Guarantee Open Enrollment Clawback

A term inside the temporary transitional aid guarantee, and the only part of the hold-harmless that can take money away. verified

[I2] Decrease Threshold      = max(prior-year entering open enrollment FTE x 0.1, 20)
[I1] Open Enrolment Adjust.  = if (prior FTE - current FTE) >= [I2]
                                then 8241.61 x ((prior - current) - [I2]) else 0

A guaranteed district whose entering open enrollment has fallen by more than the greater of 10% of last year’s count or 20 FTE has its guarantee reduced by $8,241.61 for every FTE beyond that threshold. verified $8,241.61 is the statewide average base cost per pupil.

The rate is charged at full value, not at the district’s state share # ↑ Contents

This is the whole character of the term. The state was paying its share of $8,241.61 for those pupils — about $824 for a district at the 10% minimum state share — and the guarantee falls by the whole of it when they leave. A district at the minimum share therefore loses roughly ten times what the departing pupil was costing the state. verified

Whether that is a deliberate incentive against shedding open enrollment or an artifact of reaching for a convenient statewide figure is not established. open The department’s own framing is the former: it is described as a disincentive against closing a district’s borders, not as a general term.

It is asymmetric # ↑ Contents

There is no corresponding increase for a district that gains open enrollment. The threshold and the rate apply in one direction only, so the term can reduce a guarantee and can never raise one. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

Scale # ↑ Contents

43 districts are charged $5,110,050 in the FY2027 model, and 22 of them lose $3,037,537. The two figures are two thirds of the way apart and only the second is money: for 21 districts the adjustment meets a guarantee that was already zero, and a term subtracted from nothing takes nothing. Columbus lost 106.2 FTE against a threshold of 24.3 and had $674,561 taken off; Cuyahoga Falls lost 118.1 and had $640,025 — both are on the guarantee and both lose the whole charge. verified

The twenty-second district is the one a guarantee test cannot find. West Muskingum Local is charged $146,074.11 and loses $7,105.69, because $7,105.69 is all the guarantee it had; the clamp in [I] = max([H2] − [I1] − [H], 0) leaves it at exactly zero, so it reads afterwards as not on the guarantee at all. Transition::guarantee_before_clawback tests guarantee > 0 and returns twenty-one. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs

Small against the guarantee’s $879 million, and not small for the districts it reaches: it is a reduction in the one line those districts are relying on precisely because the formula computes less for them than they used to receive.

Carrying a clawback is not the same as losing money to one # ↑ Contents

The guarantee is max([H2] - [I1] - [H], 0), and the floor at zero is the whole of the difference: a district the formula already pays has no guarantee for the clawback to come out of, so its [I1] is computed, published, and takes nothing.

In the FY2025 payment report 41 districts carry a clawback and 16 of them are on the guarantee. verified crates/project/tests/the_interpolation_the_terminal_year_cannot_show.rs, against the department’s final FY2025 payment report Those 16 are exactly the districts paid less than their funding base that year, and for every one of them the shortfall is the clawback to the cent — which is how the term was found at all: the summary sheet carries [Ha] and [I] and not [I1], so the gap is visible there and unexplained.

The distinction matters because the intersection is not predictable from either side. 25 of the 41 lose nothing, and a count of clawbacks would have named them all.

The FY2027 figures above were stated on the wider reading and have been corrected. This node reported 43 districts, $5.1 million withheld, and the arithmetic behind it was right: the figure summed [I1] across every district carrying one. What was wrong was the word. That sum is the adjustment charged, and withheld is the amount the guarantee actually loses, which is $3,037,537 across 22 districts.

Both are now computed and bound separately — project/open-enrolment-clawback-carrying and -adjustment for the charge, -districts and -withheld for the loss — because both are real and they answer different questions. The charge is the mechanism’s incidence: 43 districts are subject to it whether or not it reaches them. The loss is its cost. verified

Why it is a node rather than a paragraph # ↑ Contents

Because it is a mechanism with its own trigger, its own threshold, its own rate and its own direction, and because a guarantee described without it reproduces correctly for 566 districts and wrongly for 43 — an error rate low enough to read as rounding. Naming it separately is what makes its absence from an account visible. inference

What an open-enrollment FTE is worth beside one of the district’s own children # ↑ Contents

The description above compares the charge against what the state was paying for the departing pupil. Compare it instead against what the district actually loses at the margin, and the gap is both wider and differently shaped. A guaranteed district loses no foundation aid at all when one of its own pupils leaves, because the guarantee holds that line level — so its resident margin is its transportation aid alone, between $319.46 and $1,902.03, while the open-enrollment margin is the undiminished $8,241.61. verified crates/project

That is between 4.33 and 25.80 times as much for another district’s child as for one of its own. verified crates/project

And the exposed population is smaller than either count above, for a reason neither carries: [K] holds 12 of the 21 guaranteed districts at a total, so for them the clawback comes off a line the supplement immediately restores. 9 districts are actually exposed to it. verified crates/project Repeal Section 265.225 and all 21 are.

None of this settles the open question above about intent — a price is not a purpose. What it does settle is the magnitude: “roughly ten times what the departing pupil was costing the state” is the right order and the wrong comparison, because at the margin the state was costing itself nothing for that pupil. inference

The floor of twenty governs the threshold for most of the state, and spares 71 districts # ↑ Contents

R.C. 3317.019(C)(1) makes the decrease threshold the greater of ten per cent of last year’s entering open-enrollment count and twenty pupils. Ten per cent is under twenty for any district with fewer than 200 such pupils, so the floor of twenty is what sets the threshold for 499 of the 609 districts; the percentage governs for the other 110. verified crates/project Governing a threshold is not the same as changing an outcome, and the census that measured this for every bound in the plan counts both: 71 districts lost more than ten per cent of their entering count and not more than twenty pupils, so they would be charged under the percentage alone and are charged nothing under the floor. verified crates/project

The clamp at the other end of the same computation is the one the counts above describe: the charge is taken off a guarantee that cannot go below zero, and for 22 of the 43 districts charged the guarantee was smaller than the charge, so the clamp rather than the charge is what they are paid. verified crates/project Among the plan’s thirty-eight bounds it is one of three that a single district reaches only partially or alone — see the Fair School Funding Plan node for the census.