The corpus › Funding Regime

Foundation Base Cost Formula

The regime DeRolph was decided against. Its structure was simple: the state declared a base cost per pupil, multiplied it by the district’s average daily membership, subtracted a charge-off representing what the district was deemed able to raise locally from a fixed millage rate against its own valuation, and paid the difference. Categorical add-ons for special education, transportation, and other purposes sat on top. verified

funding-regime/foundation-base-cost-formula · 13 nodes point here

Everything turns on where the base cost number came from. The Supreme Court of Ohio found in DeRolph I that it was not derived from any study of what educating a child costs, but arrived at by working backward from the money the General Assembly had decided to spend — the practice known as residual budgeting. verified A per-pupil amount produced that way cannot support a claim of adequacy no matter how precisely it is applied.

The charge-off compounded the problem. It assumed a district could raise a given yield from a given millage, but H.B. 920’s reduction factors meant many districts could not actually levy at the assumed effective rate, and districts at the 20-mill floor were charged off against valuation growth they were in some cases genuinely collecting and in other cases not. inference The gap between assumed and actual local capacity is what practitioners call phantom revenue. verified

Properties

NameFoundation Base Cost Formula
In force fromFY1992
In force untilFY2009
How it distributes moneyState aid = (statewide base cost per pupil x district average daily membership) - (charge- off millage x district assessed valuation), plus categorical funding for special education, transportation, and other designated purposes. Negative results were floored at zero or at a minimum guarantee. Base cost was set in the biennial budget.
Statussuperseded
Where its boundary is drawnTreated here as one regime across roughly two decades, and "because its structure was stable" is no longer the reason — it was not stable at the end. H.B. 119 abolished the cost of doing business factor, abolished the FY2005 base cost guarantee, and moved parity aid and poverty-based assistance inside the base cost calculation, all in the regime's last biennium. verified

It stays one node anyway, and for a reason rather than for want of evidence: what those changes removed were adjustments to a base cost computed by the successful-schools method, and that method survives to the end — H.B. 95 is still inflating a FY1999-data figure in FY2005. The method is the regime; the multiplier and the floor were fittings on it. That is the same test applied to Bridge Formula, where the caps-and-guarantees mechanism turned out to be the continuity and the formula overlays were not.

What remains open is the other end: the building-blocks recosting of the late 1990s, and whether the regime as enacted in 1975 and the regime H.B. 94 rebuilt in 2001 are one thing. No act before the 122nd General Assembly is served by any publisher, so that end cannot be read the way this one now can. open

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The statute timelineIn “What was in force, and for how long” and “Every act, in the order it was signed”.