Ohio schools are facing some real financial problems, but do voters even understand? Jan Resseger explains. Reposted with permission.
School districts across Ohio are facing financial crises. The Columbus Dispatch’s Cole Behrens reports: “More than 120 Ohio public school districts are projecting negative cash balances by 2029 — the worst rate since the Great Recession.” Choices made by the state legislature in the current budget, along with the diversion of state revenue to school privatization, have forced a multitude of local school districts to put school levies ballot this November.
As levy politics play out across Ohio school districts, those of us who are engaged citizens need to keep essential fiscal realities in mind as we talk with neighbors and friends and make our way to the polls ourselves on November 3rd. If your district is one of the many, many Ohio school districts on the ballot this November, here is a set of basic facts about how the legislature has abandoned the needs of Ohio’s public school students. These are reasons for voting “YES,” if a levy appears on your local ballot.
Ohio bans “unvoted” tax increases. In Ohio, if a school board is desperate to provide students with small classes, well educated teachers, and enriched curricula—and have sports and music programs, the only choice is to mount a political campaign and pass a local school levy.
School finance in Ohio is designed as a state-local partnership. The federal government contributes only about 10 percent, and under the Trump administration that portion is threatened.
For years, Ohio’s legislature been underfunding the state’s share. On March 24, 1997, in the famous DeRolph case, Ohio school funding was declared unconstitutional. The court found Ohio’s state investment in the public schools inadequate and inequitably distributed. The decision condemned Ohio’s overreliance on local property taxes for funding public schools.
None of that has changed significantly. Ohio’s legislature continues to underfund the state’s portion of public school funding. Ohio school funding expert, Howard Fleeter has reported that in Fiscal Year 2024, the state paid for 43.3% of the cost of Ohio public schooling. The state share dropped to 38.4% in FY 2025, and 35% in FY 2026. The state share will drop to 32.2% in FY 2027.¹
In the current Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Ohio state budget, the legislature grossly underfunded and abandoned a new state school funding formula designed to ensure that school funding would be adequate and equitable.
Back in 2019, Republican Senator Bob Cupp and Democratic Representative John Patterson introduced a new, bipartisan, Fair School Funding Plan, a formula designed by an expert committee over several years to ensure that Ohio’s public schools have adequate school funding, and that funding is fairly distributed to create a system that serves all Ohio children and adolescents no matter the wealth of their community. The plan was designed to cover the actual costs faced by school districts—a per-child base cost, along with adjustments for the state to provide the extra money needed for well qualified staff and programs to help disabled children, English learners, and students in communities where poverty is concentrated.
- The Fair School Funding Plan was designed to be phased in over three state budgets — Fiscal Years 2022-2023, Fiscal Years 2024-2025, and Fiscal Years 2026-2027.
- The first two steps of the phase-in worked fine.
- But in the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget, the legislature grossly underfunded the plan by $2.75 billion and essentially abandoned the phase-in.
At the same time, the Ohio legislature reduced the amount of state revenue it collects through taxes. The legislature also diverts education dollars to school privatization.
- The legislature flattened the income tax in the current state budget—eliminating top tax brackets and reducing taxes for the wealthy even as it has also reduced taxes on business and increased the tax burden on homes and farms.
- Today the legislature diverts well over a $1 billion every year to an uncapped private school voucher program.
- Today the legislature diverts over $1 billion a year to privately operated charter schools.
Here are some additional fiscal realities Ohio school districts face:
- The weights Ohio uses to determine state funding for the six categories of special education were last updated for the 2009-2010 school year. This means that the state’s contribution to special education has fallen below 30%.
- Neither is the federal government fulfilling its responsibility for special education. Back when the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was passed in 1975, it was expected that the federal government would pay 40% of the cost. The federal government has never done its part. Today the federal government is covering only 12% of the cost of special education.
- In Ohio, there is an additional state enhancement called Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid to help public schools cover the needs of low-income students. DPIA is currently set at $422 per child, far below the $3,300 extra spending that state research says is appropriate.
All this means that the only way Ohio school districts can afford quality public schools for our state’s 1.6 million public school students is to pass local school levies. School funding in Ohio is a plain matter of simple arithmetic and public responsibility.
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CAUTION: Ideally levy committees will focus campaigns on what we all know are our school districts’ desperate fiscal needs—caused by the legislature’s failure to fulfill the state constitution’s requirement that the state will “secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools.”
In Ohio today, there is also a property tax revolt. Here is a simple explanation of property tax realities in Ohio today.
In many Ohio urban and suburban areas, the 1976 Ohio House Bill 920 still works well to protect homeowners from massive sudden tax hikes after reappraisals. HB 920 requires that when your property value increases due to a reappraisal, HB 920 automatically rolls back the effective tax rate to the level it was on the day the most recent local levy passed.
Ohio’s property tax revolt centers especially in rural and small town school districts where HB 920 has rolled back tax increases all the way down to 20 mills (the 20 mill floor). In school districts at the 20 mill floor, HB 920 no longer limits property tax increases after reappraisals.
Experts agree that there is a good strategy by which the legislature could address the needs of homeowners who cannot afford their property taxes. One such strategy involves a property tax circuit breaker. The research director at Policy Matters Ohio, Zach Schiller explains how a property tax circuit breaker would work:
“Property tax reductions must be aimed specifically and only at those who truly need them. That’s exactly what a circuit breaker does, targeting those who are paying an outsized share of their income in property taxes. Those with high incomes are unaffected. The typical circuit breaker mechanism works like this: A qualifying household pays property taxes up to a threshold percentage of income. If the household’s property tax bill exceeds this limit, the state picks up all or a portion of the tax payments made above it (up to a cap in many places). Crucially… the state pays the cost, protecting schools, counties and other taxing entities.”
Please do your best to keep your school levy conversations with neighbors and friends focused on the school funding crisis the state has created by abandoning its responsibility under the state constitution to pay for its share of public school finance.
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¹Howard Fleeter, “On the Money,” January 30, 2026. Paywalled Hannah News Service document available in the research collection of many public libraries.