Lottery Profits Education Fund

The answer, in the Legislative Service Commission’s own words: “Generally, the majority of lottery profits in each year are combined with the GRF to provide foundation funding to schools.” verified LSC redbook Lottery profits are not added to foundation aid. They are one of the funds foundation aid is paid from.

It is visible in the appropriation table. Five line items collectively support state foundation aid and scholarship payments, and one of them is the lottery — FY2026 as enacted, each line net of its own specific earmarks, which is the basis on which the Legislative Service Commission strikes the total: verified dew-greenbook.txt

GRF   ALI 200550  Foundation Funding — All Students      $8,318,925,549
GRF   ALI 200502  Pupil Transportation                      $703,348,806
5VS0  ALI 200604  Foundation Funding — All Students         $600,000,000
5YO0  ALI 200491  Public and Nonpublic Education Support    $171,200,000
7017  ALI 200612  Foundation Funding — All Students       $1,436,583,202
                                     Total foundation aid $11,230,057,557

Fund 7017 is the Lottery Profits Education Fund. Its $1.44 billion is inside the $11.23 billion FY2026 foundation aid total, not beside it. A district’s foundation payment does not rise because the lottery had a good year; the General Assembly appropriates a total and the lottery is one of the buckets it comes out of. FY2027 runs the same way, at $1,398,174,884 of $11,525,218,197. verified

Which is exactly what the constitutional text permits. Article XV Section 6(A) requires the entire net proceeds to be “used solely for the support of elementary, secondary, vocational, and special education programs as determined in appropriations made by the General Assembly.” verified The earmark binds the purpose and leaves the level to the appropriation. A constitutional guarantee that money be spent on schools is not a guarantee that schools receive more money, and this is the clearest instance of the distinction in Ohio school finance.

History. Voters created the lottery by constitutional amendment in 1973. The education earmark is a separate 1987 amendment, fourteen years later — so the lottery existed for over a decade before its profits were constitutionally tied to schools, and the tie was added because the money was going elsewhere. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

The share, over thirty-eight years. Lottery profits peaked at 16.9% of combined GRF and Lottery Profits Education Fund K-12 spending in FY1991, fell to a record low of 7.6% in FY2007, held around 8-9%, then rose with video lottery terminals at the racinos from FY2014 to 12.4% in FY2021. verified Over FY1988 to FY2025, total GRF-plus-lottery spending on primary and secondary education grew $9.48 billion, of which the lottery supplied $1.12 billion — 11.8% of the growth. verified LSC projects 12.5% in FY2026 and 12.1% in FY2027, but that projection is the executive recommendation — it rests on lottery K-12 spending of $1.65 billion in FY2026, and the enacted foundation aid line alone came in $97.6 million above what was proposed. The two projected points are a proposal and the thirty-eight before them are actuals, and no enacted restatement of the series exists: LSC publishes this chart in the redbook and drops it from the greenbook. open

Read that series against the belief the earmark was sold on and the gap is the finding: the lottery’s share of school funding was highest thirty-five years ago and has never returned to it. What raised it after 2014 was not the lottery growing into its promise but a different form of gambling being routed through the same fund.

The substitution is legible in the passage from proposal to act # ↑ Contents

Between the redbook table and the greenbook table — the same five lines, the same year, the bill as introduced against the bill as enacted — Fund 7017 rose $97,638,202 while the other four lines together fell $15,575,916, so the foundation aid total grew by $82,062,286, which is less than the lottery line alone moved. verified crates/project/fixtures/dew-redbook.txt against dew-greenbook.txt

That is the mechanism caught in a single table across a single bill. It does not show intent — the General Assembly was setting a total, and the four GRF and non-lottery lines move for their own reasons — but it is the tightest instance available of the thing the substitution critique describes: more lottery money in, and not the whole of it staying in. inference

What this does not establish. Whether foundation aid would be lower in a world with no lottery — the counterfactual the substitution critique actually asserts. LSC’s “combined with the GRF” describes the mechanism and not the legislature’s intent, and no appropriation record can show what a different General Assembly would have voted. open What is established is that the mechanism offers no protection against substitution, which is the weaker and sufficient claim.