Foundation Funding Bases — the two bases the phase-in runs from

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Office of Budget and School Funding. One workbook, Foundation-Funding-Bases-6-16-2022.xlsx. Type. Primary source — the department’s own published bases, with the methodology it used to build them stated on the face of the file. Location. education.ohio.gov, Finance and Funding → School Payment Reports → State Funding for Schools → Traditional School Districts. Openly served, no credentials, 499,238 bytes. The current department page no longer links it. The file is still served at its address. A digest is pinned in source-digests.txt because an unlinked file is one nobody will announce a revision of.

What makes it load-bearing is the Introduction sheet, not the numbers. The Fair School Funding Plan phases in against two bases — [H2], the FY2020 base state funding the temporary transitional aid guarantee [I] compares against, and [L1], the FY2021 funding base [K] Formula Transition Supplement holds a district at. Statute names both and defines neither arithmetically. This sheet does, line by line, in the department’s words:

• [H2] is the FY2020 May #1 formula payment (line A), less FY2019 final capped transportation, less the FY2020 community and STEM school deduction, less the FY2020 total scholarship transfer, plus FY2020 net open enrollment for K-12 students, plus the FY2021 net excess cost adjustment — that last term removed for FY2023 by H.B. 583.
• [L1] is the FY2021 final #2 formula payment (line A) with the executive budget reductions restored, plus FY2021 net open enrollment, plus FY2022 net excess cost, less the FY2021 community and STEM school deduction, less the FY2021 total scholarship transfer, plus FY2021 student wellness and success, plus the FY2021 enrollment growth supplement.

Three sentences on that sheet answer questions the acts leave silent.

Why FY2019 figures stand in for FY2020 ones: “References to FY19 funding are used because FY20 state foundation funding for traditional districts was flat to FY19 funding for the categories described below.” That is the license for reading a 2019 payment report as the base of a 2022 formula.

Why [L1] is larger than [H2] by a district’s transportation: “transportation funding is not subject to the phase-in and is therefore removed from the base state funding calculation.” The gap is a subtraction one definition makes and the other does not — the phase-in’s own scope, not an accident of which components were capped.

Where the guarantee went: “any eliminated funding elements from the previous formula (such as K-3 literacy) or elements not specifically mentioned (such as the guarantee or EdChoice scholarship deductions) default to the funding base used for line A Base Cost.” The department says in its own voice that the retired guarantee is inside the base and unallocated. That is the fact Phasing Out the Temporary Transitional Aid Guarantee needed to price the third reading of H.B. 110 Section 265.225, and no statute states it.

What it contains. Six worksheets and one named range: Introduction, Core Foundation Funding (Ha), Components (Aa-Ga) - Jan FY22, Components (Aa-Ga) - Feb FY22, Components (Aa-Ha) FY23, and FY21 Funding Base. The last is 11 columns by 618 rows — the seven terms of [L1], their sum, and IRN, district and county — carrying 611 districts in rows 7 through 617, sorted by district name. docProps credits Shams, Daria, dates creation to 2022-01-12 and last modification to 2022-06-16, and names Sanders, Elena as the last editor; the filename’s own date is the modification. No sheet is protected.

The seven terms of [L1] sum to FY21 FUNDING BASE to the cent on all 611 rows, and the first term equals the same district’s TOTAL FOUNDATION FUNDING in the FY2019 final payment report on 609 of them — see FY2019 Final Traditional District Foundation Payment Report for the two exceptions and the one dissolution. A 611-row extract is committed at crates/project/fixtures/fy21-funding-base.csv, built by connect::fixtures::transition_base, which refuses a file that stops reproducing either identity.

Caveats #

The file holds three vintages of the same base, and they are not interchangeable. Components (Aa-Ga) - Jan FY22 was superseded in February, because the January allocation produced negative component bases wherever FY2020’s negative adjustments exceeded FY2019’s amounts; the department set those to zero and moved the difference into line A Base Cost. Components (Aa-Ha) FY23 differs again, because H.B. 583 struck the excess-cost adjustments from the FY2020 base for FY2023 only. Reading the wrong sheet for a year is not a rounding difference.

[L1]’s FY22 NET EXCESS COST term is zero on every row, and that is the file’s own admission, not a nil. The Introduction sheet says “The FY22 excess cost is not yet available” — the workbook was last touched in June 2022. The term exists in the definition and carries no value here.

The component allocation is the department’s, not the law’s. “While the law directs the total (line H) funding base, the Department allocated this total amount to each line.” Line H is statutory; lines A through G are a methodology, and the department published its reasoning because the funding streams it split the total into are separately restricted.

One district on the base sheet has no name. IRN 048959 — Middle Bass Local, an Ottawa County island district — appears as #N/A in both the name and county columns, with zeros across all seven terms. The row is real and sums correctly; the lookup that failed was the department’s. The extractor takes that district’s name from the FY2019 report rather than committing a spreadsheet error as a district name, and does so only for a name that is literally #N/A.

The total row carries no IRN, and one of its cells is empty. Row 618 is a statewide sum that the extractor drops along with every other non-district row, and its community and STEM school deduction cell is blank where the other seven totals are filled. A reader taking the published statewide total gets a figure whose terms do not sum to it.

The FY21 on the community and STEM deduction column sits alone, two rows above the rest of its label. Any header rule that treats a single-cell row as a banner silently strips the year off that one column of the seven. See the header discussion in connect::fixtures::transition_base.