Almost 90% of Ohio’s children – in big cities, small towns, and rural communities – grow up, learn, and dream at a local public school. But policymakers are falling short on their responsibility to fund our public schools.
Ohio's last two state budgets included partial funding for the Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP), a hard-won fix to Ohio’s old unconstitutional school funding system that had forced districts to over-rely on local property taxes. Now it’s time for legislators to fully fund our public schools, using data based on the current costs of school district expenses.
Policymakers have now released three versions of the state budget: Governor DeWine’s initial budget proposal, the Ohio House budget bill, and the Ohio Senate budget bill. All of these budget versions fail to complete the phase in of the Fair School Funding Plan. The most recent version, the Senate bill, claims to follow the Fair School Funding Plan but in actuality it uses outdated information on what it costs districts to educate students, it fails to provide extra funding for students with disabilities and students who are English language learners, and it undercounts the number of students who are in low-income households. The biggest betrayal of the Fair School Funding Plan though is that the Senate bill allocates additional funds based on standardized test performance rather than based on the needs of school districts, heightening inequities in public education.
Write a letter to your state legislators and to the budget conference committee and tell them that school districts need fair and predictable school funding, not a cheap imitation of the Fair School Funding Plan.