Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed two-year state budget includes funding for a bipartisan public school funding plan that was launched in 2021. DeWine said he’s allocated funding for the final two years of the six-year phase-in.
However, the two unions representing the state’s K-12 public school teachers are concerned about the data used to provide those dollars. And Ohio's House Speaker is indicating there will be changes when his chamber proposes its budget.
Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro said DeWine’s finding for the Fair School Funding Plan is based on 2022 salaries and financial information, and needs to be updated.
“The formula doesn’t work unless the input data is updated so that it reflects the most up to date costs that school districts are facing,” DiMauro said. “Without that, far too many schools across the state of Ohio are going to be severely underfunded.”
Melissa Cropper, president and executive director of the Ohio Federation of Teachers agrees.
“The state legislature is still operating on 2022 figures, so we need to find out what are the actual costs now in 2025,” Cropper said.
There’s another part of the funding piece that the unions don’t like – the attempt to whittle down what’s known as “the guarantee.” In the past, state leaders have guaranteed districts a set amount of funding that will not be less than the previous budget, based on a variety of factors. Cropper said that’s helped districts when they plan their expenses.
“So just because you might not have the same number of students, you have, for example, lost a couple of students out of each grade level—to lose the funding for those students overall, that’s a significant amount of money,” Cropper said.
DeWine's budget aims to end funding for “empty desks”
For his part, DeWine thinks it's time the guarantee goes away.
“It also allows us to phase out the funding of empty desks in schools, schools that have decreasing enrollment by reducing, we do this by reducing funding guarantees,” DeWine said.
DiMauro said that could be done anyway if DeWine and legislators would follow the formula that became the Fair School Funding Plan that was devised years ago by Republican former House Speaker Bob Cupp and Democratic Rep. John Patterson.
“I think the full intention of Cupp-Patterson once it is fully implemented is that there is no need for guarantees or caps anymore. But this is still not finishing the job,” DiMauro said. “So we should not even be talking about adjustments to the guarantees until the formula is fully funded.”
Both teachers unions praised DeWine for funding reading initiatives he’s championed in the past. They say those are important in making headway in schools. But they’re not happy that he’s continuing to spend about a billion dollars on vouchers for private schools.
“We’ve got a billion dollars going to vouchers and again going largely to students that have always attended private schools,” Cropper said. She said because they’ve never been in public school, those students were not receiving any state funding until their families got vouchers after the last budget.
“That’s a lot of money going to a private system when we still are not fully funding out public schools,” Cropper said.
House is likely to make changes to public school funding
House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima), a proponent of vouchers, has suggested he would back away from the Fair School Funding Plan last month. After DeWine unveiled his plan, Huffman didn’t change his tune.
“It’s not a binary choice like it’s the governor’s plan or something else,” Huffman said. “I think the system needs to be taken apart. We need to keep the parts that are successful, are teaching kids.”
Huffman said the guarantee is paid to schools at the beginning of the year and schools get to keep, even if students move out. He said it needs to be redone so that the state isn’t paying for students that are not in class. But he hinted some public schools might like what they see in the upcoming House budget.
“We are going to have an increase in public school funding and a lot of schools are going to get more money than they’ve gotten before, substantially more,” Huffman said.
The House is expected to unveil its budget soon, with the goal of passing it by Easter break, around April 20. And the Senate will take up the budget after that. The new two-year operating budget if expected to be in place by the end of June.
