The Ohio Legislature phased out a funding line in the current budget specifically meant to catch up urban school districts left behind in the state's school-funding formula. The move has officials at districts including Canton and Cleveland worried about the future.
During an Oct. 13 board of education meeting, Canton City School District Treasurer Jeff Gruber said his district just learned of the loss of the Supplemental Targeted Assistance funding about a week and a half ago, which amounts to approximately $4.35 million a year.
"Supplemental targeted assistance has been reduced to zero, and they are telling us on the report they intend on taking back the money that they had already paid us," Gruber said.
The funding was phased out in the biennial state budget approved earlier this year, although the change didn't hit schools' balance sheets until Oct. 1, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce said in a statement. Gruber said the district is now anticipating an expected $17 million deficit in the 2028 fiscal year due to cuts in both state and federal funding.
In total, 36 Ohio school districts will lose about $52.2 million in the current fiscal year from the ending of Supplemental Targeted Assistance. The districts included some of the largest school districts in the state like Cleveland, Akron, Dayton and Toledo, but also some mid-sized and smaller districts like Lorain and Warren in Trumbull County.
Education policy analyst Stephen Dyer, a former Democrat state representative, said the funding stream was once used to offset issues with calculating urban school districts' state aid under the Fair School Funding Plan, a bipartisan model of school funding implemented four years ago.
"A lot of what was funded early disproportionately helped some districts and not others, and one of the groups of districts that were gonna need to be helped out in the early phases of the Fair School Funding Plan implementation until it was fully funded, were the urban districts," he explained.
The Ohio Legislature this year tweaked the Fair School Funding Plan model, which meant slight increases and losses in state aid for Ohio public schools, although Republican leaders at the time argued the state was still providing more money to schools than it ever had before. However, it was still far cry from what a fully funded version of the Fair School Funding Plan would look like, according to a Policy Matters Ohio analysis from earlier this year.
That analysis from the public policy nonprofit suggested public schools would be missing out on almost $2.75 billion over the next two years under the current state budget, compared to a fully funded version of the plan.
"The issue is if you say that you're now fully implementing the Fair School Funding Plan, but you're not fully funding it, you still have the same problem," Dyer said. "Which is until it's fully funded, a lot of the benefit that flows through the fair school funding plan to urban districts doesn't get fully realized until it gets fully funded."
Following the formula?
The Republican majority in the Ohio Legislature said it was following the Fair School Funding Formula, according to a statement issued Thursday, which in its final phase called for ending Supplemental Targeted Assistance. That means the state is no longer providing funding for districts with students who live in the district, but attend schools elsewhere, said David Fraizer, deputy press secretary for the Senate majority caucus.
"Critics have made allegations that schools lost money unduly under this approach, however, the school districts were previously profiting under this method," Fraizer said. "Canton City Schools had been receiving roughly $4.3 million across the biennium for the education of students who were not under their education system. The funding they are now receiving is based on the students who are in attendance and enrolled. Additionally, Canton City Schools is estimated to receive more funding per student enrolled than before the enactment of the Fair School Funding Plan."
Sen. Jane Timken, a Republican whose district includes Canton, said higher scores one the state report card now also net school districts additional funding under the adjusted state funding model.
“The additional aid previously given was to help the school districts transition from receiving funding based on the students’ home address school district to the student’s enrolled school district," she said in a statement. "During the Operating Budget process, additional funding opportunities were created to encourage growth. Previously, Canton City Schools did not project to quality for this additional state aid in the Performance Supplement. I am happy to see, as of September, there has been improvement in the state report cards for Canton City Schools, which would bring the school district to quality for these funds and be eligible to receive further state financial aid. Parents and voters should also know that the district carried over more than $41 million dollars to start the school year.”
Cleveland Metropolitan School District will also be losing about $5 million per year with the phase-out of the Supplemental Targeted Assistance funding.
"Supplemental Targeted Assistance was designed to protect the educational experience of students in low-wealth, low-income districts with declining enrollments," said Chief Financial Officer Kevin Stockdale. "The state’s decision to cut Supplemental Targeted Assistance is only one way in which it has shifted costs to local communities by abandoning the Fair School Funding Plan. It forces more districts, like Cleveland, onto old minimum funding guarantees. Cleveland has already experienced $16 million in state cuts since 2024. This means the state is only funding students, teachers, and schools for a portion of the cost of education in 2021."
During a Sept. 23 board of education meeting, Stockdale said the district will need to cut its budget in the coming years to avoid a deficit, despite voters approving a levy in Nov. 2024. That will mean at least $5 million in cuts this fiscal year and another $35 million in the following fiscal year.
Eric Resnick, a former Canton City School Board member who is running for re-election, argued the loss of Supplemental Targeted Assistance is a sign the state is targeting funding for diverse, high-poverty urban districts. Resnick is also a member of the steering committee for the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, a group of schools that is suing the state over the money going to vouchers for private schools.
"It is more proof that the legislature is trying to destroy such (urban) districts, and communities are going to be hurt by this," he said. "And they are still not funding the Fair School Funding Plan fully."
Fraizer said that claim is "completely absurd and has no foundation" in reality.
"The Legislature does not and has never taken race into account when determining school funding," he said.
