DeRolph v. State (DeRolph IV, 2002)

What it did is more specific than “reaffirmed.” On 11 December 2002 the Supreme Court of Ohio vacated DeRolph III — the September 2001 decision that had found the plan constitutional subject to four prescribed methodological fixes — and reinstated DeRolph I and DeRolph II as the controlling law of the case. verified The effect was to strip out the remedial specifics the court had supplied a year earlier and leave standing the bare declaration that the system is unconstitutional, together with the direction to the General Assembly to enact a compliant one. A reading that treats the four decisions as cumulative gets the operative holding wrong.

Then it ended without a compliance finding. On 16 May 2003 the court granted a writ of prohibition barring the trial court from conducting further proceedings, terminating the remand. verified The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari on 20 October 2003. verified The declaration of unconstitutionality was never withdrawn and the system was never adjudicated compliant. The case simply stopped.

This produces the condition every subsequent Ohio funding regime operates under: a standing constitutional judgment against the funding system with no court supervising a remedy. inference It is why the Evidence-Based Model could be repealed after two years without judicial consequence, why the Bridge formula could distribute aid by reference to prior-year amounts for a decade, and why the Fair School Funding Plan’s phase-in depends entirely on legislative willingness. Whether the current system would satisfy DeRolph has not been tested and, on the existing record, cannot be. open