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Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ohio private school vouchers get double increase in funding over public schools in House budget
Ohio school children in a classroom. (Photo by Morgan Trau, WEWS.) The Ohio House's proposed budget increases the private school voucher system by $500 million and only gives half of that much of an increase to public schools. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine visited a public school Monday morning, hearing from teachers and kids about literacy efforts. But schools like Hamilton Elementary School in Columbus may have to undergo massive cuts under the proposed state budget. The governor was asked about the possible elimination of the Fair School Funding Plan in the budget and whether he's heard the concerns of teachers, students, and parents. 'Sure, look, I received communication from parents, communication from school superintendents,' the governor responded. 'What I tell them is they're doing the right thing. They should make their point of view available to the governor, but they also should do it to their legislators.' Parents such as Kia Woodward are stressing about school funding for their kids. 'It's disheartening to see that people are trying to shut (public school) doors and just trying to shut it with funding,' Woodward said. While Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, and Finance Chair Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, say the state doesn't have enough money to fully fund public education — slashing its expected budget by hundreds of millions — the same leaders have given even more money to the private school voucher system, which funnels taxpayer dollars to nonpublic schools. In the Ohio House Republican proposed budget, public schools would get about a $220 million increase, while private schools are set to receive double that — $500 million. Huffman and Stewart argue that what they are doing is actually giving more over the biennium than in FY25 to public schools, just not as much as they had hoped — or were expecting due under the Full School Funding Plan. 'Well, when you see the proposal, which was, 'We'll just increase the inputs to FY '24,' that was the ask — it cost $1.8 billion to the taxpayer,' Stewart responded. 'We simply don't have it.' That is misleading, Democrats argue. 'What is being produced is likely one of the lowest state shares in our state's history… meaning that it's even less state money going into our schools than when this was deemed unconstitutional,' Finance Ranking Member Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Cleveland, said. 'You have the privilege to send your kid wherever you want to, and you're gonna use my tax dollars to do it, and I don't have the right for my kids to go to school and be in a safe building,' Woodward said. Parent and conservative activist Greg Lawson is on the other side of the debate — arguing that dollars are best served following each individual child to the best school of choice. 'I spend a lot of tax money, my tax money… I want a little bit of that back so that I am able to put my student where I think it's the right thing,' Lawson said. Some Republicans argue that poor-performing school districts may not be spending money wisely. Woodward responded that public schools face audits, while nonpublic schools don't have to follow transparency guidelines. 'I think that we could have some further conversation about that,' he said. 'I think we want to be very careful on how we do it because what we don't wanna see happen is a heavy hand of the government coming in and then dictating certain things from a curriculum standpoint.' The governor sits in the middle of this debate, saying he wants to protect public schools — despite cutting $100 million from what they were expecting, as well — while also providing choice for families. 'We are still early on this process,' DeWine said. The budget will likely be passed out of the House this week, but it still has to go through the WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on Twitter and Facebook. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Co-creator of Ohio's public school funding model pushes state to implement final phase
Getty Images Former Ohio state Rep. John Patterson, co-author of Ohio's Full School Funding Plan — the final phase of which has an uncertain future in the next state budget — said in an online forum last week that the full funding is a necessity for local schools and a responsibility for the state. Patterson put together what would later be called the Fair School Funding Plan with former House Speaker Bob Cupp in 2017, in an effort to bring about the 'adequacy' in public school funding demanded by the Ohio Constitution and four separate Ohio Supreme Court orders that the state properly fund public schools. Because the school funding topic is a complicated one, Patterson said he and Cupp 'realized early on that we didn't have all the answers,' and needed to bring in others to help put together a plan that addressed the real costs of educating a student in Ohio. 'Not one person, not one group, it was a bipartisan effort,' Patterson said. With the help Republicans like former state Rep. Gary Scherer and former state Sen. Peggy Lehner, plus former Democratic state Sen. Vernon Sykes, the pair worked to simplify the education funding model to true district costs. The effort would later be taken up by another bipartisan pair, state Rep. Jamie Callender, R-Concord, and Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake, in the following general assembly, where it was passed as part of the state budget. Patterson and Cupp also put together a work group of treasurers and superintendents from across the state to pin down what districts needed from the state, and why each district's costs looked different. 'We wanted a diverse group so we could get an actual read on how schools are funded and where the money needs to be coming from, so that our kids could receive that quality education,' Patterson told a virtual forum last week, hosted by the League of Women Voters of Ohio. The two leaders of the Fair School Funding Plan landed on a method that created a formula for districts, that would encapsulate not only the funding that all districts needed to survive, but also the extra things like special education, transportation, and the needs of low-income students. The formula made sense to Patterson and Cupp because while a state legislature operates on budgets spanning only two years, schools districts were required to create five-year forecasts. 'Imagine your household, if you had to plan five years out, but you could only account for money in the first two years,' Patterson said. 'You would want to make sure that there was a formula in place so that your family could prosper for years three, four, and five. That's what we were trying to do.' The Fair School Funding Plan, as Patterson and Cupp designed it, didn't mandate how districts should use the money, but focused on the actual costs of everything from bus transportation to extracurriculars, blending property valuations with income wealth in each individual school district. 'Every component of this Fair School Funding Plan meets the individual needs of that particular district; it's not dependent on anyone else,' Patterson said. 'If that's not adequate, I know what is.' The first four years of the six-year phase-in have been implemented in previous General Assembly budgets, but this year's plan might meet some pushback, with GOP members of the Ohio House Finance Committee expressing concerns about continuing with the plan as budget talks continue in that chamber. Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman already walked back some comments made about implementing the final phase of the plan, after he said the funding model was 'unsustainable.' Democrats have noted issues with Gov. Mike DeWine's executive proposal for the budget, despite the fact that it recommends implementation of the final phase-in. But those issues are with the lack of inflationary 'inputs' in DeWine's proposal, with which Patterson also took issue. Updating the inputs for base costs and teacher salaries, among other inputs, is 'necessary to keep pace' with inflation, Patterson said. 'Because if we don't, it's going to create disruption in the formula, which means local taxpayers are going to pay more, the state gets off the hook, and that's not fair,' he said. The debate over how the final phase of the plan will look is part of a 'tug-of-war' public education advocates are seeing with the state funding of public schools and the private school voucher program that now has near-universal eligibility levels in Ohio, and which DeWine's executive budget supports for universal eligibility. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Susan Kaeser, education specialist for the League of Women Voters of Ohio said the private school voucher programs are 'a personal responsibility that is now on the public's shoulders without any of the safeguards that protect taxpayers or the private school consumer.' According to LWV Ohio research of state data, the voucher programs have seen enrollment between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years increase by 3,700 students, while the spending on voucher expansion nearly tripled in the same time period. 'So the bulk of that (enrollment) increase went to students whose families had already decided and been able to commit their resources to enroll their kid in a private school,' Kaeser said at the forum. The voucher program faces a legal challenge as the public school advocacy group Vouchers Hurt Ohio pursues a lawsuit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court, which supporters hope will result in the elimination of the program all together. One of the school districts that's signed on to the lawsuit is the Richmond Heights City School District, which saw almost 20% of their nearly $14 million operating budget go to students headed to adjacent private schools in the 2018-2019 school year, according to Nneka Slade Jackson, president of the district's board of education. The district also struggled to get out from under the weight of being labeled 'failing,' and six defeated school levies that led to further financial instability. For Slade Jackson, fighting for the public school funding and against the private school voucher program is 'a moral imperative.' 'It is an act of advocacy for our children, for our schools, for our future, and for our democracy,' she said. 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