COLUMBUS, Ohio — The State of Ohio accidentally overpaid schools $30 million due to an error in the funding formula. The state’s largest education union is weighing the pros and cons of what some might call a “happy accident.”
Ohio finally has a constitutional funding formula for the state’s public education system after nearly 30 years, but many schools are still struggling.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done on this,” said Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro.
Every dollar counts when it comes to schools, he added.
But a mistake in the funding formula has led to what could be considered good news for hundreds of schools.
The state overpaid K-12 school districts, charter schools and private school voucher programs by about $30 million this year.
“That could be salaries for staff to address class size issues; it could be additional resource officers; it could be some additional counselors or nurses; it could be assistance in terms of maintenance,” DiMauro added.
I got the financial records, and districts like Cleveland schools got about $700,000, Akron got $400,000, Parma got $175,000, and Canton got $145,000. I contacted each one, but no one was available to talk.
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In total, the Department of Education and Workforce overpaid public schools by $21 million, charters by $2 million, career centers by $1.2 million and county disability development boards by $135,000. The remaining amount, ranging from $4 million to $6 million, went to the EdChoice voucher program.
Luckily for schools, money has no visible ties.
“We’re not going to get all that money back,” said Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima).
Huffman acknowledged that the fluke was due to faulty data.
“There was an error in the calculation of the school funding formula,” he added.
I contacted DEW to get clarity on what happened. Spokeswoman Lacey Snoke told me the calculation system is based on the average amount of money a student needs by district. However, some schools did not report certain expenses, which ended up inflating the amount per student.
“Fourteen school districts did not report expenditures related to co-curricular athletic activities, so the approximately 11,000 students who attended those schools were excluded from the per-pupil amount calculation,” he wrote.
Including those students would have reduced the per-student amount used to calculate the formula by $1.40. This occurred for three of the per-student amounts used in the base cost calculation.
Not all schools benefited from the miscalculation. Eighty of the 610 public schools ended up owing money to the state.
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“I like to fix problems as quickly as possible; what we would simply do is, say, starting next biennium, make the basic formula based not on what we paid, but on what we intended to pay,” Huffman explained.
DiMauro worries that Huffman’s solution, whether a quick technical fix or something larger, could actually hurt the funding formula. This is where the invisible the ropes can be.
It has taken the educator years to help implement a constitutional funding formula, opposed by Republican lawmakers like Huffman. Now that he’s finally here, he worries that this is a way to change the system.
“I would hate to see any harm done to the districts,” DiMauro said.
That change should occur before the end of June.
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