Fair School Funding Plan

Base cost is district-specific. Rather than one statewide per-pupil figure, each district’s base cost is built from staffing ratios applied to its own enrollment and priced at regional salary levels. verified Two districts with the same enrollment can have different base costs.

Local share is capacity, not millage. The charge-off asked what a fixed millage rate would raise against a district’s valuation. The local capacity measure asks what the district’s community can actually bear, combining property valuation with resident income — which matters because a district can have high property value and low household income, and the charge-off treated those districts as wealthier than they were. verified

Students are funded where they are educated. Community school and STEM school students are funded directly by the state rather than by deducting from a resident district’s foundation payment, which removes the mechanism at the center of a decade of district revenue-loss arguments. verified

The unresolved question is whether it is ever run as designed — and the answer is now in. The phase-in reached 16.67% in FY2022, 33.33% in FY2023, 50% in FY2024, 66.67% in FY2025, and is set at 83.33% in FY2026 and 100% in FY2027. verified the LSC greenbook prints the series as Table 1 and the H.B. 96 final analysis states the last two On the phase-in alone, the plan will have been fully implemented on schedule.

The percentage is not the fraction of the computed amount appropriated: R.C. 3317.022 pays the FY2020 funding base plus that fraction of the distance to the computed amount, so the schedule is a hold-harmless retired in sixths rather than six steps up from nothing. verified See FSFP Phase-In Percentage.

And a third fact undercuts both. In FY2027, the terminal year, 294 of 609 districts — 48.3%, holding 54.1% of base cost enrolled ADM — are funded by the temporary transitional aid guarantee rather than by the formula at all. verified crates/project The guarantee is a hold-harmless carried forward from what districts received before, and across those 609 it totals $878,954,627. 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 department’s own Summary_SFPR gives the guarantee as $878,974,300 over the 611 rows that sheet holds, against $878,954,627 across the committed 609. The $19,673 between them is two districts the extract does not carry, and pairing the workbook total with a 609-district count was a mismatch that survived because both numbers are right about something.

The two are Middle Bass Local and North Bass Local, Lake Erie island districts in Ottawa County, and the money is one of them: the FY2027 workbook states $19,672.64 for North Bass and $0.00 for Middle Bass. verified crates/project/tests/the_year_the_biennium_is_measured_from.rs, against the department’s final FY2025 payment report, which carries all 611

They are the same districts the property-tax replication drops for want of a Cupp report row, and the reason is the same one: a district of a few dozen pupils on an island is absent from half the department’s files. inference What closed the question was a source that carries every row — the payment report — rather than a better reading of the model.

The cost inputs tell a different story. Base cost was priced from FY2018 salaries for the first two years, refreshed to FY2022 by H.B. 33, and held at FY2022 by H.B. 96 through FY2027. verified the department’s FY27 model prices a teacher at $68,022.22, the FY2022 statewide average By the year the formula reaches 100% of its computed amount, that amount is priced from data five years old. Both statements — fully phased in, and funded below its own costing — are true, and they are two dials rather than one.

And there is a third frozen input beside those two. The categorical multiplicands — the statewide average base cost per pupil and its career-technical companion — are held at their FY2024 values of $8,242 and $9,856 in both FY2026 and FY2027, so special education, English learners and career-technical are priced off a year that is neither the salary vintage nor the year being funded. verified LSC greenbook Three dials, not two.

So the plan reaches 100% phase-in of a computed amount that nearly half of districts do not receive, priced from inputs five years stale. A regime designed to fund every district at its own costed requirement ends its phase-in with half the state still on a floor inherited from the regime it replaced. inference

What holds them there is property wealth, not enrollment decline # ↑ Contents

Both candidate causes are real and they point the same way, so the question is which dominates. Splitting the 609 districts at the median of each: verified foundation, pinned by test

                      enrollment falling fast    stable or rising
wealthy (> median)              79%                     65%
poor    (< median)              35%                     15%

Holding enrollment constant, being wealthy adds about 45 points to the chance of being on the guarantee; holding wealth constant, fast decline adds about 15. By property-wealth quartile the guarantee rate rises monotonically from 13% in the poorest to 76% in the wealthiest; by enrollment-decline quartile it runs 58% in the fastest-declining against 31% among growing districts — a real spread and a far narrower one. verified foundation, pinned by test

These are not marginal cases. The median guaranteed district is held more than three times above what the formula would give it, so the guarantee is the operative funding mechanism for those districts rather than a rounding buffer. verified foundation, pinned by test And removing it strengthens the association between wealth and aid, from −0.605 to −0.662: the formula equalizes more than realized funding does, and the guarantee is what separates the two. verified foundation, pinned by test

So the answer is both causes and neither framing. Three-quarters of Ohio’s wealthiest districts are held above what the plan computes for them, and a floor inherited from the regime the plan replaced is doing most of its work for the districts the plan would fund least. inference

Which of the plan’s bounds are ever the operative term # ↑ Contents

The plan is written in floors, ceilings and clamps, and the question of which of them ever decide a district’s number has two answers that must not be confused: a bound can be unreachable by construction, which is a drafting fact provable without data, or reachable and reached by nobody, which is a policy fact about Ohio. Across base cost, local capacity, the categoricals, the guarantee and transportation the modeled formula contains 38 such bounds, and exactly 1 of them cannot bind: R.C. 3317.011(F)(6)(c)‘s floor of one leadership support staff member, whose own input is already floored past it. verified crates/project Every other bound is reached by at least one district in the department’s FY2027 model, so the count of bounds that can bind and never have is 0 — there is no provision in the plan that Ohio has written and never applied, only one sentence with no force. verified crates/project

Where those 38 sit, and how far each one reaches. Base cost carries 13 of them, the categoricals 9, transportation 7, the guarantee 5 and local capacity 4 — which is a fact about drafting rather than about which part of the plan is most hedged, since R.C. 3317.011 states each of its staffing elements as a minimum of its own. verified crates/project The widest-reaching bound in the plan is that section’s floor of one EMIS support employee at (F)(5)(b), which is the operative term for 554 of the 609 districts — more than five hundred districts funded for an EMIS employee they are too small to generate. The leadership support floor above it is the operative term for 0, which is what unreachability looks like counted from the other end: the two are the ends of one ranking, and the thirty-six bounds between them run from 499 districts down to one. verified crates/project

Three rows of that census are worth stating on their own. Two bounds are reached by exactly one district: the department’s cap of the DPIA blended count at enrolled ADM, which only Edgerton Local reaches, and the guarantee’s clamp of its own floor at zero, which only Richmond Heights Local reaches, because its FY2020 funding base is negative. verified crates/project One bound’s population is fixed by the statute rather than by the state: R.C. 3317.017(A)(4)(d)(i) caps the local capacity percentage at 0.025 for every district at or above the fortieth-ranked income ratio, so the ceiling is on 40 districts whatever Ohio’s incomes are — a rank wearing a ceiling. verified crates/project And the two zeroes in targeted assistance reach half the state between them: the capacity tier pays nothing to the 304 districts at or above the median district’s weighted wealth, and the wealth tier pays nothing to the 171 whose wealth index is under 0.8. verified crates/project

The census counts districts on a bound, which is not the count a bound moves — 138 sit on the minimum state share and 31 move when it is lowered — and the open enrollment clawback node records the one new instance the census priced. Steps are not in it: the athletics eligibility test, the enrollment growth supplement’s gate, the performance supplement’s rating gates and the repealed supplemental tier’s gates are two-branch tests rather than bounds, and each is measured where it lives. inference