Appropriation Proration Factor

A rate is a policy choice about how much to pay per unit. A proration is an appropriation divided by an entitlement: a fact about a budget, arriving after the formula has run, expressing that the two did not agree. It moves when the legislature changes the line item or when the counts change, and for no other reason. verified

It is a condition on an appropriation, not a formula in statute # ↑ Contents

R.C. 3317.0213 does not mention proration; the redbook does — “If necessary, DEW must prorate the payments so as not to exceed the amount appropriated for each year.” That is why the search of the Revised Code for “proration” found it only in the calculator’s labels and not in the sections. verified

The published amount is not what the district is owed # ↑ Contents

That is the whole reason this needs a node. Under a proration the department’s figure is what was available, divided — and the shortfall cannot be recovered from it. A reader shown $1.2m has no way to know the formula computed $1.31m, and nothing in the payment report says so. verified

A proration of 1.0 is not an absence # ↑ Contents

General transportation carries a factor of 1.0, and that is a different statement from carrying no factor at all. It says the entitlement was computed, the appropriation was compared against it, and the two did not bind this year — a measurement that happened to come out at unity. A component with no factor was never put through that comparison. Dropping the 1.0 as “no proration” loses the only evidence the corpus holds that the line was tested. inference

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

Three are known, and only one publishes its appropriation # ↑ Contents

program                                    factor        appropriation stated?
special education transportation           0.91746       no
preschool special education                0.96854448    yes — $147,500,000, but that
                                                         cell is the FY2025 estimate
transportation, general                    1.0           no

The preschool sheet is what makes the class describable. It carries the appropriation limit in a cell beside the factor, which is the only place in the FY2027 calculator that shows a proration’s two halves at once. Without it the factor is an unexplained multiplier; with it the arithmetic is legible. verified

Why a node holding only the factor would be useless # ↑ Contents

At the stated 0.96854448 the preschool program totals $148,408,184 against the $147,500,000 printed beside it — $908,184 over that cell, though the cell turns out to be the FY2025 estimate rather than the FY2027 appropriation; see below. A third cell on the same sheet states $146,708,228.07, matching neither. The likeliest reading is a factor calibrated against an earlier ADM vintage and never recalibrated after the counts were refreshed. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs

The FY2027 calculator is a projection published before the fiscal year, so a recalibration before payment is expected and this may never reach a district. But a parameter that has silently stopped satisfying its own constraint is exactly what a three-property node catches and a one-property node cannot, and that is the argument for the class. inference

No proration applies inside [H] Foundation Funding, and the workbook says so # ↑ Contents

The distinction is not lexical. A phase-in is a policy ramp written into the enactment: the Fair School Funding Plan was legislated to reach its computed amount over six years, and FY2027 is the terminal year at 100%. A proration is a budget falling short of a formula that has already run. One is a plan; the other is an outcome. Ohio prorates what it pays around schooling and phases in what it computes for it.

And the department says so itself, in two notes on its own sheets:

Note: Special Education Transportation is being prorated in this simulation.

Note: Transportation and Preschool Special Education may be subject to proration in actual FY27 payments.

verified The second is what settles the entry below: the department names transportation’s general factor as a live dial, not a dormant one.

Transportation’s general factor is one this year. The cell exists, the multiplication happens, and the dial has evidently been turned before or it would not be there. Recorded as a live parameter at its neutral value, on the same grounds as the funded-but-zero program lines this corpus already holds — supplemental targeted assistance and gifted professional development. inference

Which budget line governs, and why it explains the anomaly # ↑ Contents

transportation                    GRF ALI 200502  Pupil Transportation
special education transportation  GRF ALI 200502  (the same line)
preschool special education       GRF ALI 200540  Special Education Enhancements

AND PRESCHOOL SPECIAL EDUCATION IS THE REMAINDER OF ITS LINE ITEM. ALI 200540 funds five earmarked purposes first — special education at DD boards and institutions, parent mentoring, school psychology interns, vocational rehabilitation, secondary transition — and preschool special education takes what is left:

ALI 200540 earmark                                FY2025 est.   FY2026 intro   FY2027 intro
Special education at DD boards and institutions   $38,500,000    $33,945,594    $33,945,594
Parent mentoring programs                          $1,350,000     $1,350,000     $1,350,000
School psychology interns                          $3,000,000     $3,000,000     $3,000,000
Vocational rehabilitation services                 $6,500,000             $0             $0
Secondary transition services                      $2,000,000     $1,000,000     $1,000,000
Remainder — preschool special education          $147,500,000   $153,976,832   $153,976,832

A residual claimant is the thing that absorbs a shortfall by construction. That is why this program prorates and the others mostly do not, and nothing on the department’s sheet says it — the sheet shows a factor and a limit. verified lsc-budget, as introduced

The limit the calculator prints is last year’s # ↑ Contents

The $147,500,000 stated beside the 0.96854448 factor is the FY2025 estimate. FY2026 and FY2027 are both $153,976,832. So the factor and the limit beside it are carried over together from the prior biennium, and on the year being modeled the program at $148,408,184 is $5.6m under its appropriation rather than $908,184 over it — meaning no proration would arise at all.

The enacted appropriation held, and the table above is the enacted one # ↑ Contents

LSC’s greenbook is the redbook as enacted — same structure, same earmark table, columns headed Appropriation where the redbook’s are headed Introduced. It existed at a sibling URL to the redbook the whole time and went unwired for four phases while this corpus quoted the proposal. Every earmark held from introduction to enactment, to the dollar, and the remainder with them: $153,976,832. verified crates/project/fixtures/dew-greenbook.txt

ALI 200540 earmark                                FY2025 actual   FY2026 approp   FY2027 approp
Special education at DD boards and institutions     $36,258,454     $33,945,594     $33,945,594
Parent mentoring programs                            $1,190,610      $1,350,000      $1,350,000
School psychology interns                            $2,843,444      $3,000,000      $3,000,000
Vocational rehabilitation services                   $6,500,000              $0              $0
Secondary transition services                          $867,533      $1,000,000      $1,000,000
Remainder — preschool special education            $147,499,999    $153,976,832    $153,976,832
GRF ALI 200540 total                               $195,160,040    $193,272,426    $193,272,426

The Catalog of Budget Line Items confirms the line independently, from a different publication parsed by a different extractor: its 2025 edition gives ALI 200540 an enacted $193,272,426 for FY2026 and FY2027 and an actual $195,160,040 for FY2025 — the greenbook’s totals exactly. verified

So the proration does not arise, and the reason is a stale cell # ↑ Contents

The calculator’s stated limit of $147,500,000 is the FY2025 figure — the estimate, against which the actual came in at $147,499,999, a dollar short. Against the FY2027 appropriation the program at $148,408,184 is $5,568,648 under rather than $908,184 over. The node’s reading was right and is now sourced from the enacted act’s analysis rather than inferred from the proposal. verified

The denominator is bigger than the model # ↑ Contents

A proration factor is a quotient, and LSC writes the formula out — “Adjustment percentage = (Earmarked appropriation)/(Total statewide allocation)”. For FY2027 special education transportation the numerator is $194,820,866, an earmark inside GRF ALI 200502. Divide it by the 0.91745974 the workbook states and the allocation comes to $212,348,136. The 611 districts in that same workbook account for $199,061,039 of it.

The $13,287,098 left over — 6.26% of the whole — is not a rounding, and the greenbook names who it belongs to in the paragraph describing the earmark:

County DD boards and ESCs are funded through a nearly identical special education transportation formula, except that the state share percentage for these entities is a uniform amount equal to the minimums for traditional districts.

So a proration factor is the one number in this model that measures a population the model does not contain. A reader who divided the earmark by the districts it can see would get 0.9787 — six points high, with nothing on the sheet to say so. verified crates/project

FY2026 bounds the same quantity from the other side. Its factor is 1.0, so the whole statewide allocation fitted inside a $176,897,678 earmark while the districts took $165,119,518 of it: everything outside the model came to at most $11,778,160 that year, against the $13.3m FY2027 measures. That is what the year which does not prorate was worth extracting for. verified crates/project

It prorates because the floor stepped, not because the line was cut # ↑ Contents

The earmark rose 10.13% between the two years. The district allocation rose 20.56%, and the three things that moved do not move together:

the FY2026 allocation                          $165,119,518
+ the prior year's reported costs               +$26,808,907
+ state share percentages, which fell            -$4,207,654
+ the floor under them, 45.83% to 50%           +$11,340,268
= the FY2027 allocation                        $199,061,039

Reported costs added $26,808,907; falling state shares took $4,207,654 back off; and the statutory floor, which H.B. 96 steps by a twenty-fourth a year, added $11,340,268 on its own. Hold that floor where it was and the districts sit $7,100,095 inside the earmark instead of $4,240,173 outside it. The proration is the price of a scheduled increase in the state’s share of a cost, arriving in a year the line had already been raised for. verified crates/project

The floor now pays 411 of the 563 districts that report a cost, against 332 a year earlier — so it is not only higher, it reaches further. verified crates/project

A factor of 1.0 is a measurement, and this is what it measured # ↑ Contents

General transportation is paid from what is left of ALI 200502 after its earmarks, which the greenbook publishes as a row of its own: $703,348,806 in FY2026 and $762,819,905 in FY2027. The districts’ transportation funding against those is $697,754,331 and $726,059,580.

So the FY2026 factor of 1.0 held by $5,594,475 — eight tenths of one per cent of the line — and the FY2027 one by $36,760,325. The general formula came within a rounding of prorating in the year before the special education earmark did, out of the same appropriation. verified crates/project

The earmark that binds is the one the legislature did not touch # ↑ Contents

GRF ALI 200502 earmark                  FY2025 actual   FY2026 approp   FY2027 approp
Bus driver training                          $970,720      $1,088,930      $1,088,930
Special education transportation         $138,038,038    $176,897,678    $194,820,866
Rural Transportation Grant Program                 $0        $450,000        $450,000
Montgomery County Transportation Pilot             $0        $250,000        $250,000
ALI 200502 earmark total                 $139,008,758    $178,686,608    $196,609,796

Special education transportation is the one row identical in the redbook and the greenbook: the executive proposed these two figures and the act carries them unchanged. Everything around it moved — bus driver training lost $3.9m of its FY2027 proposal, two earmarks were added, and the unearmarked remainder was raised in both years. The conference committee was in this line item and did not open the half of it that prorates. verified crates/project

The cap on the formula’s own self-correction, measured # ↑ Contents

R.C. 3317.0212 reimburses special education transportation on reported cost at the district’s state share, floored. So the section corrects for a cost shock by construction: a district that spends more earns more the following year. The earmark inside GRF ALI 200502 is what decides how much of that it receives, and in FY2027 it binds.

Re-prorating the year against a rise in reported cost, with the appropriation held where the act put it: verified crates/project

rise in reported cost	factor	districts are paid	earned and withheld
0% (as published)	0.917460	$182,630,489	$16,430,550
5%	0.876382	$183,176,287	$25,837,804
10%	0.838826	$183,675,305	$35,291,838
20%	0.772607	$184,555,160	$54,318,086

A fifth more reported cost raises what districts are actually paid by $1,924,671 — 1.05%. Payments are allocation × appropriation ÷ (allocation + remainder), which climbs toward the appropriation and never reaches it, so the earned entitlement and the received payment come apart as fast as costs rise. Doubling every district’s reported cost would raise the statewide payment 3.2%. verified

That is the precise sense in which an appropriation caps a statutory formula. Divisions (C) and (D) promise reimbursement at the state share; the line item decides what fraction of the promise is kept; and a reader of either document alone cannot see the other, because the factor appears in neither. inference

It takes an 8.47% rise to carry the factor to 0.85 and 15.66% to reach 0.80. FY2026, which did not prorate, bounds rather than measures the same quantity — its remainder cannot have exceeded $11.78m where FY2027’s is $13.29m — so its curve is the deepest proration consistent with what is known rather than a measurement. verified

This is deliberately not a fuel forecast. Neither rate in R.C. 3317.0212 is a price: both are trimmed means of what districts reported spending the prior year, so a diesel shock reaches the payment only through districts’ own books and only a year later. The size of that pass-through is not identified by anything this repository can reach — crates/dispersion fits eleven specifications and every one spans zero, and the blocker is the absence of a mile column in the F-33 rather than sample size. So the table above is parameterized by cost and a reader who holds a fuel share can compose the two. verified

    special education transportation   an earmark inside GRF ALI 200502
    transportation, general            what is left of GRF ALI 200502 after its earmarks
    preschool special education        what is left of GRF ALI 200540 after its five