against 23% on the formula’s floor. For most of Ohio, local capacity does not determine transportation aid at all. This is the single largest difference between how Ohio equalizes instruction and how it equalizes getting to it, and it is the kind of fact no published total can carry. verified

The denominator is the department’s rather than this repository’s, and the two differ. The committed panel holds 609 districts and gives 438; the department pays 611 and gives 440. Both are right about their own population — the two districts between them are Lake Erie islands the department computes no base cost for, so they are below the transportation floor and outside every figure the crates compute. verified the_population_the_panel_speaks_for.rs

Its own guarantee, and not on the year its column says # ↑ Contents

[F] holds 38 districts at a fixed historical amount, $24.8m, where the computed amount has fallen below it. The calculator heads that amount [F1] FY21 Trans Funding Base, and the heading is the only place in the record where FY2021 appears. The two sources that define the base agree with each other instead: R.C. 3317.019(A)(2) pays it on the FY2020 amount before Executive Order 2020-19D’s pandemic reductions, less the FY2019 community and STEM transportation payment, and the department’s own line-by-line explanation states the same two terms in five consecutive editions — “(FY 2019 Capped Transportation – Community/STEM School Transportation)”, ensuring a district “does not receive less … than what it received in FY 2020”. verified crates/project

So it is not a clause of this formula and it is not a third base. It is division (A)(2) of the section that pays the guarantee itself: the same statute, the same FY2020 anchor, the same reach past the same executive order, floored at zero the same way. Ohio holds districts harmless against two years across three places, not three — only the formula transition supplement is on FY2021, and LSC’s greenbook names each base in one paragraph. The three sets of districts are still distinct and still unnested: 294, 144 and 38. verified crates/project

The heading is not thereby shown to be false. Under H.B. 166 both years were held at FY2019, so a FY2021 transportation payment may be the same dollar the section reaches back for — which Transportation Cost Rates keeps as unfilled, because settling it needs a per-district figure for one of those years. What is settled is what the base is: one definition, stated in two places, and neither of them this formula. verified for the definition

That blocker has now been checked rather than asserted, and it holds. No committed fixture carries a per-district FY2020 or FY2021 transportation payment. The FY2027 model’s trans_fy21_base is the quantity in question and not an independent check; the FY2026 model carries only reported special-education cost, the special-education payment and the total; f33-ohio-panel carries district spending under V45, which is what a district laid out rather than what the state sent; and district-finances splits aid no finer than unrestricted against restricted. verified So the identification is not unasked — it is waiting on the department’s per-district payment reports, the source behind dew-payment-reports, whose own blocker is an authenticated portal rather than an absence. open pending that retrieval

The general proration factor is an appropriation, not a dial # ↑ Contents

[F3] is what the corpus’s proration factor node describes and LSC states as a formula: “Adjustment percentage = (Earmarked appropriation)/(Total statewide allocation)”, applied so as “to keep the total statewide payment to the amount earmarked for such purposes in item 200502”. The instruction in the budget that revived the formula is plainer still — “ODE is required to prorate the calculated amount for each district to fit within the appropriation.” Nobody chooses it. verified crates/project

It was below one in FY2010, FY2011, FY2014 and FY2015, and the proof is a payment that only exists when it is. Each of those bienniums created a supplemental transportation payment defined as formula allocation − prorated aid, paid to a targeted set of districts and, in FY2014-15, given an earmark of its own — $25,300,000. A payment whose formula is the difference between the full amount and the prorated one cannot exist unless the proration binds, and is not worth appropriating for unless the difference is material. The factor itself is published in neither biennium; the payment is. verified

Who it rescued changed with the instrument available. H.B. 1 selected on wealth per pupil and ridership density, both at or below the median, using parity aid’s wealth measure; H.B. 59 selected on a state share index of 0.5 or greater and the same density test. Both mean “poor and sparse”, reached two ways. verified

What it divides by is an earmark inside the line, not the line # ↑ Contents

$413,385,915 in FY2014 — 82% of ALI 200502. The rest of the line pays for special education transportation, payments in lieu of transportation, driver training, and the supplement that undoes the proration. The seven earmarks sum to the line, and the line is the figure project::ledger already held from a different document, to the dollar. verified

And for one biennium the line did not pay for transportation # ↑ Contents

“In FY 2012 and FY 2013, the formula was not used and instead the appropriation for pupil transportation provided funding for the bridge formula.” So there is no proration for those years because there was no entitlement to divide, and ALI 200502 shows two ordinary-looking years in which the money changed purpose entirely. An appropriation series read by line item cannot see that, which is the general hazard the line origins exists for. verified