Am. Sub. H.B. 94 (2001) — FY2002-03 Budget; the post-DeRolph II formula
The General Assembly’s answer to DeRolph II, and the only Ohio school funding act a court has ever examined provision by provision and found constitutional — conditionally, briefly, and in a decision that was then erased.
legislation/hb-94-2001 · 5 nodes point here · 1 correction
What it built. H.B. 94 recalculated the cost of an adequate education as $4,814 per student in FY2002, rising 2.8% a year to $5,527 by FY2007, and — answering DeRolph II’s sharpest criticism — funded that amount in full immediately, with no phase-in. verified DeRolph III ¶16 DeRolph II had found the state “funding below the level that the General Assembly deemed to be the base amount for an adequate education”, which is a specific and damning finding: the state had named its own adequacy figure and then not paid it.
The base cost came from an unweighted average over 127 “model” districts — the 170
districts that met at least 20 of 27 performance standards in FY1999, less those in the top
and bottom 5% by income and property wealth. verified ¶17 The formula was ADM × base cost × cost-of-doing-business − 0.023 × valuation. verified ¶18
Four mechanisms it introduced or restructured, three of which the corpus already models under later names:
- Six special education weights. verified ¶22 Ohio’s six clinical categories, which the FSFP node still carries, date from this act. It also added catastrophic-cost thresholds — $30,000 in category six, $25,000 in categories two through five — above which the state funds all of half the excess plus its share of the other half. verified ¶22
- Gap aid, extended to transportation as well as base cost, special and vocational education, explicitly to address phantom revenue: the state contributes more where the tax base does not grow with the base cost amount. verified ¶19 This is the corpus’s charge-off problem, named and partially compensated by the legislature seventeen years before the charge-off was retired.
- A three-mill cap on what a district must raise locally toward special education, vocational education and transportation. verified ¶20
- Parity aid. Poor districts received the difference between what 9.5 mills raises for them and what it raises at the eightieth percentile of income-adjusted wealth. Estimated at $100m in FY2002 and $500m a year fully phased in by FY2006 — which DeRolph III accelerated to FY2004. verified ¶23
What this repository computed Contents
Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.
And a stabilizer, which is the provision the court later overrode. R.C. 3317.012(D)(4) required the state share percentage of base cost and parity aid not to vary by more than 2.5% from the preceding update year, and directed the General Assembly to bring it back within range “by any means it determines to be necessary”. verified ¶25 One available means was moving the charge-off millage. DeRolph III ¶62 forbade exactly that, holding the rate at 23 mills through FY2007 “irrespective of the language of R.C. 3317.012(D)(4) suggesting such a methodology”. verified The court was not freezing a number in the abstract; it was closing the adjustment mechanism the act had built.
Its own citations no longer resolve, and they resolve to something plausible Contents
This is the reason the act is worth a node rather than a footnote. Every section DeRolph III cites has since been repealed or reused: verified fetched 2026-08-09
section in H.B. 94 (2001) on codes.ohio.gov today
R.C. 3317.012 the base cost formula "Joint vocational school district base cost"
R.C. 3317.0217 parity aid "Targeted assistance funding"
R.C. 3317.0216 gap aid gone; the URL redirects
A reader following DeRolph III’s citation for parity aid lands on targeted assistance — a different program, in the same chapter, doing something recognizably similar, with no notice that the number changed hands. That is the failure mode this corpus has already recorded twice for citations that pointed at sections which did not exist; a citation that points at a section which exists and has been repurposed is worse, because nothing looks wrong.
It follows that H.B. 94 cannot be sourced from the current Revised Code at all.
ohio-laws serves the text in force, so the act survives here only through DeRolph III’s
recitation of it, which is a court’s account rather than the enacted text. Retrieving the act
itself needs the session laws — the same gap that keeps lsc-budget from carrying the
pre-2000 record. open
What became of it. DeRolph III held the plan constitutional subject to four modifications. Fifteen months later DeRolph IV vacated DeRolph III entirely, which left H.B. 94 in force and unadjudicated, and left the declaration of unconstitutionality from DeRolph I and II standing over it. verified Whether the four modifications were ever implemented, once the order requiring them ceased to exist, is not established here and is the obvious question. open
Properties Contents
| Designation | Am. Sub. H.B. 94 |
|---|---|
| General Assembly | 124th General Assembly |
| Signed | 2001-06-06 |
| Effective | 2001-06-06 |
| When each part took effect | Two dates, and effective above carries the appropriation one. The appropriation sections took effect on 6 June 2001, the day the legislature's record has the act signed, and the codified amendments on 5 September 2001, ninety-one days later; some provisions took effect on other dates. verified the legislature's version index; LSC's enrolled analysis, whose cover gives the September date |
| What it did | Enacted the FY2002-03 operating budget and rebuilt the foundation formula in response to DeRolph II: base cost of $4,814 per pupil in FY2002 funded without a phase-in, derived from 127 model districts; six special education weights with catastrophic-cost thresholds; gap aid extended to transportation; a three-mill cap on the local share of categorical costs; and parity aid equalizing 9.5 mills of discretionary capacity to the eightieth percentile of income-adjusted wealth. verified DeRolph III at paragraphs 16 through 25 |
| Vetoes | The greenbook does not discuss them, and that is what is recorded rather than a placeholder. LSC's analysis of this act carries no vetoed-provisions chapter and the word does not appear in it at all — unlike every other greenbook in the series, each of which has one. Whether that means no education provision was vetoed or only that LSC did not report them is not established, and the act itself is not retrievable: the legislature's version index reaches the 122nd General Assembly and serves no text for the 124th's budget act. open |
| Effect on accountability | The regime was rebuilt beside this act, not by it. Am. Sub. S.B. 1 of the same General Assembly replaced the proficiency tests with achievement tests and the Ohio Graduation Tests, extended ratings to buildings and added "excellent" as a fifth rating; H.B. 94 appropriated for it, through Academic Standards and Student Assessment among other items. verified greenbook Its own coupling governed how a formula payment was spent, not how much. LSC's final analysis records that only "effective" districts could spend parity aid on anything; every other district had to budget it in its continuous improvement plan and spend it on listed purposes such as intervention, professional development or smaller classes, unless the state superintendent approved another use (R.C. 3302.041). inference The greenbook does not mention it. So a rating reached a formula dollar two years before H.B. 95's earmarks let one set an amount; see Ohio report card. |
Where this appears on the site Contents
The pages outside the corpus that link here, and the section of each the link sits in.
Links Contents
| Instance of | Legislation |
|---|---|
| Responds to | DeRolph v. State (DeRolph II, 2000) |
| Reviewed by | DeRolph v. State (DeRolph III, 2001) |
| Rebuilds | Foundation Base Cost Formula |
| Sets | Base Cost Per Pupil |
| Sets | Local Share Charge-Off Millage |
| Originates | FSFP Special Education Weights |
| Compensates for | Charge-Off Local Share |
| Shares citation with | FSFP Targeted Assistance |
| Appropriates for | FY2002-2003 Biennium |
| Sourced from | DeRolph Litigation Record |
Also mentions
Pointed at by
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 1
It said
signed: 2001-06-30 and effective: 2001-07-01 — the eve of the biennium and its first
day, which is where most budget acts’ dates fall and where this one’s do not.
It says
Signed and its appropriations effective 6 June 2001, its codified amendments 5 September,
with the split recorded in effective_note.
Settled by
The legislature’s version index for H.B. 94 of the 124th, whose enrolled entry gives both dates, and LSC’s enrolled analysis, whose cover gives the September one.
What else it touched
Nothing read the date: no other node, crate or page cites it, and the fiscal period the act funds takes its start from its own definition.