The corpus › Metric

General Fund Cash Balance

What a district holds, as against what it is given or what it spends. The general fund’s cash balance at 1 July (carry-over) and 30 June (ending balance), from the district’s own five-year forecast filing under R.C. 5705.391.

metric/general-fund-cash-balance · 3 nodes point here · 1 correction

The other measures in Ohio school finance are flows — what the state sends, what a formula computes, what a district spends. This one is a stock the district controls, and it is the figure a board points to when it says it cannot afford something, or that a legislator points to when they say it can.

It is also a record of money that changed hands rather than a model. That distinction is load-bearing everywhere it appears: the funding calculator says what a district is owed, this says what its treasurer booked.

What this repository computed Contents

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

STATEWIDE BALANCES ROSE THROUGH THE RELIEF YEARS AND FELL IN THE FIRST YEAR AFTER THEM. verified Over the 660 filing bodies, ending cash rose in every year from $8.37bn in FY2020 to $11.20bn in FY2024, then fell to $9.14bn. It is the only fall in the series. In FY2020 dollars the same series ends below where it began.

FY2025 IS THE YEAR SPENDING CAUGHT UP. verified Revenue rose 4.9% and spending rose 16.5%, and it was not a handful of large districts — the median district raised spending 13.7%. 460 of 659 ran a deficit, against fewer than half the year before. The difference came out of the balances above.

THE GUARANTEE IS NOT PRODUCING DISTRICTS THAT SIT ON CASH. verified A standing claim, and the panel does not support it: guaranteed districts hold a median 0.319 years of spending against 0.338 for districts on the formula — about a week less, in the direction opposite to the claim. See temporary transitional aid guarantee, which is where the guarantee’s own erosion in real terms is recorded.

open Whether the FY2025 drawdown continues, which needs the FY2027 filing and one more closed year.

VERY LITTLE OF THE BUILD-UP WAS THE RELIEF, AND THE FORECAST LINES DO SEPARATE IT Contents

This node recorded, open, that how much of the FY2021-FY2024 build-up was ESSER booked in the general fund is something “the forecast lines cannot separate and the federal award data could.” One of the lines can, and nothing had read it.

The filing carries two revenue totals. total_revenue is the district’s own receipts and excludes transfers by construction, which is why it does not close the cash identity; total_revenue_and_sources is every dollar that entered the fund and does. Their difference is transfers, advances and note proceeds — the only route money received into a special revenue fund can take into the general fund. Every consumer in the workspace read the first column and none read the second. verified crates/project, transfers::by_year, pinned by test

The line has the shape relief would leave. Statewide it more than doubles across the relief years and falls back when the grants end: $0.28bn in FY2020, rising to $0.72bn in FY2024, then $0.43bn in FY2025. verified

It does not have the size. The build-up does not track a district’s relief: the correlation between ESSER surge per pupil and the FY2021-FY2024 change in ending cash per pupil is 0.075 across 606 districts. If the balances were the grants, the districts that received more would hold more. They do not, and at the level the question was asked that is the answer. verified crates/project, transfers::build_up_against_relief, pinned by test

How much is attributable, bounded rather than pinned. Sizing the relief share needs a level the transfers line would have run at without the grants, and the panel holds no clean one. FY2020 already carries ESSER I, which arrived in the spring of 2020; FY2025 is not a post-period either, because ESSER III’s obligation deadline fell in September 2024 and liquidation ran into 2025. On the FY2020 baseline the excess is $0.86bn — 46.9% of a $1.83bn build-up — and relief explains 15.1% to 39.4% of it. Leveled against both years the excess is $0.57bn, 31.3%, and relief explains 6.4% to 8.8%. The two ends of each range are a least-squares slope, which a handful of large districts pull, and the gap between the outer quartile medians, which they cannot. verified crates/project, transfers::attribution, pinned by test

What survives every choice is the ceiling: under two fifths, and most plausibly under a tenth. The spread is stated rather than resolved because the corpus cannot defend one baseline over the other, and a midpoint would be a number with no argument behind it. inference

This is consistent with the control from the other side. The grants never entered as revenue at all: federal revenue in these districts rose 139% across the peak while their general-fund revenue fell, which is what makes the transfers line the only remaining route and so what makes a small number here an answer rather than a gap. See ESSER. verified crates/project

What the line cannot say is whether a given dollar was a permanent transfer or an advance later repaid — the filing reports one figure for transfers, advances and note proceeds together, and ESSER was a reimbursement grant, so both are present. It bounds the total either way. open

Properties Contents

Definition
Name	General fund ending cash balance, and its carry-over
Unit	dollars
Forecast line 7.020, ending cash balance at 30 June, excluding proposed renewal, replacement and new levies. Its companion 7.010 is the same quantity at 1 July — the carry-over from the year before — and within a single filing the identity is exact: 7.020(year) = 7.010(year+1) 7.010 + (2.080 total revenue and other financing sources) - (5.050 total expenditures and other financing uses) = 7.020 The second identity closes on 2.080 and not on 1.070 total revenue, which excludes transfers, advances and note proceeds. Using 1.070 leaves the balance unreconciled for all but a handful of districts, which is how the wrong line was caught. verified Reported against the scale of the operation rather than alone: cash as years of spending = 7.020 / 5.050 A dollar figure is meaningless without it. The same $10M is a year of reserve for a small district and three weeks for a large one, and Ohio sets no statutory minimum, so this is a comparison figure and never a compliance one.
Inputs	Five-year forecast filings — the department's republished submissions, two pinned filings whose audited-actual windows tile FY2020-FY2025 without a gap. 660 reporting bodies, covering all 609 traditional districts the FY2027 funding model pays. CPI-U all items — the Bureau of Labor Statistics flat file for any statement in constant dollars.
Values over time
Statewide general fund ending cash, line 7.020, FY2020-FY2025 verified `crates/project/src/finances.rs`: FY2020 $8,367,366,132 FY2021 $9,234,398,370 FY2022 $9,861,046,108 FY2023 $10,262,256,511 FY2024 $11,204,712,970 FY2025 $9,135,474,508 Each year sums 659 of the 660 filing bodies, but not the same 659: Toronto City's filing carries no balance for FY2020-FY2022, and IRN 049619 files nothing after FY2022. verified An unreported line is skipped rather than summed as zero. Nominal dollars throughout; the caveats give the constant-dollar reading, which ends below where it began.
Caveats	General fund only. Capital, food service, and most federal programs sit in other funds. A balance here is not the district's total resources and an expenditure here is not its total spending. It must never be compared line-for-line with per-pupil operating expenditure, which is computed on the department's own definitions over a different base. FY2021-FY2024 are the federal pandemic relief years. ESSER money was booked in the general fund by some districts and separately by others, and it arrived and stopped on a schedule with nothing to do with Ohio's formula. A balance rising across that span is not evidence about a district's own position. Named in code as `project::finances::Finances::pandemic_years` rather than left to a footnote. Nominal figures across this span can have the wrong sign. CPI-U June rose 25.1% from FY2020 to FY2025. Statewide the balance ends 8% above where it started in nominal dollars and 14% below in constant ones, over the 609 districts in the platform feed. Both are correct and they support opposite arguments, which is why nothing here may be quoted without its basis. verified The panel is not one continuously audited series. The two filings report the FY2022/FY2023 seam three years apart and disagree about it for more than half of districts — median $2, 90th percentile $9,054, nine districts over $1M, largest $13.3M. Those are reclassifications across the relief years, not errors, and the corpus states them rather than smoothing them. One district's filing carries no cash line at all. Toronto City (IRN 044917) is absent from lines 5.050, 7.010 and 7.020 of the FY2023 filing, so it has no expenditure and no balance for FY2020-FY2022 — and, until the correction, published $0 against $9.86M of revenue for each of those years while every identity check passed, because a zero balance carries over into a zero balance perfectly. It was the tenth of the ten seam restatements above, at $8,140,842, and it was neither a restatement nor a reclassification. Pinned as `project::finances::INCOMPLETE`, the missing-line counterpart to `PARTIAL`: a row count finds a district short of years, and cannot find one short of lines. A submitted forecast is not a measurement. Each filing carries five projected years made by a treasurer under incentives — a board arguing for a levy and a board defending a balance want different numbers on the same line. Only the audited actuals are extracted; the committed fixture contains no forecast value.
Calculator	project::finances

Links Contents

Instance of	Metric
Measures	Northern Local School District (Perry County)
Measures	Upper Arlington City School District

Also mentions

Temporary Transitional Aid Guarantee ESSER — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Five-year forecast filings — the department's republished submissions CPI-U all items — the Bureau of Labor Statistics flat file Per-Pupil Operating Expenditure

Pointed at by

Temporary Transitional Aid Guarantee	Measured against
Per-Pupil Operating Expenditure	Contrasts with
ESSER — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief	Bears on

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

Ten districts restate the FY2022/FY2023 seam by more than $1M, and all ten are reclassifications across the relief years rather than errors in either filing.

It says

Nine. verified The tenth was Toronto City at $8,140,842, which is not a restatement of anything: the FY2023 filing carries no line 7.020 for that district, the extract wrote the absence as 0, and the whole of the district’s cash then appeared to arrive between two filings. The count was the load-bearing part of the sentence — it is what said how rare the disagreement is — so the correction is to the count and to what the tenth case was.

Settled by

project::finances::the_only_lines_a_filing_omits_are_the_named_ones, which the correction adds. Nothing before it could see the hole: the fixture is uniform width, so a district missing a line has a row of exactly the same shape as one that reported every line, and the identity checks pass on a zero balance carried into a zero balance.

What else it touched

The live feed published $0 of expenditure and $0 of cash against $9.86M of revenue for Toronto City for FY2020-FY2022, and statewide expenditure and ending cash were understated by $9-10M in each of those years. Feed contract 38.0.0 makes the five finances figures nullable so an unreported line cannot be summed again.