Ohio school funding remains mysterious
The Ohio Supreme Court gave Ohio lawmakers a 1998 deadline to fix the state’s unconstitutional schoolfunding system. Since then, the state has poured tax money into operating public education — about $1.4 billion more last year than in 1998, adjusted for inflation.
Even as Ohio’s public school enrollment has dropped by about 140,000
students, the total doled out by the state increased almost 23 percent in real terms, a response to the high court’s finding that Ohio’s funding formula was arbitrary and in no way connected to what it cost to educate a student.
In 2017, Ohio spent about $7.78 billion from its general fund on public education. Adjusted for inflation, the state was spending about $6.33 billion in the 1998-99 school year.
But 20 years on, winners and losers are still being determined deep within the complicated school-funding formula, and district funding caps are required because lawmakers haven’t fully funded the formula. Meanwhile, charter schools and taxpayer-funded, privateschool vouchers have exploded in Ohio. Those two education programs, which largely didn’t exist when justices ruled Ohio didn’t meet its constitutional mandate of a “thorough and efficient” education system, got about $1.1 billion last year, or almost 80 percent of the total increase.
That left the 608 traditional school districts to divvy up the remaining $350 million of the increase, which the state says amounts to about $240 per student enrolled in those districts — roughly the cost of a couple of textbooks. Many districts have lost state money on a per-pupil funding basis since DeRolph, a Dispatch analysis has found.
“The DeRolph ruling … said that Ohio was over-reliant on property taxes ... and legislators and the governor said they were gonna fix this,” said Mark Raiff, superintendent of Olentangy schools in Delaware County. “Well, we here at Olentangy would argue they haven’t.”
Of 19 central Ohio districts,
nine got less money per student from the state last year than they received in the school year after DeRolph. The big financial loser under the current system is Columbus City Schools, the largest district in the state, which serves one of the highest concentrations of poverty. It now is getting 20 percent less funding per pupil from the state than it did back in the 1998-99 school year.
The Dispatch arrived at its per-pupil funding figures by taking the net amounts of state funding received by school districts for the years in question and then dividing them by their enrollments.
Columbus City Schools spokesman Scott Varner said the state-funding formula shortchanges it the district so much that it’s as if the district receives no state money for every child in kindergarten through third grade — more than 18,000 students.
“Columbus right now is whipsawed,” facing a “double-whammy” of perpupil deductions for charter schools that are roughly double the amount Columbus receives per pupil from the state, combined with a “cap” on total state-aid increases that keeps the district from collecting more than $80 million a year that the state formula says it’s owed, said Howard Fleeter, an economist and expert in Ohio school funding with the Ohio Education Policy Institute.
“They’re saying, ‘We’re not diverting your local property tax to charter schools,’” said Fleeter, whose expert testimony was highlighted by the Supreme Court in its 1997 ruling. “The hell you’re not. They’re diverting something.” The state increase is too little, too late, said William Phillis, a former interim state superintendent of public instruction who is the executive director of the coalition of more than 500 school districts that sued the state in DeRolph.
“There’s been an increase, OK, but an increase from what?” he asked. “A grossly inadequate level.”
The DeRolph case also highlighted shabby and deteriorating school buildings. In addressing that issue, the state has more to hang its hat on. The state has since spent more than $11 billion on school facilities, opening more than 1,100 new buildings.
“I think that, in general, the state has tried to do a pretty good job of addressing the DeRolph case,” said Greg Lawson, research fellow at the conservative Buckeye Institute, a free-market research group. “I think when you look at the whole amount of money, the state has done pretty good work.”Charter schools are public schools and should be viewed as part of Ohio’s system, not separate from districts, Lawson said. For all their flaws, some charters are doing remarkably well, he said. And the state school-rebuilding project has addressed many of the infrastructure problems identified in DeRolph, he said.
But the state didn’t really come up with a new funding system, Lawson said. Instead, it used “masking tape and bubble gum,” and “what you end up with now is some sort of weird Rube-Goldberg contraption,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the state who actually understands it completely.”
There were plenty of winners under the changes, too. Of the “Big 8” urban districts, all except Columbus and Cincinnati have seen inflation-adjusted funding increases per student of between 37 percent and 57 percent.
The district that benefited the most locally from the changes to the formula is Whitehall City Schools, which has seen its per-pupil funding increase by more than 90 percent since 1998.
Olentangy schools is receiving more state money per pupil under the new formula, but it never received much to begin with. Olentangy schools receives about
5 cents from the state for education for every incometax dollar the district’s residents send to the state government, according to Department of Education data.
If the district got what the funding formula prescribes, Olentangy schools would have received $51 million for the 2016-17 school year. Instead, because of the cap, the district got about $9 million, or less than $500 a student.
Olentangy spends a total of about $10,100 per student annually, slightly below the state average. The district of about 21,000 students has gained 600 students since last year.
“The only way we can keep the lights on and the programs going is we have to be back in front of our voters for additional (property) taxes,” Raiff said.
Raiff said he recognizes the state budget is finite, but he and officials at about 20 other districts would like to be funded per pupil at least at the same levels as private schools.
“A kid who lives in our district and goes to a private school, that school gets $1,200,” Raiff said. “How does that make sense?”
Even worse off is Upper Arlington schools, which got 53 percent less per pupil in 2017 than it did in 1998. That district gets back less than 3 cents for every dollar its residents pay in income taxes.
“State funding levels are definitely a challenge for districts like Upper Arlington,” said Upper Arlington Superintendent Paul Imhoff in an emailed statement. “We’ve been working with state lawmakers to ensure Ohio’s public schools receive at least as much funding as private schools.”