Local Taxpayers will feel squeeze under Governor’s proposed School Funding

School fund­ing in Ohio relies on the con­cept of shared respon­si­bil­ity between the local and state gov­ern­ment. Basi­cally, school dis­trict rev­enue con­sists of three main sources, which includes local, state and fed­eral. The local rev­enue sources account for 74.49 per­cent and include local prop­erty taxes, local income taxes, tuition pay­ments, fees, sales, etc. The state rev­enue sources account for 21.77 per­cent and include such sub­si­dies as Basic State Aid, rollback/homestead prop­erty tax allo­ca­tions, and state grants. The fed­eral rev­enue sources account for just 3.74 per­cent and include both restricted and unre­stricted fed­eral grants such as Title I (Read­ing), Title VI-B (Spe­cial Edu­ca­tion) and Title II-A (Teacher Pro­fes­sional Development).

Dur­ing Fis­cal Year 2012 Big Walnut’s local con­tri­bu­tion per pupil was $7,842, the State of Ohio con­tributed $2,292, while the Fed­eral con­tri­bu­tion per stu­dent was $394. In Sim­i­lar Dis­tricts dur­ing FY 2012 the local con­tri­bu­tion per pupil was only $5,716, the state con­tributed $3,354, and the Fed­eral con­tri­bu­tion per pupil was $428. The statewide aver­age dur­ing FY 2012 was a $5,276 local con­tri­bu­tion per stu­dent, the state rev­enue per stu­dent was $4,675, and the Fed­eral con­tri­bu­tion per stu­dent was $900.

As you can see from these num­bers Big Wal­nut receives less state and fed­eral aid than both its sim­i­lar school dis­tricts and the statewide aver­age across Ohio, which unfairly shifts the fund­ing bur­den to our local res­i­dents. This is of con­cern to us because the state bud­get, as recently intro­duced by the Gov­er­nor, includes a new posi­tion by the state regard­ing pub­lic school fund­ing in which “wealthy schools” will receive less state aid and poorer schools will receive more state aid. A “wealthy” school dis­trict, as defined by the state, is a school dis­trict with a high prop­erty val­u­a­tion per pupil. Since Big Wal­nut Local School Dis­trict cov­ers 109 square miles it has a rel­a­tively large total prop­erty val­u­a­tion of more than $640 mil­lion to serve 3100 stu­dents. Recent arti­cles in the news­pa­pers and media com­ments may be con­fus­ing to some res­i­dents in the Big Wal­nut com­mu­nity; there­fore, we wanted to pro­vide you with the best and most cur­rent infor­ma­tion avail­able regard­ing the effect the bud­get may have on our community.

The Governor’s bud­get esti­mates indi­cate that Big Walnut’s state sup­port for the next two years (i.e. 2014 – 2015) will con­tinue to be frozen at last year’s 2012 fund­ing level. Despite Big Wal­nut main­tain­ing non-emergency local oper­at­ing rev­enue at the 20-mil floor, which is the min­i­mum amount the state requires all school dis­tricts to levy or col­lect upon their res­i­dents, the state con­sid­ers us to be “wealthy” because our sparsely pop­u­lated large geo­graphic area results in a high prop­erty val­u­a­tion per pupil. Only in local aid does Big Wal­nut receive more fund­ing because the vot­ers in our dis­trict approved the 2010 emer­gency oper­at­ing levy that makes up for the lack of state and fed­eral money. It is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that less local sup­port would not result in more state or fed­eral money as Big Wal­nut has a high prop­erty wealth per pupil referred to by the state as “high wealth”. This “high wealth” state bud­get the­ory is much like qual­i­fy­ing for col­lege finan­cial aid. For instance, if a par­ent has the mon­e­tary resources or earned income to fund tuition their stu­dent will get less or no Fed­eral aid regard­less of their par­ents’ appar­ent abil­ity to pay for college.

We hope that dur­ing the bud­get process we will see mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the bill that will result in addi­tional state fund­ing for our school dis­trict. While state fund­ing is com­plex and con­fus­ing as the above num­bers illus­trate the inequity of using local wealth as a deter­mi­na­tion of receiv­ing state aide. Big Wal­nut has max­i­mized its local resources to deliver a qual­ity edu­ca­tion with lit­tle help from the state and fed­eral government.

We encour­age you to con­tact Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mar­garet Ann Ruhl at 614–466-1431 to express con­cern about pro­posed school fund­ing that freezes or elim­i­nates state sup­port to schools based on com­mu­ni­ties’ col­lec­tive prop­erty value wealth.

This infor­ma­tion was com­piled from the FY12 Dis­trict Pro­file Report located on the Ohio Depart­ment of Education’s (ODE) web­site at < www.ode.state.oh.us >.

Posted by Gary Henery on Mar 13 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.