Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition reports that public school districts are billing the state for revenue lost to state-created charters. Thus far, three districts have billed the state. There are likely to be more.
Here is the first:
“Woodridge Local School District invoices Ohio Department of Education (ODE) in the amount of $5,027,058.38 for deductions of funds for charter schools
“The Woodridge Local School District Board of Education authorized Superintendent Walter Davis and Treasurer Deanna Levenger to invoice ODE to recoup losses of $5,027,058.38 for deductions made to charter schools for the period of FY 2000 through FY 2015.
The Logan Hocking Board of Education adopted a resolution to invoice the state, in the amount of $4,729,901, for the charter school deductions since year 2000. This sparked a front page article in the Logan Daily News.
The article covered several aspects of the privatization movement.
Ed Penrod, a board member and OSBA President, is quoted in the article, “What is going on needs public outcry.””
“The Woodridge Board of Education urges other districts to do likewise.”
William Phillis
Ohio E & A
Now another district has sent a bill to the state:
“Another district invoices the state for funds lost to charters
“Logan Hocking Local School District adopted a resolution October 26 to bill the state in the amount of nearly $5 million for deductions for charter students. One of the Board members, Edgar Penrod, is President of the Ohio School Boards Association this year.”
William Phillis
Ohio E & A
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Next step after the state refuses to pay the bill, court, but I suspect that if these districts win in court, the majority of the state legislature or the governor owned by the billionaire oligarchs will just ignore the court verdicts and spend tax payer money to fight this as long as they can on appeal. The goal of the corporate education demolition derby will be to drag the court cases out on appeal until there are no more public schools left and the issue will go away on its own.
Le us use simple math:
In the last 15 years 5% of the public schools have converted to charter schools. That means charter schools change 1/3% of public schools per year. At that rate all public schools will be gone in 285 years, i.e., by year 2300 AD. All of us will no longer be around including all the oligarchs, governors and the legislature mentioned above.
This demolition derby is the slowest in the history of mankind.
Raj, if charter schools in Ohio are receiving not just state funding but also local funding thru a funding “shell game” should people who provide the local funding be 1. notified of that, and 2. have an opportunity to vote on it?
They have an opportunity to vote on local funding for public schools in this state. They never authorized local money to go to charters. In fact, they were told it was all state dollars.
Your math and logic is totally flawed.
“From school year 1999–2000 to 2012–13, the percentage of all public schools that were (alleged) public (corporate) charter schools increased from 1.7 to 6.2 percent, and the total number of (alleged) public (corporate) charter schools increased from 1,500 to 6,100.
Therefore, in thirteen years, corporate charter schools increased by more than 406% between 2000 – 2013. If that increase stays constant at the same rate between 2013 and 2026, then there will be more than 26,000 corporate Charter schools by 2026, and we will see a decease of public schools by 25%, but the odds are that the increase will not be constant but will accelerate at an even faster pace because of the HUGE amount of money a few billionaire oligarchs and their hedge fund counterparts are spending to speed up the process through media propaganda, campaign contributions, funding cuts to public schools, etc.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30
In addition, just in case you throw out the flawed logic that teachers’ unions are manipulating public opinion to save the public schools, let’s compare how much teachers’ unions spend nationally to the corporate education public school demolition derby (CEPSDD.
I’ve already done this in another comment and provided links to sources and it turned out that the teachers’ unions haven’t even come close to the $100 million mark in spending versus billions of $$$ spent by the FEW billionaire oligarchs funding the CEPSDD.
For instance, just the Walton family spends about $160 million annually to fund the CEPSDD, and Bill Gates spends a lot more.
Speculation on why the media fails to ask Fordham how much their donors (like the Waltons), contribute to support the only charter schools, branded as good, in Ohio? Follow-up question, what happens when the oligarchs and their U.S. Dept. of Education stop financially propping up charter schools?
It helps them because they are accountable to taxpayers in these districts for handling funding. If they have to go back to the public for more local funding they have to explain why they are doing that. If the reason is because they receive less state funding than they did- less state funding per pupil who remains in a public school- that is an explanation on why they need more local funding.
It also makes state lawmakers accountable for public school funding. There can’t be any political accountability for ed reform government in Ohio if people have no idea what is going on with the money they send to the state for education. If they’re paying state taxes and getting less back for their local schools, they need to know that.
I agree, the people need to know what’s going on but what if the media doesn’t give this the coverage it deserves and figuratively brushes this news under the rug? Then many voters might now know it is even happening.
If the schoolgirls do control 90% of the traditional media, I guess that means we have to step up and use internet social media and face-to-face word of mouth to spread this word.
I can’t really complain about that anymore, Lloyd. The fact is the one and only reason anyone in this state understands the real charter situation at all is because every major Ohio newspaper covers it.
It was true at one time that Ohio media were reform cheerleading squads, but no longer. Even the Columbus Dispatch no longer spouts the reform party line and they were head cheerleader. Reporters in Ohio have been much, much better watchdogs than anyone in the statehouse or the ed agency. They’re way ahead of the political actors.
That is good to hear. The media in Ohio actually doing their job. Now if the rest of the country could follow along.
Have you seen the film “Truth”. It just came out last Friday. I went to see it yesterday. The film reveals the real pressure on the media to conform to what the power brokers want.
I hope more districts follow suit. The value may be in the publicity it generates. I suspect that a lot of people have no idea of the magnitude of loss. Supporting choice when faced with the obvious losses to the public schools may cause some people to examine their beliefs a little more seriously.
Maybe someone in North Carolina should do the same thing.
There’s another issue here that they are attempting to explain to the public.
“School districts do subsidize our nationally ridiculed charter schools.
When you have Republican education policy leaders in the Ohio Senate, like Peggy Lehner, go on the record with a statement like this:
“It’s kind of a shell game with the money,” she said. “It’s state dollars, but you have to use local dollars to backfill the state dollars. I think it’s pretty clear that these kids are getting local dollars.”
Or when Ohio House Finance Committee Chairman Ryan Smith describes the charter school funding system like this:
“I think we can find a better way, a more transparent way,” he said. “It’s affecting (schools’) bottom line and could somewhat be deceiving in what they’re actually getting.”
This is really important for two reasons. The first reason is the public in these districts may not know that more state funding is going out than is received for each charter student. That’s the “shell game” Lehner is talking about- where the state funds the charter student at 5k yet the school sends 7k to the charter. That 2k comes from somewhere, and it has to come from one of two places- either the state funding for the kids who remain in the public schools is reduced or it comes from local dollars. The second reason is that the public in Ohio are told again and again that charter schools don’t receive local dollars. They’re told this because they never authorized local dollars to go to charter schools- in fact, they have voted that down on the local level. If local dollars are going to charter schools with this “shell game” and “backfill” that should be up for a vote.
http://www.10thperiod.com/2015/09/debate-over-local-taxpayers-subsidize.html
I’d like to congratulate two lawmakers for actually visiting an Ohio public school:
“Ohio Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni, D-Boardman, and Minority Whip Lou Gentile, D-Steubenville, first met with students for an hour and then met with administrators and parents to talk about their concerns and ideas they have to improve Ohio’s schools.
Shiavoni and Gentile both expressed how impressed they were by the students with whom they spoke, and Schiavoni told parents and teachers how he’s holding “Columbus to the Classroom” meetings all around the state to get a sense of what’s working, what’s not working, and what the state Legislature needs to do.”
We’ve been debating “choice” in this state ever since the ed reform “movement” captured the majority of our state legislatures, so for the last decade, and it seems like that is all anyone in state government is interested in. 93% of kids in this state of ALL income levels attend public schools- urban, rural, suburban, whatever. State lawmakers need to start paying attention to the public schools that exist, instead of chasing their ideological vision of privatized systems and grand schemes.
This week, Sen. Sherrod Brown spoke out to the media about the $71 million that Duncan gave Ohio to expand charters. The ODE was told not to spend the money because the funding is under review.
The reporter was Jeremy Kelley, Dayton Daily News.
TWENTY-SIX Ohio school boards have now passed resolutions to call attention to how money is being taken away from traditional public school systems to support charter schools that traditionally have much lower academic achievement rates than public schools. The numbers continue to grow!
1. Woodridge (Summit County)
2. Logan-Hocking (Hocking County)
3. Troy (Miami County)
4. Elyria (Lorain County)
5. Parma (Cuyahoga County)
6. West Clermont (Clermont County)
7. Cardinal (Geauga County)
8. Keystone (Lorain County)
9. Northmont (Montgomery County)
10. Jackson (Stark County)
11. Streetsboro (Portage County)
12. Firelands (Lorain County)
13. Lake Local (Wood County)
14. Bowling Green (Wood County)
15. Belpre (Washington County)
16. LaBrae (Trumbull County)
17. Southington (Trumbull County)
18. Beaver Local (Columbiana County)
19. Northridge (Montgomery County)
20. Claymont (Tuscarawas County)
21. Southern Local (Perry County)
22. Indian Creek (Jefferson County)
23. Green Local (Summit County)
24. Garaway Local (Tuscarawas County)
25. Xenia (Greene County)
26. Noble Local (Noble County)