Baloney.
What legislators actually did was pass the buck, as usual, to voters, to raise more local money for schools by passing more property tax levies – or butcher local schools’ budgets. What, given voters’ rage over property taxes, is likelier?
Moreover, the school-tax legislation Statehouse Republicans are ballyhooing (a) will likely require {ital.} more {end ital.} levy elections and (b) make them harder to pass because, hey, didn’t the legislature’s carnival barkers claim school taxes would {ital.} fall, {end ital.}, not climb?
The General Assembly’s purported tax reforms will have the effect of even further cutting the state’s share of public school budgets.
Howard Fleeter, the respected school-finance scholar, said in Statehouse testimony that in fiscal year 1999 – the first after Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled that the General Assembly was unconstitutionally underfunding public school – the state’s share of local public school costs was 45.7%.
In contrast, Fleeter estimated that the state treasury’s projected share of public school costs for the fiscal year that began last July 1 is 35%. So, over the last quarter-century two things happened in Ohio’s 600-plus school districts: Slashed programs, and more levies.
To their credit, many Ohio homeowners, with and without chidden, invest in Ohio’s future by approving levies. Trouble is, the cost of living keeps rising and, especially for older homeowners, more levies are unaffordable.
Yet the bottom-line of the General Assembly’s nifty-difty stunt is to further burden local school boards. So it’s school boards, not feckless legislators, that’ll draw heat from homeowners.
Attention, honorable General Assembly members: You took an oath the day you were sworn in to uphold the Ohio Constitution. And among other things it says, “the General Assembly” – not the South Soybean school board – “shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, ... [to] ... secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.”
Meanwhile, the legislature has (unconstitutionally) sluiced oceans of cash to subsidize the tuition of pupils attending non-public, often religious, K-12 schools. (And, oh yes, our 132 states-persons are handing $600 million in cash to the NFL’s klutzes, the Cleveland Browns, for a new stadium in Brook Park, amid a spaghetti bowl of highway ramps clotted with passenger traffic to and from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.)
Limiting schools’ avenues for seeking levies will also limit a board’s options. Politically, General Assembly members, except when it comes to defying Ohio voters’ clear commitment to abortion choice and marijuana legalization, and some legislators’ trashing of LGBTQ Ohioans, didn’t say much about that snag.
Homeowners have every right to be angry about a property-tax “system” that’s impossible to understand unless a homeowner is a CPA. That “system” also makes public investment in public schools grossly unequal, with pupils in well-off neighborhoods receiving far more public support than, say, K-12 pupils in Appalachian Ohio. That’s not only unconstitutional; it’s also flat-out wrong.
An Ohioan is an Ohioan in the eyes of school law the state constitution or should be. But a school funding setup that hinges on real estate values undermines that pupil-to-pupil parity
For example, in Greater Cleveland’s Beachwood district, 1 mill of property tax yields $650 per pupil. But in Pike County’s Eastern Local district, which includes parts of Jackson and Scioto counties – just one example from Appalachian Ohio – 1 mill of property tax yields $150, making levies a huge struggle. Yet pupils in suburban Cleveland, and in the hills south of Columbus, are all Ohioans, constitutionally guaranteed a thorough and efficient public education.
Are pupils in both districts getting the equal opportunities Ohio promises all its children? No: And the quartet of purported property-tax-cuts the General Assembly passed can only worsen those inequities. Legislators sang the “Hallelujah” chorus. Ohioans who know better heard a dirge.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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