Voodoo Accounting: Charter Schools And The State School Aid Formula
Last fall, the Columbus Dispatch published an article, Are local school taxes subsidizing Ohio Charters? that confirmed the Byzantine nature of Ohio school finance and the complexities surrounding the calculation of state school aid. If comprehending how the formulas work which allow districts to receive state aid is enough of a challenge, readers also learned that the state was adding insult to financial injury by sending extra money to charters by calculating the amount of local support in the charter aid formula. This calculation method further assists charters by using the local share amount (viz., local property taxes raised by the district for its schools) in the formula to determine charter payments at the expense of public education.
How novel: starve public schools of state funds for years but use local support dollars to calculate the level of state charter payments. So much for local control.
Let’s get back to that word Byzantine again. Consider this one example of how state school aid works.
“When a student living in the Columbus district attends a charter school, the state subtracts nearly $7,800 on average from the district’s state funding. But the state is giving Columbus only an average of about $3,900 in basic aid per pupil,” the Dispatch’s Jim Siegel reported. “Once charter-school money is subtracted, the district gets just $2,604 for each student who is left, a $1,312 loss that is also, by far, the highest in the state,” he explained.
As we’ve read before on these pages, voodoo public policy begets voodoo economics which begets voodoo accounting. In the Dispatch story, Sen. Peggy Lehner, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, confirmed the perfidious nature of state school aid when it comes to charters. “It’s kind of a shell game with the money,” she said. “It’s state dollars, but you have to use local dollars to backfill the state dollars. I think it’s pretty clear that these kids are getting local dollars.”
If Sen. Lehner is clear about the creative accounting used to determine state aid, the voting public in this election year should also be clear about what’s going on here. Though some state officials like Lehner would describe state school aid calculations as backfilling, let’s call it what it is: voodoo accounting.
When Ohio taxpayers start catching on to this state-sponsored ongoing charter school finance scam, they will find that what was a mini-revolt against voodoo accounting that pumps additional public tax dollars to privately operated Voodoo Accounting: Charter Schools And The State School Aid Formula:
