State Foundation Aid

Its defining characteristic is the mirror image of the local property tax’s. Local revenue is voter-controlled and inflation-frozen; foundation aid is inflation-indifferent by design but entirely dependent on a biennial appropriation. inference A district cannot vote itself more foundation aid, and no enactment can guarantee it against the next General Assembly’s budget. The phase-in percentage is where that dependence becomes visible: the formula computes an amount, and the appropriation decides what fraction of it arrives.

Because foundation aid is a residual — computed cost less deemed local share — its distribution is more unequal than the underlying cost, and deliberately so. A district with low local capacity receives a larger share of its cost from the state. verified This means that a uniform cut to foundation aid is not uniform in effect: it falls hardest on the districts for whom it is the largest revenue share. inference

The formula’s line changed its number. It is 200501 Base Cost Funding through FY2005 and 200550 Foundation Funding from FY2008, retitled Foundation Funding - All Students at FY2022. The renumbering happened inside FY2006-07 — the one biennium whose greenbook has no line-item table — so the series can say the number changed and not in which act. verified the appropriation series Anything tracing 200550 backwards stops at FY2008 and should not conclude the formula did.

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

The appropriation behind it grew, and so did the department around it. Across FY2014 to FY2026 the appropriation line that carries the formula — ALI 200550, Foundation Funding — rose 45.6% in cash and 3.9% against CPI-U, while the Department of Education’s whole enacted appropriation rose 50.6% in cash and 7.5% in constant dollars. verified the appropriation series, lsc-appropriation-spreadsheet So the formula’s line grew in real terms and grew less than the budget around it.

That is a statement about appropriations rather than payments, and the two are different claims: an appropriation is a ceiling the General Assembly sets, and at least one line in this chapter prorates because it is a residual claimant. What a district actually received is the department’s own report. verified

The growth is concentrated and the line count is not. Of the 61 lines appropriated in both FY2014 and FY2026, the gains outweigh the losses by roughly $1.08 billion against $0.55 billion in FY2026 dollars — and the department went from 109 appropriation lines to 79 across the same window, with 48 disappearing and 18 appearing. Fewer lines carrying more money, in real terms, most of it in the two Foundation Funding items. verified the appropriation series

Whether the disappearances are abolition or consolidation this series cannot say, and the distinction is the whole meaning of them. A line ceasing to be listed may have been folded into another, and the two largest real gains in the window are the two Foundation Funding lines — which is exactly what consolidation into the formula would look like. Settling it needs the acts’ own language rather than their appropriation tables. open The disappearances are at least localized: 11 lines last appear in FY2015, 11 in FY2017, 12 in FY2019, 7 in FY2021, 4 in FY2023 and 6 in FY2025, so each cluster belongs to a nameable act. verified the appropriation series

The same question about districts, answered — and instructive about this one # ↑ Contents

Ohio’s districts also disappear, and the federal register of them files every departure as a closure “with no effect on another agency’s boundaries” — including the three that demonstrably transferred all their territory to a neighbor. What settled those was not the register and not any derivation from it, but a single sentence in a state officer’s audit of the receiving district, naming the resolution and its date. verified the audit reports

The parallel is exact and so is the lesson: the series that counts the things cannot say why one stopped, and the document that can say why is filed by whoever received what was left. For these appropriation lines that would mean the act that created the surviving line, rather than the table the vanished one drops out of. inference

One thing the composition does say plainly: the largest real-terms falls among surviving lines are federal pass-throughs — Title I, IDEA, Improving Teacher Quality, the child nutrition programs. That is a federal story arriving in a state budget document, not a decision of the General Assembly’s. verified the appropriation series

And one consolidation the table does show, because the line was renamed rather than dropped # ↑ Contents

The paragraphs above look for consolidation among the 48 lines that disappear, and conclude the table cannot settle it. The case that settles cleanly is in the other list. ALI 200604 is one of the 18 lines that appear across the window, and it is not a new program: it is Adult Basic Education through FY2011, the Student Wellness and Success funds H.B. 166 created for FY2020-21 outside the frozen foundation amount, and then — from FY2022 — Foundation Funding - All Students, at $500m to $600m a year. verified the appropriation series

So the Fair School Funding Plan pulled a channel that had been paid alongside the formula inside it, and the appropriation table records the fold-in exactly: same line number, new title, no disappearance anywhere. The distinction the open question turns on is abolition versus consolidation, and this is consolidation with the receipt attached. inference

It generalizes less far than it looks. What made it legible is that the General Assembly reused the line number, and a fold-in that retires the old number and enlarges a different one leaves the same table showing a disappearance and an unexplained increase — which is the shape of the 48 and the reason they stay open. The lesson is narrower and still useful: the title column is evidence and the line number alone is not, so a disappearance should be checked against the titles of the lines that grew before it is called an abolition. inference

This is also why FY2026 shows three lines titled Foundation Funding - All Students where FY2014 shows two titled Foundation Funding. The two-line reading above is over the 61 lines appropriated in both years, which 200604 is not. verified the appropriation series

A tenth of it was never kept, and ten districts bore most of that # ↑ Contents

Before the Fair School Funding Plan, a community school was paid by deducting its pupils’ funding from the district they lived in. The district was credited with the money in every account that records foundation aid, and never held it. The federal survey collects the payment separately, so the size of the pass-through can be read directly for the eleven years the column is sound — FY2010 to FY2021.

At its peak in FY2015 the deduct was 0.09783 of the state aid Ohio’s districts were credited with, and it never fell below a fourteenth of it in any year of that window. verified crates/dispersion

The incidence is the finding. 604 of 615 districts paid something, so a statement that the deduct was spread across the state is true of the count — and false of the money. The ten districts that bore most of it bore 0.62799 of the whole pool between them, and fifty bore 79.1%. verified crates/dispersion

They are Ohio’s big-city districts, and the share of their own money is large enough to change how their foundation payments should be read: Columbus paid on 0.35289 of every state dollar it was credited with across the window, with Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati and Dayton each between a fifth and 30%. verified crates/dispersion

The column cannot say which school a district’s payment went to, because the survey asks for one number per district — see Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (closed), where that limit is what keeps one question open. It also cannot establish that the deduct ended: FY2022 reads as a collapse to near zero in the year the mechanism changed, but an unreported value and a zero are the same character in this column, and FY2009 carries zeros that are demonstrably false. open