Rain, Meet Piss: How Ohio Keeps Screwing Over Public School Kids

Ohio Senate gives only 30% of its Education funding increase to the 85% of kids attending public schools

I hate to be a broken record here, but just as the Governor and Ohio House did earlier this year, it’s the Ohio Senate’s turn to put lipstick on their hideous budget pig.

While I appreciate them returning the Fair School Funding Plan to the budget (which the Ohio House killed in its version), but of course they don’t fund it fully. And they play around with some of the funding elements. Why? Not because of policy, but because it nets them more money to give to unaccountable private schools through taxpayer funded tuition subsidies.

But what really pisses me off is they claim there’s a $633 million increase to education. But that’s all education — public schools, charter schools and vouchers are included in that number. How much is going to local public school kids through the Fair School Funding plan? $192 million of that. That’s barely 30 percent of the additional education funding.

That’s right. The Ohio Senate is crowing about its record education funding, but hiding the fact that public school kids are only getting 30 percent of it, despite public school kids making up 85 percent of all school kids in the state.

You remember all those “money follows the kid” claims pro-privatization advocates always demanded education funding systems do? Well, how the hell does giving 30 percent of a new funding stream to 85 percent of the students and 70 percent of the funding increase to 15 percent, especially when the vast majority of that 70 percent increase would go to adults who never sent their kids to public school in the first place, meet that definition?

Oh yeah. And we still can’t audit a single damn penny of this voucher money. So we have no idea how it’s being spent.

Not.

One.

Idea.

There’s a saying I’ve grown fond of that goes like this: “Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.”

But that’s exactly what this legislature and Governor do to Ohio’s kids all the time — crow about huge education funding increases, yet provide a tiny fraction of that increase to the 85 percent of Ohio school children who attend this state’s public schools. This is exactly how today, Ohio’s public school students only receive about 75 percent of all K-12 Education funding despite being 85 percent of the population.

Oh yeah. The Ohio Senate is also doing school districts a “favor” by allowing districts to now keep their rainy day funds unless they are more than 50 percent of their overall revenue. Great. Now small, rural districts only have to give back the majority of their hard-earned savings, not the vast majority of it like they did under the House, which required them to give back everything over 30 percent (as listed below).

Again. Rain, meet Piss.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. This is how Ohio’s legislative and executive branch leaders have lied to us for the last 35 years. And by the looks of it, this pattern will never change.

Unless we change the leaders.

Time to get to work.

(I’ll expand on these clowns’ horrendous plan to eliminate inside millage on property taxes and wipe out services for kids and adults with developmental disabilities soon.)