The $2.86 Billion Schools Were Promised, and Didn't Get

In 2021, Ohio did the thing it almost never manages on schools: both parties agreed. After decades of a funding system courts had repeatedly found unconstitutional, Republicans and Democrats sat down together and built a replacement. They called it the Fair School Funding Plan. For the first time in a generation, the state would calculate what it actually costs to educate a child, district by district, and fund to that number. The catch was the timeline. Full funding would phase in over six years, arriving in the 2027 budget year.

That year is almost here. The formula is not.

The 2025 state budget quietly walked away from the plan before it finished. In its place the legislature put a "guarantee," a word that sounds protective and does close to the opposite of what the formula was designed to do.

Formula versus guarantee

Start with what a formula does. It asks a question: given this district's students, its poverty rate, its costs, what does an adequate education cost here, and how much of that can local property taxes reasonably cover? Whatever the local share cannot reach, the state fills. When costs rise or a district gets poorer, the number moves with it.

A guarantee asks nothing. It looks at what a district got last year and promises it will not get less. That protects a floor. It also freezes every gap the formula was built to close. A district the formula said was owed more this year simply does not get more. The shortfall does not shrink. It sets, like concrete.

That is the swap the 2025 budget made. The state stopped funding what schools need and went back to funding roughly what they already had.

Who absorbs $2.86 billion

Policy Matters Ohio put the size of the retreat at about $2.86 billion. That is the distance between what the formula said Ohio's districts were owed at full phase-in and what the budget actually delivers.

A gap that large does not land evenly. The formula directs the most new money to the districts with the least local wealth, because those are the places where property taxes cannot cover the cost on their own. Freeze the formula and you freeze exactly that help. The districts with the thinnest tax base, high-poverty rural systems and the big urban ones, are the districts that were counting on the phase-in most and lost the most when it stalled.

Which specific districts lost how much, down to the dollar, is a question the state does not advertise, and it is worth a reporter pulling the per-district runs to answer. The direction, though, is not in dispute. A formula built to send help where it is needed most was abandoned right before it delivered, and the places waiting on it are the ones with the fewest other options.

A promise with both parties' names on it

The detail that makes this more than a budget dispute is who made the promise. The Fair School Funding Plan was not a Democratic wish list a Republican legislature blocked. It was bipartisan. It carried Republican sponsors. It passed a Republican-controlled Statehouse and was signed into law. Both sides looked at the same broken system and agreed on the same fix.

Then the same supermajority that had signed on to the six-year plan declined to finish it. Nothing about the cost of educating a child changed between 2021 and 2025. What changed was the will to pay the bill the state had already calculated and agreed to.

Why "guarantee" is the tell

The word was not chosen by accident. "Guarantee" tests well. No one campaigns against guaranteeing school funding. But the guarantee guarantees the one thing the 2021 reform was meant to end: a system where what a district gets depends on what it happened to get before, not on what its students need now.

Meanwhile the state found room in the same era to spend roughly a billion dollars a year sending families to private schools through near-universal vouchers. The money exists. The question the budget answered was where it goes, and it did not go to closing the formula's gap.

So here is the question a voter might carry into 2026, when the legislative seats that wrote this budget are back on the ballot: if both parties once agreed on what Ohio's schools are actually owed, and then the state decided not to pay it, what does a "guarantee" guarantee, other than that the gap stays exactly where it is?