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Am. Sub. H.B. 153 (2011) — FY2012-13 Budget; Bridge Formula

The FY2012-13 operating budget, Governor Kasich’s first, and the act that ended Ohio’s most serious attempt to cost out an education. It repealed the Evidence-Based Model before the third year of a ten-year phase-in and put a placeholder in its place. verified

legislation/hb-153-2011 · 8 nodes point here · 2 corrections

The Bridge formula was explicitly temporary — a holding pattern until the administration devised its own model. Its logic was proportional distribution of a reduction: districts received roughly the same share of a state funding cut measured against their total resources including local dollars, with funding effectively frozen near FY2011 levels while federal stimulus money simultaneously expired. inference The placeholder lasted a decade.

It kept a guarantee and changed what it held. H.B. 1’s transitional aid had guaranteed 98% of a district’s prior-year state aid in FY2011; this act’s supplemental allocation guaranteed its FY2011 state aid minus the portion federal stimulus had paid for, so the floor excluded the one-time money. verified the greenbook What it repealed was the Evidence-Based Model’s guarantee, not the guarantee.

One further change compounded the effect on the districts least able to absorb it. The act began the phase-out of the tangible personal property tax reimbursements created by H.B. 66. verified Those reimbursements were concentrated in districts with industrial tax bases, so the phase-out fell hardest on communities that had already lost the underlying tax base by state decision six years earlier — a second withdrawal from the same places. inference

This is also the act that makes the case for modeling regimes and reimbursements separately. A district in an industrial county experienced FY2012 as three simultaneous reductions — the formula freeze, the stimulus expiry, and the reimbursement phase-out — none of which appears in a base cost figure. inference

Appropriation totals, the exact reimbursement phase-out schedule, and the number of districts affected are not yet recorded. open

What this repository computed Contents

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

The mechanism, which the corpus had only ever characterized Contents

LSC’s greenbook states it in formula boxes. Aid in FY2012 and FY2013 is a per-pupil amount carried from FY2011, adjusted for property wealth, applied to the current year’s pupils — with a dollar floor beneath it. verified the greenbook, committed at lsc-education-greenbooks.txt

FY2011 state aid per pupil  = actual FY2011 allocation / recalculated FY2011 ADM
                              (recalculated on the FY2011 October count, whichever
                               count the district's FY2011 aid was actually paid on)

charge-off valuation index  = FY2011 charge-off valuation per pupil
                              / median FY2011 charge-off valuation per pupil

adjusted per-pupil amount   = FY2011 per pupil + (index x a uniform statewide adjustment,
                              set by the department each year so total aid fits the
                              appropriation)

total allocation            = adjusted per-pupil amount x current-year ADM

supplemental allocation     = FY2011 total state aid MINUS its federal stimulus portion,
                              less the total allocation, where that is positive

Three things follow that the characterization did not carry. The adjustment is indexed to property wealth, not to total resources. The uniform statewide adjustment is set to fit the appropriation, so the formula is solved backwards from the money available rather than forwards from a cost. And the floor is FY2011 aid net of the federal stimulus, so the one-time money is excluded from what any district is held at — the expiry was not cushioned, it was designed out. verified

Joint vocational districts were simply flat-funded at their FY2011 allocation. A high-performance subsidy paid $17 per current pupil to districts rated Excellent or Excellent with Distinction. verified

This is where the anchor chain ends Contents

The chain that funds nearly half of Ohio in FY2027 runs backwards through four re-anchorings to H.B. 59’s FY2013 base — and that base is Bridge formula funding, which is this. It bottoms out at FY2011, and FY2011 state aid was computed under the Evidence-Based Model, which this same act repealed. verified

So a district guaranteed in every biennium since is funded in FY2027 on a figure whose origin is a per-pupil amount produced by a formula that has not existed for sixteen years. The full sequence is in Bridge Formula. verified

Properties Contents

DesignationAm. Sub. H.B. 153
General Assembly129th General Assembly
Signed2011-06-30
Effective2011-06-30
When each part took effectTwo dates, and effective above carries the appropriation one. Signed 30 June 2011, with the appropriation sections effective then; the codified amendments took effect on 29 September 2011, and some provisions on other dates. verified LSC's enrolled analysis; the legislature's version index
What it didEnacted the FY2012-13 operating budget. Repealed the Evidence-Based Model and replaced it with the Bridge formula, distributing state aid by reference to prior-year amounts with funding held near FY2011 levels. Replaced the Evidence-Based Model's transitional aid with a supplemental allocation guaranteeing FY2011 state aid net of federal stimulus. Began the phase-out of tangible personal property tax replacement payments. Signing date to be confirmed against the enrolled act. open
VetoesOne, and it is not a funding provision. verified the greenbook

The act repealed the requirement that districts, community schools, STEM schools and chartered nonpublic schools conduct body mass index and weight status screenings for pupils in certain grades. The Governor vetoed the repeal, so the screening requirement survived.

Worth recording precisely because of what it is not. This is the act that repealed the Evidence-Based Model and installed the Bridge formula, and none of that was vetoed: the largest structural change in the class passed entire.
Effect on accountabilityIt paid on a rating, and on success. Districts and community schools rated Excellent or Excellent with Distinction received an extra $17 times current-year ADM in FY2012 and FY2013, and H.B. 59 then wrote this high performance subsidy into its guarantee base. verified greenbook

It is the reversal. Ohio's only earlier formula coupling, H.B. 119's Closing the Achievement Gap, paid on failure; this is the first formula payment on a good rating, and it carried no wealth term. The census of rating-driven payments in Ohio report card first missed it, because none of its four terms is this subsidy's name, and now searches the subsidy's own heading. verified crates/project, rating_payments, pinned by test

It also keyed consequences to a statewide performance index ranking rather than to a rating alone: a district school in the lowest 5% for three consecutive years and in academic watch or emergency must close, be contracted out, be restaffed or convert; EdChoice eligibility extended to buildings in the lowest 10%; and core-subject teachers in the lowest ten percentiles must retake licensure tests. Teacher evaluations became 50% student academic growth and govern retention and removal. A community school offering no grade above 3, or any of 10 to 12, now closes after academic emergency in two of three years, and the State Board lost its authority to revoke a district's charter under H.B. 1's standards. verified greenbook

Where this appears on the site Contents

The pages outside the corpus that link here, and the section of each the link sits in.

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

What this node used to say Contents

The corpus is not rewritten to have always been right. Each entry is a claim this node carried, what replaced it, and the thing that settled it.

Correction 1 of 2

It said

The Bridge formula’s logic was described as “proportional distribution of a reduction: districts received roughly the same share of a state funding cut measured against their total resources including local dollars, with funding effectively frozen near FY2011 levels.” inference

It says

Wealth-indexed, not resource-proportional, and not a freeze. Each district’s FY2011 aid per pupil is carried forward, adjusted by where its charge-off valuation per pupil sits against the statewide median, and multiplied by current-year ADM — so a district’s allocation moved with its own enrollment every year. The freeze is the floor underneath it, and the floor is FY2011 aid net of federal stimulus.

Settled by

LSC’s greenbook for the act, which states each step as a formula box. It was retrieved only when the greenbook series was completed across all twelve General Assemblies; before that the corpus had the act’s appropriation table and no account of what the act did.

What else it touched

The characterization was a reasonable reading of the effect and it hid the mechanism. Two things depended on the difference: that a Bridge-era district’s aid tracked its enrollment, which a freeze would not do, and that the statewide adjustment is solved to fit the appropriation, which makes this the one formula in the corpus that runs backwards from available money. It also fixes the depth of the anchor chain at FY2011.

Correction 2 of 2

It said

The act “removed the funding guarantee”, stated in the description and the subject, and given as one of two changes that “compounded the effect on the districts least able to absorb it”.

It says

It kept a guarantee. The supplemental allocation held every district at its FY2011 state aid net of the federal stimulus portion. What went was H.B. 1’s transitional aid, the Evidence-Based Model’s guarantee, which had held 98% of prior-year aid. The compounding argument now rests on the reimbursement phase-out alone, because the stimulus netting applied to every district’s floor and not to the least able in particular.

Settled by

This node’s own findings, whose formula box is the supplemental allocation, and H.B. 59’s greenbook, which defines its guarantee base as FY2013 Bridge funding plus “supplemental guarantee” plus the high performance subsidy. Filed as #536.

What else it touched

The same sentence was copied into bridge-formula, corrected with it. The anchor chain in both nodes already assumed a guarantee in every biennium, so nothing downstream depended on the removal.