DeRolph v. State (DeRolph III, 2001)

On 6 September 2001, exercising the continuing jurisdiction it had kept in DeRolph II, the court held 4-3 that the plan enacted by Am.Sub.H.B. 94 would meet the test created in DeRolph I and II with modifications, ordered those modifications, and then declined to retain jurisdiction. verified Fifteen months later DeRolph IV vacated it. verified

What it ordered. Four changes, all to the base cost build-up or its local counterpart: verified

• The model district panel. H.B. 94 derived base cost from 127 “model” districts, reached by taking the 170 top-performing districts and screening out those in the top and bottom five percent by income and property wealth, then re-admitting some that missed the standard through a rounding rule. The court ordered the wealth screens removed and the rounding dropped: the panel must be all districts actually meeting twenty of twenty-seven performance standards, and no others.
• No echo-effect adjustment. H.B. 94 took the lower of inflation-adjusted FY1996 spending or actual FY1999 spending, on the theory that model districts had overspent at the base level. The court found the adjustment unsupported by the evidence and barred its use to lower the base cost figure.
• Parity aid fully funded by 1 July 2003 — the start of FY2004, two years earlier than the FY2006 the act provided for.
• The charge-off rate frozen at 23 mills. “In determining future biennial budgets through fiscal year 2007, the rate of millage charged off as the local share of base cost funding under divisions (A)(1) and (2) of R.C. 3317.022 may not be changed from twenty-three mills, irrespective of the language of R.C. 3317.012(D)(4) suggesting such a methodology.”

And then it let go. “Because we have no reason to doubt defendants’ good faith, we have concluded that there is no reason to retain jurisdiction of the matter before us. If the order receives less than full compliance, interested parties have remedies available to them.” verified Ten years of retained jurisdiction ended in that sentence, and the enforcement mechanism became a new action by whoever cared to bring one.

What this repository computed #

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

That last order is the one with consequences this corpus can still see. The local share charge-off millage moved three times between 1991 and 1997 and then stood at 23 mills for the rest of its life. It was not legislative inertia: for six of those years a court had forbidden the General Assembly to change it. verified A parameter series read without this decision looks like a policy that stopped being revisited; it was a policy that had been enjoined.

The retroactivity is unusual and worth naming. The court set no deadline for calculating and distributing the revised amounts, but required the new calculations to apply retroactive to 1 July 2001 and to the subsequent years designated in R.C. 3317.012 — a remedy reaching backwards into a fiscal year already begun. verified

Why it is in the corpus despite being vacated. DeRolph IV stripped these specifics out and reinstated the bare declaration of DeRolph I and II, so nothing here is operative law. verified It is here because it is the only judicial statement of what a compliant Ohio formula would contain — a costed, mechanical specification of adequacy against which the Evidence-Based Model and the Fair School Funding Plan can each be read. Both later regimes build base cost from a resource specification rather than from a residual, which is the direction this decision pushed; whether either would satisfy the panel rule it ordered has not been tested. open

The act this decision is about now has a node: H.B. 94, holding the FY2002-07 base cost series and the four mechanisms the modifications above operate on. Writing it turned up something that bears directly on reading this opinion: every section cited here has since been repealed or reused. R.C. 3317.012 is now joint vocational district base cost, R.C. 3317.0217 is now targeted assistance, and R.C. 3317.0216 is gone. A reader following ¶64’s citation for parity aid lands on a different program with no notice that the number changed hands. verified

  1. Base cost model panel — all districts meeting 20 of 27 performance standards, without
     the top- and bottom-five-percent wealth screens and without the rounding re-admission
  2. No "echo effect" adjustment: the lower of inflation-adjusted FY1996 or actual FY1999
     spending may not be used to reduce the base cost amount
  3. Parity aid fully funded no later than 1 July 2003, rather than FY2006
  4. Charge-off millage under R.C. 3317.022(A)(1) and (2) held at 23 mills through FY2007

2000-05-11  DeRolph II; continuing jurisdiction retained, matter continued to 15 June 2001
2001-06-20  Submitted, No. 99-570, on the exercise of continuing jurisdiction
2001-09-06  DeRolph III
2002-12-11  Vacated by DeRolph IV; DeRolph I and II reinstated as controlling