Dyer: Ohio’s reliance on property tax system to fund schools growing, not shrinking under Kasich

Back in October we released an analysis which showed that November school levy initiatives seeking ‘new money’ were the highest since 2008. Just last year, the administration of Gov. John Kasich and the GOP-led Ohio General Assembly cut $1.8 billion from Ohio public education. We believe there is a cause and effect relationship here and it boils down to this: Kasich’s cuts – while making the state budget look better – simply shifted the burden in many villages and cities around Ohio onto the backs of local property tax payers. Of course, in many cases, the levies failed. In those communities Kasich and his rubber stamp Statehouse shifted the burden onto Ohio kids who are losing teachers, bus service, extra-curricular activities and even hours out of the school day. Where new levies pass, the funding burden is shifting to more property taxes. As part of the project we posted several levy profiles on our blog, Innovation Station, and began maintaining a page dedicated to collecting our analysis, profiles and infographics on the topic, Kasich Cuts = More Levies. We want to wrap up the work from this fall, but we will continue to watch what we believe is going to be an unfortunate trend for some time to come in Ohio – more levies or more drastic cuts. A few things to remember about our work. First, we concentrated on ‘new money’ levies. This simply means that districts we looked at were coming to voters with requests for additional or new millage requests. We did not count renewal levies for instance when we pointed out that 83% of Ohio’s counties had new money levies on the ballot. When it came to the districts we chose to profile, there were two criteria. They had to be new money levies and the districts had to have a documented history of recent fairly drastic cuts. Through a review of Ohio local media, such districts – large and small – were not hard to find. One last note on why we chose to look at fall levies rather than all levies from both the spring and fall of this year. The chart to the right shows the success rate of renewal levies v. new levies during fall elections in Ohio. New money levies have a high rate of failure in fall elections. School boards know this. For a board to go to voters for new money in the fall is a sign that funding issues are getting to critical condition in that district. [Read more…]