State of the State Location's SOS

Gov. John Kasich will be travelling to Medina County (the home of current House Speaker Bill Batchelder) this month for his State of the State Address. And, while he should be commended for taking these events outside Columbus, there is perhaps no place in the state that better epitomizes the current Governor's commitment to public education than Medina County.

Just a few highlights:

• Children in Medina County schools will have $13.7 million fewer for their educations since Gov. Kasich took office
• Children in Medina City Schools have $4.4 million less
• Meanwhile, payments to Charter Schools have increased by about one-third ($3.4 million to $4.3 million). And in the 2011-2012 school, every dollar that went to a Charter School from a Medina County district went to a poorer performing Charter School.
• And even more alarming, payments to private schools through Vouchers has gone from zero dollars the year before Kasich took office to $937,000 this school year.
• All that money going to Charters and Vouchers means that children who continue attending Medina County schools have 5.2% less state revenue than the state's funding formula says they need.
• Is it any surprise, then, that Medina County schools have been to the ballot requesting more than $70 million in local property and income taxes to replace the cuts since May 2011?

The children of Medina County have significantly fewer educational opportunities now. In their world, the State of the State is not that great. Perhaps Gov. Kasich (or Speaker Batchelder) has an explanation for all this. If he does, I'm sure the children in Medina would love to hear it.

Cutting through the Rhetoric

Here's my letter to the editor for one of my local newspapers, the South Side Leader:

To the editor:What the Ohio General Assembly did last week to education is extremely troubling. While legislators are trying to fool the public into thinking that somehow they increased money for education, in fact, school districts are receiving $515 million less than they received from the state three years ago.

Three out of four Ohio school districts have less state revenue than they did then, including Green ($1.4 million), Manchester ($1.3 million), Mogadore ($389,000), Springfield ($1.1 million), Copley-Fairlawn ($2.8 million), Coventry ($760,000) and Revere ($3.5 million).And these cuts don’t include the additional money districts will be losing to charter schools, 70 percent of which will rate an F on the new report card. Currently, every kid not in a charter school loses 6.5 percent of their state money because charters remove so much from districts. Nearly every dollar sent to a charter from a South Side News Leader-area district goes to one that performs far worse than the district.

Finally, every district will be subject to losing money to private school vouchers, even if the school is highly rated.

In short, this budget represents an attack on public education. In the 2010-11 school year, 50 percent of the revenue for education came from the state — the first time that’s happened in three decades. Today, that number is back down to about 47 percent.

The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four times that the state’s duty is to reduce the need for property taxes to pay for schools. This budget will continue to increase the need. Since 2011, a record $1.3 billion in new levy money to fund operations have been before Ohio voters as property taxpayers continued to foot the bill for our legislators’ constitutional failure.To add insult to injury, since the state decided to eliminate state support of property tax cuts in this budget, anyone who voted for it will have voted for what could be the largest property tax increase in state history.

Stephen Dyer, Green (Stephen Dyer is a former District 43 [now District 36] state representative and current education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, a Columbus-based think tank.)

What's amazing, is this letter could be written about most every area of the state. Yet that's not what many are saying, accepting $1.8 billion less for education as the state's new funding reality. I fail to understand how it can be with a budget that has billions more in revenue than the one from three years ago.