Classroom Facilities Assistance Program

This program is the clearest direct response to DeRolph in Ohio’s funding structure. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s findings included extended description of school building conditions, and the state’s construction program was substantially expanded in the years following. verified It is also the reason program needs a funds edge and not only diverts-from: this is money moving toward districts, and the capital channel is invisible in any operating per-pupil figure.

The local share requirement is where the program interacts with everything else in this corpus. A district receiving a high state share still must raise its own portion, typically through a bond issue requiring voter approval — so a program designed to help property-poor districts requires those districts to pass a levy in a tax environment shaped by H.B. 920. inference How often that requirement has delayed or blocked projects is not established here. open

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

The money, from the side that receives it # ↑ Contents

$12.65 billion of state capital money reached Ohio’s school districts between FY2009 and FY2024, against $33.28 billion those districts spent on buildings from every source — so the state paid 38.0% of Ohio’s school construction bill across sixteen years. verified crates/dispersion

This corpus recorded the amount as unpopulated and gave a reason: the appropriation sits in the capital act, which no connector retrieves. That is true of the paying side and it is not true of the receiving side. The Census F-33 counts the money as it arrives at a district, and it has done so for every year of the panel under C35 — the item the survey calls nonspecified, defined as state revenue “that pertain[s] to more than one of the above categories, but for which reporting units could not provide distinct amounts by category”. verified

Because that is a catch-all rather than a facilities line, the reading rests on measurement rather than on a label. Four things hold and nothing else in the survey’s state block does any of them. The column correlates with capital outlay per pupil in every one of the fifteen years the panel holds, never below 0.4733; general formula assistance, the control, never reaches 0.1122 against the same measure and is negative in ten of the fifteen. Only 4% of the money lands where a district spent under $200 per pupil on capital. 81.8% of districts whose largest receipt year is worth reading were building that year on their own median — a within-district test, so neither size nor wealth can produce it. And the state’s share behaves the way the program says it does, below. The last two years come from the Bureau’s own file rather than NCES’s and behave like the other thirteen, so this is not one publisher’s recoding. verified

The wealth rule, measured rather than described # ↑ Contents

The share of a district’s capital spending the state covered falls monotonically with the district’s assessed value per pupil: 57.56% for the poorest fifth of districts and 18.95% for the wealthiest, three times as much of the bill, at a correlation of −0.4405 against log wealth per pupil. This corpus already stated the rule — “poorer districts receive a higher percentage” — marked verified against a description of the statute. It is now verified against the payments. verified

Two cautions on that share. It is the state’s share of capital outlay, not of assessed project cost, so it counts locally funded work outside any approved project and is the lower of the two numbers; the gradient is the finding and the level is a bound. And it is computed by summing a district’s whole run before dividing, because a project’s state and local money arrive in different years — averaging annual ratios instead gives 0.664 of the same gradient, which is how a real rule can be made to look like a weak tendency. verified

Two things the series says that the program’s description does not # ↑ Contents

Every one of the 606 districts received some of it, the smallest fifteen-year total being $730,000. The program is described here and elsewhere as a queue ordered by poverty, and it is — what separates a poor district from a wealthy one is not whether the state paid but how much of the bill it took. verified

And it was already shrinking when the corpus’s longest series opens. Districts received $1.357 billion in FY2009 and $492.5 million in FY2013, a fall of nearly two thirds in four years, and FY2009 remains the largest year the panel holds — in nominal dollars, sixteen years later. The clearest structural response to DeRolph is the one channel of Ohio school funding this corpus had no series for, and it has been contracting for the whole period the corpus can see. verified

What the survey cannot say is which project a district-year’s money belongs to, or what share of an approved project’s assessed cost the state set. Those are in the Commission’s own records and in the capital appropriations act, and neither is retrieved here. open