NEWS FROM THE STATE
Educational Funding. It has long been an issue in communities across Ohio. Now, an amendment to Ohio’s constitution has been proposed and it is taking steps towards November’s ballot. What do you need to know about this proposed constitutional amendment? Two groups with opposite opinions weigh in.
The Position Statement FOR the Constitutional Amendment
The Position Statement FOR the Constitutional Amendment was contributed by James E. Betts, who represents Getting It Right! for Ohio’s Future.
This campaign is supported by a substantial list of statewide education organizations. Jim Betts is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Adequate School Funding, a consortium of approximately sixty Ohio public school districts dedicated to finding responsible solutions for school funding through research and legislative action. He also served six years in the Ohio House of Representatives during the 1970’s representing Cuyahoga County’s West Shore communities. Jim has been a practicing attorney for more than twenty-five years. His e-mail address is jbetts@choiceonemail.com. The website for Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future is www.RightForOhio.org.
Ohioans can fix the state’s unconstitutional school funding formula at the ballot box in November.
By supporting the Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future constitutional amendment, we can take a stand to make education the state’s No. 1 priority. The time is now to invest in a solution that will fairly fund high quality public education opportunities statewide, relieve local property tax burdens and shore up Ohio’s economic future.
The amendment will:
1. Identify the cost of high quality education and
make the state pay a higher portion of the bill
2. Guarantee accountability for results with regular
reports that the public can understand
3. Reduce the number of property tax levies and
require a higher state share of school funding
4. Cut property taxes for senior citizen homeowners
and disabled homeowners
5. Protect state funding for school facilities, local
government and higher education
Ohio’s broken school funding formula punishes students and taxpayers across the state, while failing to produce the education outcomes Ohio needs to compete in a global economy. That’s why the Ohio Supreme Court has declared the formula unconstitutional four times – and this amendment is the first sound proposal put forth to fix it.
Ohio cannot afford to wait any longer to institute meaningful changes to the public education funding system. Ohio’s children deserve access to a high quality public education regardless of geography or family circumstances. Ohio taxpayers and their local school districts deserve relief from local tax levy campaigns. And Ohio public schools need fair funding, determined accurately at the state level, to have competitive education resources on the world stage.
Fixing the system
Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future puts in place the process to fix Ohio’s school funding system by reducing its reliance on local property taxes, identified as the current system’s primary flaw by the Ohio Supreme Court. All school districts would be required to provide the same fixed contribution rate of local taxation with the state funding the difference. The amendment would put the responsibility for generating per pupil investment levels needed to provide in the hands of elected and appointed officials and knowledgeable experts, with constitutional checks and balances.
The State Board of Education, with 11 elected members and eight appointed by the Governor, will conduct a biannual review of the components, programs and services necessary to provide a high quality education, plus their costs, and pass along their findings to the Ohio legislature in conjunction with the state budget cycle. The state will pay for the costs not covered by the required local funding contribution, unless the General Assembly overrides the State Board with a substitute plan adopted with a three-fifths majority in both houses. An alternate plan adopted by the legislature will still need to contain essentially the same components, programs and services.
A new nine-member education accountability commission appointed by the Governor, speaker of the House and president of the Senate will monitor education investments to determine if they are being implemented in a cost-effective and efficient manner and positively impacting student performance. The commission will issue regular reports to the public, Governor, General Assembly and the State Board.
Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future will:
• Reduce the required local school district funding contribution to 20 mills of property or equivalent taxation in a six-year phase-in, between fiscal years 2012-2017.
• Eliminate “phantom revenue” by exempting the 20 local mills from rate reduction factors, which will significantly reduce the size, number and frequency of operating levies.
• Retain all existing operating millage or other equivalent forms of taxation until planned expiration, or elimination by local school district voters.
• Mandate a 5 percent, plus inflationary, increase in per-pupil funding during the two initial fiscal years prior to the full launch of the constitutionally revised system.
• Exempt Ohio senior citizen homeowners and disabled homeowners from property taxes on the first $40,000 of market value of their homes.
• Protect state funding for school facilities, local government and higher education.
Getting It Right right now
It has been 10 years since the Ohio Supreme Court originally ruled the state school funding formula unconstitutional. Yet school districts still rely on the same flawed funding formula that forces them to make up the difference in state guaranteed funding to provide a good education, or severely compromise the local education opportunities available. Unlimited spending is not the goal, but Ohio can and should assert the rights of every child to have access to a high quality public education.
The status quo cannot continue in Ohio. Voters are increasingly weary of school tax levy requests that local districts have no choice but to pursue or cut education opportunities – including appropriate staffing and extracurricular activities. Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future seeks to implement a more stable funding process that will allow local required millage contributions to grow as local property tax valuations increase. Because this problem was created by constitutional rate reduction requirements on voter-approved school district millage, it requires a constitutional solution.
For far too long, the legislature has counted on local taxation to keep Ohio’s public schools afloat, contrary to the Supreme Court’s decisions. Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future addresses that issue.
Getting It Right – for the future
Implementing a constitutional guarantee will create a state commitment to education that will prepare young Ohioans to compete in a rapidly evolving global economy. Our state economy depends on improvements to our public education system and Ohio must act now to make the necessary changes that will keep and attract jobs. The manufacturing jobs that built Ohio’s economy continue to disappear and Ohio must provide a superior education if it is to succeed in transitioning to leader status among global competitors.
Commissioned by the Ohio State Board of Education, the recently issued Achieve, Inc. report, Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio, concludes that the state won’t be able to compete in the global economy without substantial changes to the public education system, chief among them transitioning from the inequitable and unpredictable local property tax.
The Position Statement AGAINST the Constitutional Amendment
The Ohio Roundtable has taken a stance AGAINST the proposed Constitutional Amendment for Educational Funding in Ohio. The position statement that follows was contributed by Melanie Elsey, who is the Legislative Director for the Ohio Roundtable. The Roundtable is funded by contributions from citizens, corporations, and foundations who support their positions and mission. Several arms of the organization fulfill different roles: the Ohio Roundtable does educational research and communications; the Freedom Forum is a lobbying organization; the Liberty Committee is a political action committee; and The Public Square is a short radio program. The website for the Ohio Roundtable and the Ohio Freedom Forum is www.aproundtable.org. Their e-mail address is info@ohioroundtable.org.
It’s been 16 years since Perry County Common Pleas Judge Linton Lewis ruled that Ohio’s public school funding system was unconstitutional. His decision was in response to a lawsuit filed by a single student, Nathan DeRolph, whose complaint began on a day he could not find a seat in a high school classroom. A coalition of school districts capitalized on this complaint and joined the suit, seizing upon two words in a single sentence in the state constitution, which assigns the General Assembly the responsibility of establishing a “thorough and efficient system of common schools.”
In the years that followed, the Ohio General Assembly dramatically increased funding for public schools. The plaintiffs and the State returned to the court again and again. In its fourth ruling the Ohio Supreme Court finally halted its intervention and relinquished jurisdiction over the case in May 2003. The bottom line to the litigation was a return to the very first argument. The Constitution clearly empowers only the Legislature to create education policy including funding. The Courts cannot legislate school funding from the bench.
After milking billions from the state in the name of “equity” the DeRolph coalition is back, demanding Ohio voters relinquish legislative authority over school funding.
The proposed amendment creates a mechanism for limitless state spending driven by the mandates of unelected committees and the State School Board.
This approach places education spending ahead of all other state programs and projects – forever. Thus concerns about health care, Medicaid, support for needy children, highways, prisons, and colleges all will stand in line for funding behind the public school funding bureaucracy.
The proposed amendment would create for the first time in Ohio, and in the United States, a fundamental constitutional right for children to a “high quality public education.” As euphoric as this may sound, the terms defined and the details outlined in the proposed text create the potential for limitless state spending and endless litigation from those who believe their children did not get the same “high quality” education as another student. Under this amendment children could sue their local schools, even sue their parents if they feel they have been slighted by the system. The proposed amendment also reverses the constitutional roles of the General Assembly and the State Board of Education. Currently the powers and duties of the State Board are prescribed exclusively by the General Assembly. This amendment creates broad new authority for the partially elected board to define the components of a high quality public education, including but not limited to services (open-ended), interscholastic, and extracurricular activities. These would be a part of the “fundamental right” required to be “guaranteed by the state.” In essence the General Assembly’s statutory policies would have to conform to the State Board’s determination of high quality.
What would this mean in a practical sense?
Since the mandates include a requirement for students to be prepared to “function at the highest level of his or her abilities in post-high school education programs,” there are a number of bizarre possibilities. For example, if Jane Doe is a talented member of her school’s swim team and her father is transferred in his employment to a school district across the state, and if this district doesn’t have a pool, much less a swim team, she would have the constitutional prerogative to sue the district to build her a pool and establish a team.
Incredibly, as the proponents spin this debate from district to district to generate public support, they will have absolutely no capacity to estimate how much this new system will cost or how quickly the costs will escalate over time. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission projects the amendment will cost at least one billion additional dollars immediately. The increase over future years is almost impossible to quantify. Such exploding costs can only be offset by massive funding cuts and/or increased taxes.
As the coalition seeks uncapped resources, it is critical to examine how the expenditures per pupil have changed in the last decade. In 1995-96 the statewide average expenditure per pupil (local, state, federal) was $5,929. By the 2005-06 academic year, the average per pupil expenditure had risen to $9,356 per child. This represents an increase of 57.8%. The increase in the rate of inflation for the same period of time, based on CPI-U, was 29.2%. For the 2005-06 school year, the average per pupil expenditure for Hudson Local Schools, an affluent suburban district in Summit County, was $10,908. For the cash-strapped Youngstown City Schools, the average expenditure per student was $14,147 an increase of 88% over the 1995-96 school year and a growth rate three times the rate of inflation. It is clear that funds for public education have increased on the statewide average at a rate twice that of inflation, raising the question: How much is enough?
This amendment is simply an attempt to hijack the state constitution and the state budgeting process, giving boards and commissions, outside the authority of the General Assembly, a blank check for education spending. This is a blatant attack on the elected legislative branch, constitutionally designed to represent the people. It will create chaos for the balance of state programs and expenditures, resulting in higher taxes for Ohioans. It deserves to be soundly defeated.
