Casino Tax — County Student Fund

The channel. A 33% tax on gross casino revenue from the four casinos authorized in 2009 (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and Franklin County). verified R.C. 5753.02 34% of that tax goes to the gross casino revenue county student fund, transferred quarterly, and is distributed among all eighty-eight counties in proportion to their public school district student populations — then within each county among the districts, in proportion to each district’s students resident in that county. verified Ohio Constitution Article XV Section 6(C)(3)(b); R.C. 5753.03(D)(2) Districts are paid twice a year and “shall determine how [their] distributions are appropriated, but all distributions shall only be used to support primary and secondary education.” verified Art. XV §6(C)(3)(b)

A fifth pupil denominator, and the only one that double-counts on purpose # ↑ Contents

R.C. 5753.11 defines “student population” as students residing in a county enrolled in a public school district in grades K-12, plus preschool children with disabilities, counted on the Friday of the first full school week in October for the January distribution and in May for the August one. verified That is not enrolled ADM, not formula ADM, not the report card’s unweighted count, and not the F-33’s fall membership — the four Ohio pupil counts that already have to be kept apart. This is a fifth.

Two properties make it stranger than a fifth count would otherwise be:

• “Public school district” here includes community schools, STEM schools, JVSDs and college-preparatory boarding schools. verified R.C. 5753.11(A)(1) Community schools receive this money directly, which is the opposite of how they were funded before the Fair School Funding Plan, when their students were deducted from a resident district. And JVSDs are included, where IDEA Part B excludes them entirely — two federal-and-state channels drawing the boundary of “district” in opposite places.
• A student dual-enrolled in a JVSD and another district is counted in both. verified R.C. 5753.11(B) Where the district of enrollment cannot be determined in time, the count is split equally between the reporting districts. The denominator is deliberately not a partition of Ohio’s students, so a per-pupil figure from it is not comparable to one from any other source here.

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

Why it is invisible in every other figure here # ↑ Contents

The distribution runs from the Tax Commissioner through county funds to districts. It is not an appropriation to the Department of Education and Workforce, so it is absent from the department’s budget, absent from the School Finance Payment Report, and absent from every fixture built from either. The only casino money in the LSC redbook is the casino operator settlement fund — a different pot entirely, which supported preschool slots through an interagency transfer from FY2017 to FY2023. verified A reader searching the department’s budget for casino money finds that and concludes, wrongly, that they have found the channel.

The substitution question, which is what the ontology actually wanted this node for. The genesis decision proposals named “casino revenue offsets” as an example of one stream substituting for another — that is why substitutes-for exists as an edge at all. No offset is visible in what this corpus holds. None of the fifteen R.C. 3317 sections committed to revised-code.txt mentions the casino distribution, and neither the constitution nor R.C. 5753 provides for reducing state aid by the amount a district receives. verified as far as those sections go

That is not the same as establishing that the money is additive. The substitution critique of earmarked gambling revenue is about the appropriation, not the statute: whether the General Assembly set foundation aid lower than it otherwise would have because this channel exists is a counterfactual about budget-making that no section of law will answer.

The appropriation history does not settle it, and that is the finding # ↑ Contents

In constant FY2025 dollars the foundation funding appropriation moves by a median of $236 million a year, mean $349 million, across a range from $11 million to $1.51 billion. A substitution smaller than that ordinary movement is arithmetically inside it — not hard to see, but indistinguishable from the year’s other reasons for moving. And nothing happens at the onset: FY2012 moves +$183 million and FY2013 −$101 million — the eleventh and seventh smallest of the 24 annual movements in the series. verified the appropriation series and the deflator, pinned in crates/project/tests/what_the_series_cannot_settle.rs

The lottery is different because it has a line, not because it is bigger # ↑ Contents

This is the thing the two channels together establish, and neither shows alone. The lottery’s substitution was visible in a $97.6 million movement — smaller than the median annual variation in the total — because Fund 7017 is itemized inside the appropriation table, so the figure can be read rather than inferred from a total. Casino money never enters the table at all, so the only available test is inference from the total, and the total’s ordinary noise is more than twice the size of the movement that was legible in the lottery’s case.

Substitution is detectable when an earmark has an appropriation line and undetectable when it does not, and the threshold has almost nothing to do with how much money is involved. inference

The channel is now measured, and it is arithmetically invisible # ↑ Contents

The size the paragraph above said would settle whether the total could register the money at all is retrieved: eighteen half-yearly per-district distributions, August 2015 through January 2024, nine complete state fiscal years. verified tax-casino, and the panel in casino-district-distributions.csv

Fiscal year	Distributed
FY2016	$90.83m
FY2017	$89.36m
FY2018	$92.03m
FY2019	$93.93m
FY2020	$95.99m
FY2021	$73.87m
FY2022	$109.39m
FY2023	$113.11m
FY2024	$114.18m

In its largest year the whole channel is under half the $236 million median annual movement in foundation aid. A substitution can be at most the whole of it, so no arrangement of this money produces a movement the appropriation series could distinguish — which converts the null result above from “we could not see it” into “it is not visible at this size, and a longer series will not change that.” verified crates/project/tests/what_the_series_cannot_settle.rs

And the comparison with the lottery is now between two measured quantities. The lottery’s substitution was legible in a movement of $97.6 million. This channel is larger than that in FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024 and is still invisible. The two differ in whether the money has an appropriation line, and in nothing else that matters to detection. verified

FY2021 is the pandemic closure and it arrives as one half-year. January-June 2020 came to $24.59 million against a floor of $42.86 million across the other seventeen half-years, the casinos having been closed by order from mid-March; the next half-year was back to $49.28 million. It is visible here only because the panel’s grain is the payment rather than the year. verified

What is still open, and it is narrower. The years the channel began. The per-district series starts in FY2016 because the distributions before August 2015 were published as PDFs, so FY2012 and FY2013 — where an offset at the onset would have to appear — are still argued from magnitude rather than measured. open And the counterfactual itself is untouched by any of this: whether the General Assembly set a foundation aid target lower because the channel exists is a question about budget-making, and it needs committee testimony, fiscal notes or the analyses behind a target, not another series of budgets. open

And the sharper case is three paragraphs above, in the same constitutional section. Article XV Section 6(A) earmarks the state lottery’s net proceeds for education “as determined in appropriations made by the General Assembly” — and for the lottery the substitution question has a documented answer: LSC states that profits are combined with the GRF to pay foundation aid, and Fund 7017 appears inside the foundation aid appropriation table at $1.44 billion of an $11.23 billion total in FY2026. verified the greenbook, crates/project/fixtures/dew-greenbook.txt

That is evidence about the lottery and not about this channel, and the difference is the mechanism. Lottery profits are appropriated by the General Assembly into foundation aid, which is what makes the substitution visible in a budget table. Casino money never passes through an appropriation to the department at all — it goes from the Tax Commissioner to county funds to districts. There is no table in which it could be shown netting against anything, which means the substitution question here is harder to answer rather than answered. inference What the lottery establishes is that Ohio’s other constitutional education earmark works this way, which raises the prior without settling it. open