The Ohio Senate Finance Committee passed its version of the state’s FY 2022-2023 state budget late Tuesday. On Wednesday the bill moved to the Senate floor where it passed by a vote of 25 to 8, along party lines. Debate will now move to a House-Senate conference committee.
This blog will take a one week early summer break. Look for a new post on Monday, June 21st.
Gongwer summarizes this week’s Senate’s action: “The Senate Finance Committee voted along party lines Tuesday afternoon to report the two-year spending outline (HB110) after accepting a multi-pronged omnibus amendment… The widely supported House-passed K-12 funding overhaul ditched by the Senate will be a top matter of discussion between the GOP-led chambers…. Before the vote, the committee’s Democrats offered several amendments, including proposals to… reinstate the House’s school funding plan….”
In a powerful editorial on Wednesday (linked here to a pdf version because the editorial is paywalled), the Cleveland Plain Dealer castigated the Senate’s deletion of the House’s Fair School Funding Plan. The House plan—now pushed aside—was designed over a period of three years by an expert Ohio House-appointed committee to restore adequate, cost-based state school funding and to remedy what has become the widespread over-reliance by school districts on local property tax levies to fund even the most basic services.
The Plain Dealer explains: “The Senate version would fail to enact the bi-partisan, educator-backed Fair School Funding Plan first proposed by Rep. Robert Cupp, a Lima Republican, now the House’s speaker, and former Rep. John Patterson, a Jefferson Democrat. The Cupp-Patterson plan would assure school funding equity. The Senate counteroffer doesn’t. It postpones a nearly inevitable day of reckoning when another school funding lawsuit, like the DeRolph case decided in 1997, determines legislators aren’t doing right by public school pupils. The Senate says it’s just being frugal but the numbers belie that. Its proposal would add to inequities in school funding while perpetuating divisions over something that should unite Ohioans of all political stripes—the need to invest in our children.”
The Plain Dealer‘s editors add that another problem in the Senate plan is the expansion of school vouchers: “The Ohio House version of the budget, which includes the Cupp-Patterson innovations, passed on a strikingly bipartisan 70-27 House vote. Tellingly… the Senate plan is not likely to achieve the same broad political backing, largely because it discards the balance the House achieved. The Senate plan, for instance, vastly expands eligibility for tax-funded school vouchers. Vouchers help parents pay for private schools. But the Ohio Constitution, which legislators swear to uphold, requires the General Assembly to ‘secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.’ That is, public schools are the legislature’s first responsibility. Committee testimony by backers of the House’s approach pointed out that the Senate plan raises the ceiling on EdChoice voucher awards for pupils from kindergarten to 8th grade to $5,500 (from the current $4,650) and for pupils in grades 9-12 to $7,500 (from the $6,000 current ceiling). Legislative analysts estimate the higher ceilings will cost the state $163.5 million over two years.”
The Ohio House’s Fair School Funding Plan was designed to address Ohio’s long-standing and growing school funding inequity. The Fair School Funding Plan would fulfill the very definition by Rutgers University school finance expert Bruce Baker of what a school funding formula should be. “School funding is largely in the hands of states, and the primary job of states’ finance systems should be to account for differences between their districts in the cost of providing that minimal level of educational quality, and then to distribute funds in a manner that compensates for the fact that some districts have less ability than others to pay these costs (e.g. via property taxes). For instance, districts serving large proportions of high-needs students will tend to have higher costs; if those districts lack the local capacity to pay those costs, state revenue needs to fill the gaps.”
In May 6, 2021 testimony to the Senate Education Committee, Ohio education funding expert, Howard Fleeter describes how the framers of the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan designed the plan to address what has been alarming and long-standing inequity in Ohio school finance: “Funding for economically disadvantaged students in particular has lagged well behind the growth in the number of such students over the past 20 years (funding has increased 22% while the number of (these) students has increased 61% since FY01)… Studies in other states have indicated that the additional costs of educating low-income students are typically 30% or more… Targeted Assistance and Capacity Aid should be retained as is the case in the HB110 funding formula (the Fair School Funding Plan). These two formula components supplement formula funding by providing additional funds to low wealth districts that lack the tax base to pursue local educational initiatives in the same manner that wealthier districts can through local levies.”
The Plain Dealer‘s editors additionally question the Senate’s inclusion of a 5% income tax cut in its new budget: “Then there are the Senate’s expanded tax cuts, which could run afoul of requirements in federal COVID-19 stimulus aid not to use the money as an offset for tax cuts. The Senate proposes to expand a 2% House-proposed income tax cut to 5% by the second year, resulting in an estimated $874 million state revenue loss over the next two years… Spending $874 million on schools would be an investment. Dribbling it away on individually puny tax cuts is a stunt. A reckless stunt, given that it could imperil needed COVID relief dollars. And an irresponsible stunt, in light of the pressing state spending needs made apparent during the pandemic….” “(F)or an Ohioan with an annual income from $41,000 to $64,000, the Senate plan would save an average of $22 a year (43 cents a week).”
Policy Matter’s Ohio’s Wendy Patton amplifies these facts in testimony she presented to the Senate Finance Committee to document who would benefit from the Senate’s proposed 5% tax cut: “Nearly half of the tax reduction would go to those in the top 5%, who are paid more than $221,000 a year. The top 1% percent, who have income of at least $526,000, would average a cut of $1,712 and receive a quarter of the tax reductions. The tax reductions in the Senate bill come on top of huge tax cuts the richest Ohioans have received over the past 16 years. While lower-and middle-income Ohioans on average saw little change or paid more in state and local taxes, the top 1% received more than $40,000 a year in tax cuts.”
The next Ohio budget will be negotiated in a House-Senate conference committee which must create a compromise before July 1. The Plain Dealer‘s editorial board describes what needs to happen in the next two weeks: “Conferees’ priority should be writing a budget that shelves dubious tax cuts and fairly funds public schools—which, as it now stands, the Senate’s proposal doesn’t do.”
This blog has posted here on the Ohio House’s Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan.
This blog has posted here and here on the Ohio Senate’s plan which is less adequate and less equitable.
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