The looting will continue until morale improves
House Republicans want to rob fiscally savvy schools to bribe property owners.
The Ohio House Republican leadership debuted its biannual budget yesterday. One Republican legislator, speaking to The Rooster, referred to it as “the Festivus Budget,” since leadership was primarily focused on airing their petty grievances.
Yesterday’s dispatch delved into what’s believed to be the least funding of public schools in state budget history, with the state’s share slipping below the 40 percent threshold that triggered the infamous DeRolph lawsuit against the state in 1991.
House Republican leadership has basically chosen to ignore the bipartisan Cupp-Patterson funding formula, which debuted in 2021.
While Cupp-Patterson was far from perfect, it improved what we had before, with the state going over 20 years with a funding model that the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional.
The current plan will shortchange schools by roughly $800 million, on top of the nearly $1 billion hole that the Legislature blew into public school budgeting with the school voucher scam, which is little more than a subsidy for rich families already sending their freaky, doll-like children to private schools.
But the robbery goes even deeper than what we saw at first glance in yesterday’s dispatch.
Because of the burden Ohio places on property taxes in funding our schools, and because Ohio refuses to enact anything close to a progressive tax structure, the 136th General Assembly has been promising “relief” for our beautiful property owners.
Well, they appear set to enact the equivalent of a Band-Aid in relief by punishing fiscally responsible school districts.
Buried on Page 3,555 of the budget, House Republicans want to siphon any money saved by districts that is over 25 percent of their operating budget (aka three months of expenses) that districts must have on hand to maintain an “AAA” bond rating.
Republicans want to take that money from those districts and give it back as a one-time payment to property owners as “much-needed relief.”
Schools have plenty of reasons to have cash reserves of over 25 percent of their operating budget. A big reason is that the State Legislature hasn’t been a faithful partner for over 20 years.
Said one educator to The Rooster: “They want us to spend down, degrade our bond ratings, and bleed out our reserves while they sit on a maxed-out rainy day fund. Punishment for being fiscally responsible.”
And what’s genuinely wild is that poor rural schools uniformly represented by Republicans will be the most devastated by this proposed backdoor robbery.
From Stephen Dyer of 10th Period, a phenomenal resource when it comes to understanding the hijinks the Republican junta is pulling with public school funding:
And here, once again via 10th Period, is a look at the individual districts that have the most to lose in this proposed plan:
The Republicans are looting their districts’ children to pay a bribe to property owners, all because they inherently refuse to raise taxes on people who can afford it.
And you know what the sad part is? Their little scheme might work. Rural voters have shown a high tolerance for this kind of bullshit, and the fact that the Democrats don’t control the Statehouse or any branch of the federal government probably won’t save them from shouldering the blame in the mind of these types of voters.
Our only hope is the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit against the state. And thankfully in yesterday’s dispatch, I wildly understated the number of districts involved in that upcoming lawsuit.
It’s over 300.
Won’t somebody think of the algae blooms?
But that’s not all the skullduggery I missed in yesterday’s first-glance recap. House Republican leadership also seems intent on making algae blooms great again in Lake Erie.
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