Formula Parameter
18 nodes · quality (ufo)
A single named value that a funding regime consumes and the General Assembly sets, carrying a series of values across fiscal periods — a base cost per pupil, a special-education category weight, the 20-mill floor, a phase-in percentage, a state share index threshold. It is a Quality because it is an aspect that inheres in a formula component and cannot exist independently of one. Parameters are separated from components because they are the surface a counterfactual binds to: a proposed policy change is, almost always, an edit to a parameter’s value.
Nodes
| Appropriation Proration Factor | A number below one that every district's payment under a program is multiplied by, because the appropriation did not cover what the formula computed. It is not a rate, a weight, a price or a threshold. |
|---|---|
| Base Cost Per Pupil | What the state treats as the cost of educating one student before categorical additions — the most consequential single number in Ohio school funding, and the one whose meaning has changed most from one regime to the next. |
| Career-Technical Category Multiples | Five multiples from 0.6230 down to 0.1570, plus 0.0294 for associated services, applied to a career-technical base cost 19.6% above the general one. Written for FY2026 and FY2027 only: from FY2028 the section pays "an amount calculated in a manner determined by the general assembly". |
| Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid Per-Pupil Amount | $422 a pupil, times a district's economically disadvantaged index, times its count. The $422 and the index's squaring are in statute; the 65/35 blend that builds the count is in no section of the Revised Code and is the department exercising a delegation. |
| English Learner Category Multiples | Three multiples that run downward — 0.2104, 0.1577, 0.1053 — as a pupil progresses. The only weight schedule in the plan that falls as the pupil it prices improves, and it is a taper by construction rather than a ranking. |
| Enrollment Supplement Amounts | $40 a pupil to every district and $250 a pupil to the 43 that grew more than 3%, neither rate in any section of the Revised Code. The 3% is a cliff: the nearest miss cost $430,477. |
| FSFP Phase-In Percentage | How far a district is moved from its FY2020 funding base toward the amount the Fair School Funding Plan computes for it — an interpolation weight, not a fraction of computed aid. The enacted series runs close to equal sixths, from 16.67% in FY2022 to 100% in FY2027. |
| Gifted Funding Rates | Five numbers across two sections: $24 a pupil to identify, $2.50 a pupil to refer, and three unit salaries of $85,776, $89,378 and $80,974. The unit prices are salaries the General Assembly writes down, which is unusual — nothing else in the plan prices a post. |
| Guarantee Funding Base | Column [H2] of the payment report: the FY2020 level each district is held at by the guarantee. Published per district, carrying no year label of its own, and never re-based since — so in FY2027 half of Ohio is funded at a figure set seven years earlier. |
| Local Capacity Percentage | The rate the plan charges against a district's blended wealth — 2.5% at the top, the district's own income ratio times 2.25% at the bottom, interpolating between. Its top is pinned to a rank rather than a value: the fortieth-highest district in the state. |
| Local Share Charge-Off Millage | The statutory millage rate the state assumed a district could levy against its own assessed valuation, used to compute its deemed local contribution before state aid. The number that made the charge-off work, and the number that made it wrong. |
| Minimum State Share | The floor under a district's state share of base cost — 10% for FY2026-27, twice the 5% the Fair School Funding Plan began with. 138 of 609 districts sit exactly on it, and for those districts every other term in the local capacity measure decides nothing. |
| Performance Supplement Rate | $13 a pupil per star — the only place Ohio's funding formula pays on a measured outcome. It is in no section of the Revised Code, and per pupil it runs 2.6 times higher in the least-poor fifth of districts than in the poorest. |
| Preschool Special Education Amounts | $4,000 flat per preschool child with a disability, plus the six special education multiples at half strength. The flat grant is 69% of the program and the state share does not touch it, so this is the one component where the wealthiest district and the poorest are funded alike. |
| Special Education Category Multiples | Six multiples, 0.2435 to 3.9554, one per disability category — a sixteen-fold range that is most of what special education funding is. The only FSFP parameter the Revised Code states with no end date, and the only one enacted by an act other than the current budget. |
| Targeted Assistance Rates | Millage, written as decimals: 8 mills on the gap to median weighted wealth, and 14 mills on the median against 11.2 on the district's own. The 0.8 eligibility floor is those two divided — neither gate in the section is a separate decision. |
| Transportation Cost Rates | $1,337.175 per rider and $6.867 per mile — the two rates in the plan that nobody chose. The section names no dollar figure: both are trimmed means of what districts themselves reported spending last year, so the rate moves when districts' own behavior moves. |
| Twenty-Mill Floor | The limit below which H.B. 920's tax reduction factors may not push a district's effective operating millage. A small number that does something large: at the floor, valuation growth reaches revenue, and above it, it does not. |
Properties
What a formula parameter may carry.
| Property | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Name | string | The parameter's name in statute or department documentation |
| Unit | string, one of dollars-per-pupil, dollars, ratio, mills, percent, count | What one value of the parameter is measured in. dollars is an amount no count multiplies — a per-district base, for one |
| Kind | text | What sort of thing sets this value, and therefore what would have to happen for it to change: legislated | delegated | measured | uncodified. Ohio's funding parameters are four different kinds of thing and a spreadsheet renders all four as a number in a cell, which is how they came to be listed side by side as though they were the same promise. Legislated — written in the section, changed only by an act. Delegated — statute names the department and the department decides, within whatever constraint the section imposes. Measured — statute specifies a computation over reported data, so the value moves when districts' own behavior moves and nobody decides. Uncodified — nowhere in the Revised Code, set by the biennial budget, and gone if it is not re-enacted. Text rather than an enum because a parameter that outlives a regime can change kind at the boundary, and because "not in the Revised Code" and "not in law" are different claims that this taxonomy has already conflated once. |
| Values over time | text | Value per fiscal period, with the enactment that set each value |
| Statutory basis | string | Ohio Revised Code section that fixes the value or its method |
| Simulation key | string | Identifier the crates/ foundation calculator uses to bind this parameter. Not required: a parameter the calculator does not bind as a scalar — one held as a per-district column — has no key, and a key pointing at nothing would read as provenance it does not have. |
| Written in formulas as | text | The phrases a formula writes this parameter as, one per line. A formula does not name a parameter the way this class does — it writes "statewide average base cost per pupil" or "the school-age weights", the words the Revised Code section uses. Measured across the corpus's fourteen function_tex fields: 152 distinct \text{} phrases, of which exactly one equals a parameter's name. So the site links a named quantity in a formula to the node that defines it by reading this field rather than by matching the name, and a function_tex carries no hand-written link. A phrase counts only inside a formula whose component declares a governed-by edge to this parameter, which is what lets a generic word like "supplement" be an alias without linking every other component's supplements. Not required: a parameter every formula writes as a symbol (w_k) has no phrase to list, and rewording a formula to manufacture one would run the vocabulary backwards. |
| Sensitivity | text | What moves when this parameter moves, and which agencies feel it most |
Relationships
The edges this class may enter into. Out is declared by the node itself; in is declared by the node at the other end.
| Relationship | To | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Valued in out | Fiscal Period | A fiscal period for which this parameter holds a specific value |
| Set by in | Legislation | The enactment that fixed this parameter's value or method |
| Read by in | Formula Component | The component that reads this parameter |
| Altered by in | Worked Scenario | A counterfactual that alters this parameter's value |