Guarantee Funding Base

The anchor under the temporary transitional aid guarantee. Where the formula computes less than [H2] for a district, the state pays [H2] instead. verified

It does two jobs # ↑ Contents

[H2] is also the origin the phase-in interpolates from. R.C. 3317.022 pays funding base + [(computed - funding base) x phase-in %], so this column sets what a district receives at a 0% phase-in as much as it sets the floor beneath it. verified The second base beside it, [H3], exists for the same reason: the statute dials DPIA separately and needs the DPIA slice to interpolate from. R.C. 3317.02(N)(2) anchors that slice to the district’s FY2019 DPIA payment, and (N)(1)(b)(i) subtracts the same figure from the general slice, so the two partition [H2] exactly.

That shared column is why lowering the phase-in cannot push a district through the guarantee: both mechanisms converge on the same FY2020 number.

It is published per district on the payment report’s Detail_SFPR sheet and carries no year label there. It is the FY2020 level, the year Ohio froze funding under the Bridge formula. verified the department’s FY2026 payment report line-by-line explanation states the guarantee “ensures that districts do not receive less in FY 2026 than what they received in FY 2020”

It is not [L1] FY21 Funding Base # ↑ Contents

The same sheet carries a second base, explicitly labeled, generally larger, and belonging to the formula transition supplement rather than to this. The two differ for more than half of districts and [L1] is smaller for seven, so neither is derivable from the other. verified

It has never been re-based # ↑ Contents

Not once since FY2022, across three biennial budgets. verified The consequence is the fact the guarantee node is built around: in FY2027, at 100% phase-in, nearly half of Ohio’s districts are funded at a level set by a placeholder formula in a year that formula was not even run — seven years earlier. The last clause is now literal rather than rhetorical, and the span is eight years: FY2020 was a freeze of FY2019, so the distribution being held was computed in FY2019. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

It is published for every district, not only the guaranteed ones # ↑ Contents

All 609 rows carry a figure and 608 of them carry a positive one, including 314 of the 315 districts the guarantee does not pay. verified Being held at the floor is not what reveals it; the department states it either way.

One district’s is negative: Richmond Heights Local at -$40,179.23, because R.C. 3317.02(N)(1)(b) subtracts FY2020 community school, STEM and scholarship deductions from FY2020 funding and for this district they exceeded the funding. verified It is the only place the floor has to be clamped at zero, and the only district whose base says the state’s FY2020 obligation to it was less than nothing.

What the FY2020 figure was itself composed of, which this repository had to go and read # ↑ Contents

FY2019, unchanged. H.B. 166 ran no formula for FY2020 or FY2021: every traditional district and joint vocational district received exactly its FY2019 allocation, with the formula amount held at $6,020 and the state share index held at FY2019. So [H2] is not the output of a computation performed in FY2020 — it is H.B. 49’s FY2019 run, preserved by a statute that declined to recompute. verified the LSC greenbook, committed at crates/project/fixtures/lsc-education-greenbooks.txt

And it reaches further back than that. Each act of the decade re-anchored its guarantee on the year before its biennium — FY2013, then FY2015, then FY2017 — and each base explicitly included the previous biennium’s transitional aid term, so a district guaranteed throughout carries its earliest anchor forward. The chain is set out in Bridge Formula.

It bottoms out at FY2011. H.B. 153 defines Bridge formula funding as each district’s FY2011 state aid per pupil, adjusted by its charge-off valuation against the statewide median and applied to current-year pupils, with a floor at FY2011 total aid net of federal stimulus. And FY2011 state aid was computed under the Evidence-Based Model, which the same act repealed — including the charge-off valuation the index divides by, which is the EBM’s own adequacy-share valuation. verified the greenbook

So [H2] is the sixth link of a chain sixteen years long whose first term was produced by a formula that has not existed since 2011. What is not established is how much of any particular district’s [H2] is still that FY2011 figure rather than a later re-anchoring on a formula run it cleared — the chain gives the worst case, not the distribution. open

It is observable only where it binds # ↑ Contents

A district’s [H2] is disclosed by the guarantee paying out against it. For the 315 districts the formula pays, [H2] sits below their current amount and no committed source carries it — so it cannot be recovered, and any simulated cut lets those districts fall past a floor that would really catch them. verified the model’s behavior open the size of the real-world correction

The base is not what districts received in FY2020 # ↑ Contents

The description above states the anchor as “the FY2020 level” on the department’s own gloss — the guarantee “ensures that districts do not receive less in FY 2026 than what they received in FY 2020”. That sentence is a fair account of what the guarantee does. It is not what the statute says the base is.

R.C. 3317.02(N)(1)(a)(i) anchors the general funding base to the FY2020 amount under H.B. 166’s Section 265.220(A)(1) — “prior to any funding reductions authorized by Executive Order 2020-19D, ‘Implementing Additional Spending Controls to Balance the State Budget’ issued on May 7, 2020”. verified crates/project The same exclusion, naming the same order, sits in R.C. 3317.019(A)(2) for the transportation base.

So [H2] is a counterfactual FY2020: what a district would have been paid had the pandemic mid-year reduction not happened. The General Assembly wrote an executive order into a definition in order to reach past it, which is a deliberate act and not boilerplate. inference

The size of what it reaches past. Foundation funding came in $254,956,620 below its enacted FY2020 appropriation — 3.67 per cent. verified Across FY2014 to FY2025 every year outside the two pandemic ones lands within a single percentage point of its appropriation, from −0.39% to +0.92%; the only comparable shortfalls anywhere in the series are FY2008 and FY2009. FY2021 misses too, by 1.06%, and that is a different event — its appropriation had already been cut $168m before the year began, so the reduction was enacted rather than ordered, and the statute does not reach past it. verified

That figure is the appropriation and not the base, so it is the size of the event the definition excludes rather than the size of the exclusion. The per-district exclusion is in nothing this repository holds. What the appropriation establishes is that the event was real and large enough to be worth excluding, which is the part a reader of [H2] needs to know: the number half of Ohio is funded at is larger than the number Ohio paid. inference

Its own shape in district size, which is why the guarantee stops climbing # ↑ Contents

[H2] per FY2020 pupil declines monotonically across the six ADM sextiles — $6,478, $5,877, $4,960, $4,589, $3,812, $3,176, the smallest band at 2.04 times the largest. verified crates/project Measured against current-year pupils instead, which needs no enrollment index at all, the shape is the same: $7,257 to $3,334, a ratio of 2.18. verified crates/project

That gradient is a property of the Bridge formula and of the Evidence-Based Model run beneath it, not of the plan the anchor is compared against — and it is the whole of what pulls the guarantee rate back down above the third sextile, where the plan’s two size-dependent terms have stopped binding. Because it is monotone it cannot produce the peak at the third sextile, which is how it was separated from the terms that do. inference

It is a nominal quantity # ↑ Contents

Written in dollars with no escalator, so its real value falls every year by construction. Across FY2020-FY2025 prices rose 25.1%. A parameter that is never changed is still being changed, in the only terms that matter to a district’s payroll. verified