Yes. The State of Ohio provides about one-third of the funding used to operate our school district. The existing school funding scheme in Ohio is simple:
In July 2009, the General Assembly passed, and Governor Strickland signed, the Biennial State Budget Bill, the legislation which details how Ohio’s public schools are allocated funding from the State of Ohio. This Bill radically altered the approach used to determine how much State money each school district receives.
The prior system was simple in concept: multiply the number of students by a per-student funding allowance ($5,732 in FY09), and subtract the amount of money that would be generated by 23 mills of property taxes on the real estate in the school district. As of July 2009, the result of this calculation was $26.6 million.
A number of other adjustments were made to this base calculation, yielding a final number of $34.6 million.
More details of the prior funding calculation can be seen in the SF-3 Report prepared by the Ohio Department of Education for each school district. Both current and historical reports are available online at the ODE's website. A recent Hilliard SF-3 is available here.
The new funding system is constructed using most of the concepts of the Governor’s Evidence Based Model. Rather than a single per-student funding allowance, as was used in the prior approach, the new system details a large number of components. For example, it specifies that there is one teacher of core subjects (language arts, math, science, social studies, and foreign language) for every fifteen students for grades K-3, and one for every 25 students for grades 4-12. Grades K-8 would then be allocated 20% more teachers for other subjects, and 9-12 would get 25% more. Special Education, Limited English Proficiency, and Supplemental teachers would be added as well. For our District, the total number of teachers required would be 1,044.
Then the total number of teachers would be multiplied by $51,407, representing the average cost of salary and benefits for the teacher staff. This works out to $53.6 million. Then this number would be adjusted by the Ohio Instructional Quality Index, which for HCSD is current set in the law to 1.155. The result is a total funding number of approximately $62 million.
The same kind of calculations is repeated for support staff, administrators, and operations staff. The sum of all these calculations works out to be about $81 million for HCSD in 2010. However, this number is reduced by the amount of money that would be generated by 20 mills of property taxes on the real estate in the school district. An example is available here.
After other adjustments, the final State funding number would be $35.6 million, a number remarkably close to the one determined by the prior system.
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