Am. Sub. H.B. 166 (2019) — FY2020-21 Budget; the Year There Was No Formula

The last act of the Bridge-formula decade, and the only one of the four that ran no formula at all.

The freeze. “In FY 2020 and FY 2021, the budget provides every traditional school district and JVSD with the same amount of foundation aid the districts received in FY 2019.” Statewide that is $8.07 billion for traditional districts and $306.5 million for joint vocational districts. verified the greenbook

It is a freeze of the machinery and not only of the total:

• the formula amount used to compute deductions and transfers is fixed at the FY2019 figure, $6,020;
• the per-pupil amounts deducted and paid to community and STEM schools for targeted assistance, economically disadvantaged funds and transportation are the FY2019 amounts;
• wherever a district’s state share index or state share percentage is a factor — preschool special education, special education transportation, county DD board and institution special education, catastrophic cost — the department must use the district’s FY2019 index. verified

The new money went somewhere else. Student wellness and success funds, an enrollment growth supplement, and quality community schools support are paid alongside the frozen foundation amount rather than through it. A biennium that adds money without touching the formula is choosing not to redistribute: every district’s share of foundation aid is whatever its share was in FY2019. verified the greenbook’s chapter structure inference the last sentence

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

The Fair School Funding Plan’s anchor is this freeze, not a FY2020 computation # ↑ Contents

The guarantee funding base — column [H2] of the payment report, the level nearly half of Ohio is still held at in FY2027 — is the FY2020 figure. That parameter recorded, [open], that “what the FY2020 figure was itself composed of” was not established and “may reach back further than 2020.”

It does. FY2020 is FY2019, carried forward unchanged by this act. So [H2] is not the output of a formula run in FY2020; it is the output of H.B. 49’s formula run in FY2019, on FY2019 enrollment and a FY2019 state share index, preserved by a statute that declined to recompute. verified

And the corpus’s own appropriation series shows it, in a fixture that was already committed # ↑ Contents

FY2018   $7,885,912,816
FY2019   $8,024,258,845
FY2020   $8,024,280,845     +$22,000
FY2021   $8,024,518,845     +$238,000
FY2022   $8,202,198,712

Three consecutive years flat to within 0.003%, against $1.44 billion of growth across the five years before them. verified appropriation-lines.csv, lines 200550 and 200612 The freeze was legible in the series the whole time and nothing here had read it as one, because no node named the act that caused it.

What that does to a finding already in the corpus # ↑ Contents

The guarantee node argues that “held at FY2020” is a nominal statement and that prices rose 25.1% across FY2020-FY2025. That argument is sound and it understates the staleness by a year: the distribution being held is FY2019’s. In FY2027, the terminal phase-in year, the districts on the guarantee are funded at a distribution computed eight years earlier — and for a district guaranteed in every biennium of the decade, the chain in Bridge Formula reaches back further still. verified