Ohio House Budget Fails to Increase Base Funding for 82 Percent of School Districts Now Capped or On Guarantee
The headline on Jim Siegel’s Columbus Dispatch article on March 19 proclaimed, “DeWine budget sets stage for Ohio House’s sweeping school funding revamp.” For those of us who know the urgent needs of Ohio’s 610 school districts after years of tax cuts under John Kasich and a state legislature for whom tax cutting still remains the dogma, the news raised our hopes for some relief—especially for the state’s poorest school districts.
But the school funding revamp didn’t happen.
Everything broke down when it became clear that the plan needed revising and there wasn’t really time, despite the good intentions of a bipartisan coalition behind what became known as the Cupp-Patterson Plan. It is not expected that the Ohio Senate will revise school funding or otherwise increase basic support for Ohio’s school districts when the budget process moves to that chamber.
Governor DeWine’s earlier budget proposal included an additional $550 million over the biennium to be distributed to school districts to support wraparound services for children living in poverty. It was supposed to be a sort of place holder to which the new school funding plan would be added. While the governor’s added $550 million investment is a good idea in a state where there is devastating Appalachian rural poverty and where there are more than a dozen school districts where urban poverty is concentrated, DeWine’s $550 million was never intended to serve as the only school funding increase in Ohio’s biennial education budget.
Then in the last week of March came the rollout of the new Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan. The mere release of the plan was groundbreaking, because the plan identified, measured, and explained an alarming decade-long school finance problem, a problem nobody CONTINUE READING: Ohio House Budget Fails to Increase Base Funding for 82 Percent of School Districts Now Capped or On Guarantee | janresseger
