We Need Fair School Funding
In 2021, Ohio’s state legislature approved the Ohio Fair School Funding Plan. This was bipartisan legislation supported by both Republicans and Democrats that created a new school funding formula for public school districts across the state. Since 1997, Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled four times that the way our state funds public schools is unconstitutional. This is due to the overreliance on property taxes to fund public education in Ohio. Our state supreme court found that more affluent areas with higher property taxes also have schools with more resources than schools in low-income areas of our state. However, Ohio’s Fair School Funding Plan was supposed to fix this issue.
Unfortunately, the Ohio Legislature has now chosen to ignore this bipartisan piece of legislation. For public schools to be fully funded based on statistics from the Fair School Funding Plan, schools would need $666 million. If you factor in inflation, that number would rise to approximately $800 million. The proposed budget currently making its way through the legislative process in Columbus only gives schools about $226 million. This will again force school districts to go back to property owners and ask for tax increases through school levies. The availability of educational resources as well as the quality of education a child receives should not be dependent upon where a student lives.
In addition to throwing the Fair School Funding Plan into the trash, our Ohio legislature has funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into private school vouchers. In 2023, the state legislature passed ‘universal voucher legislation’ that allows parents to tap into taxpayer dollars to pay for their child’s private education, often at religious schools. There are a variety of issues with vouchers. These are tax dollars that could be utilized to improve and support public schools. It also must be pointed out that public tax dollars are being utilized by private Catholic schools, a clear violation of the separation of church and state, a policy that this country has always operated under.
We also need to take a step back and think more about how budget cuts and vouchers impact the student demographics within our public schools. With the expansion of vouchers, school segregation will continue to rise. We will see more and more special needs students segregated within public school districts since they are predominantly not welcome in private schools. There is also data that suggests that schools accepting vouchers disproportionately attract higher-performing and/or more affluent students from public schools, leaving behind a more disadvantaged population. Our schools in Ohio are becoming more and more segregated due to vouchers and the defunding of public school districts.
Lastly, the systematic destruction of our country’s Department of Education will have serious negative consequences for our most vulnerable students. The Department of Education distributes over $70 billion annually in grants like Title I for low-income schools, Pell Grants for low-income college students, and special education funding. The intentional destruction of the Department of Education complicates how this money will be distributed, if at all. States like Ohio may struggle to fund education without this support. I beg the public to speak out against these budget cuts and call your elected representatives across all levels of government.