Special Education Category Multiples

Six numbers, written out in R.C. 3317.013 in the same order as the categories they price: 0.2435, 0.6179, 1.4845, 1.9812, 2.6830, 3.9554. Each multiplies the statewide average base cost per pupil, the district’s ADM in that category, and its state share percentage. verified the section, in crates/project/fixtures/revised-code.txt

The range is the policy. A Category 6 pupil generates sixteen times what a Category 1 pupil does, so which category a child is assigned to is not an administrative detail — it is most of the money. Statewide, Category 6 is 15% of the pupils and 48% of the aid; Category 2 is 65% of the pupils and 34%. verified crates/project

What they multiply is not obvious from the numbers. The multiplicand is the general statewide average base cost per pupil, $8,241.61, and not the career-technical figure 20% above it that career-technical multiples use. Two schedules, two multiplicands, and no published table says so; a reader comparing a special education weight against a career-technical one as though they sat on one scale is out by a fifth before any pupil is counted. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

This is the one that does not expire # ↑ Contents

Of the nine Revised Code sections that carry the Fair School Funding Plan’s parameters, this is the only one stated flatly. Three — R.C. 3317.011, 3317.017 and 3317.0217 — open with “This section shall apply only for fiscal years 2026 and 2027”. Five more hand their values back clause by clause: forty divisions across six sections read “For fiscal year 2028 and each fiscal year thereafter, an amount calculated in a manner determined by the general assembly”. R.C. 3317.013 does neither. verified counted over the committed extract

It is also the only one of the nine not amended by the current budget act. Its effective date is 6 April 2023 and its source is H.B. 554 of the 134th General Assembly; every other section here carries H.B. 96 of the 136th and 30 September 2025. verified the extract’s own date: and source: fields

Whether the durability is deliberate or an artifact of the section not having needed amendment is not established, and the two are not distinguishable from the text. open

The six ratios are the General Assembly’s of 2001, carried and never repriced # ↑ Contents

Every one of the plan’s six is 0.8379 times the corresponding weight in the Evidence-Based Model of 2009 — the same constant on all six, agreeing to a part in eight thousand. The plan did not re-derive this schedule; it rescaled it. In dollars that is a rise of 11.1% on the FY2017 amounts, identical for every category, which is what a single scalar means and a different act from repricing. verified crates/project

Those 2009 weights are in turn the FY2002 schedule with one change: category two roughly doubled, from 0.3691 to 0.7374, and the other five moved by less than 3 per cent. So the ratios Ohio prices disability with in FY2027 are the ratios the 124th General Assembly set, carried through four regimes and re-expressed twice. verified

And for eight years the schedule was dollars, not multiples # ↑ Contents

FY2014 through FY2021 each category carried a per-pupil amount instead of a weight: $1,503 to $24,407 in FY2014, rising 2 per cent a year to FY2017 and then frozen — H.B. 49 holds them at the FY2017 figures and the Bridge formula computed no categoricals at all. Those amounts are the 2009 weights times a single per-pupil figure, $5,171 in FY2014 and $5,431 in FY2017, so even the regime that paid in dollars was paying the same six ratios. verified

That is why “the multiples before FY2022” had no answer in the form it was asked: for eight years there were none. The ratios, which is what the question was after, never went away.

What moved was which children are in which category # ↑ Contents

H.B. 1 reassigned vision-impaired and orthopedically disabled pupils to categories with a higher weight, and LSC records it in a sentence rather than a number: in FY2002 category three read “hearing impaired, vision impaired, severe behavior handicapped” and category four “orthopedically handicapped, other health – major”; by FY2010 vision impaired had moved into category four, where it still is. No weight in any of the four schedules records that, and for a child it is the larger change of the two. verified

And the range has never been priced # ↑ Contents

Naming the categories settles what is being ordered; it does not say what any of it costs. No source this corpus holds prices a category, so whether a sixteen-fold funding range tracks a sixteen-fold difference in the cost of educating a child is unanswered. open

The history above narrows where an answer could be. Four regimes have applied these six ratios and none of them derived them: 2009 rescaled 2001 by category, 2013 converted them to dollars, 2021 converted them back to weights. Whatever costing sits under the schedule, if one does, is older than every source in this corpus. inference

(A)  0.2435  speech and language disability
(B)  0.6179  specific learning disabled, developmentally disabled or delayed, other health
             impairment-minor, preschool developmental delay
(C)  1.4845  hearing disabled, severe behavior disabled
(D)  1.9812  vision impaired, other health impairment-major
(E)  2.6830  orthopedically disabled, multiple disabilities
(F)  3.9554  autistic, traumatic brain injury, both visually and hearing impaired