While legislators have said most Ohio school districts will receive more funding under the Senate’s proposed biennial budget, the majority of Ohio’s eight biggest urban school districts stand to lose money.
The Senate version of the state budget bill was released in early June. The Senate and House will need to reconcile their different versions – each feature different school funding models – before sending the bill to be signed by the governor by the end of the month.
For Northeast Ohio’s biggest urban schools, Canton and Youngstown schools stand to lose the most when comparing the Senate’s proposal to how much they currently receive in state funding, about $6.6 million from Canton and $5.6 million from Youngstown over the next two years. Funding for Cleveland and Akron would remain relatively flat.
Ohio’s highest-poverty school districts stand to lose the most out of other kinds of schools based on the Senate proposal, when comparing it to what a fully funded Fair School Funding Plan would look like, according to a Policy Matters Ohio analysis. The Fair School Funding Plan, in its fourth year of a six-year implementation, attempts to base state funding on things that advocates say more adequately represent the cost of education, increasing funding for districts with higher numbers of low-income students or students with disabilities, for example.
The Policy Matters analysis suggests Ohio’s schools serving the highest-poverty areas would lose out on $576 million over the next two years under the Senate proposal if the full Fair School Funding Plan is not implemented.
"The Senate’s proposal includes some key elements of the FSFP formula, but it also eliminates or fails to implement those elements that legislators decided were too expensive," the Policy Matters analysis reads. "The Senate plan combines the outdated costs of education from the governor’s proposal with its own budget math based on enrollment and report card data."
Senate leaders said the plan does continue the Fair School Funding Plan’s structure, and still provides the most funding the state has ever given to public schools.
“The education funding that we have put into this budget, we have invested more in this budget than any other budget before,” Senate President Rob McColley told Cleveland.com. “There will be a record amount of investment in public education in this budget.”
Other urban communities with high poverty rates also lose out in the Senate proposal, including Lorain City Schools, while higher-income suburban schools like Strongsville, Solon and Shaker Heights will receive a funding boost. The Senate proposal includes a clause to reward schools with better scores on the annual state report card with more money.
Eric Resnick, a former Canton school board member, is a member of the steering committee for the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, a group of schools that is suing the state over the money going to vouchers for private schools. He said the budget limiting funding for public schools means a higher burden on taxpayers.
"For the most part, districts are funded with the state aid and property taxes, and those are your two sources," Resnick said. "When the state starts to shrink the size of that pot, especially in these inflationary times, the shift of that burden goes to the local taxpayers and school districts are going to have to go back to their public, which is also heavily burdened right now to try to recoup some of that money."
Under the House version of the budget, schools would receive small increases across the board. Still, it's a far cry from how much money they would be receiving under a fully funded Fair School Funding Plan, Ideastream Public Media has previously reported.
Greg Lawson, research fellow at the Buckeye Institute, a think tank that espouses free-market principles, said during Tuesday's Sound of Ideas that most districts across the state are educating fewer students due to declining enrollment, yet are still seeking more funding.
"It doesn't necessarily make sense over time to continue to fund districts at the same level if they don't have as many students," Lawson said.
The proposals from the Senate, House and the governor all boost funding for private-school vouchers over the next two years. The state spent an estimated $2.037 billion on vouchers during the current and prior fiscal years. That number increases to $2.470 billion over the next two years in the House's budget, $2.440 billion in the Senate's budget, and $2.414 billion in DeWine's budget.
