Thursday, March 06, 2014
From John Curry, March 6, 2014
The STRS reply to the ORSC
is attached. Of course, Wachtmann and his fellow legislators have dragged their
feet for almost two decades without adequate funding to Ohio's schools, haven't
they? In case you forgot that one...here it is.....
John
From Ohio History Central
DeRolph v. State of Ohio
In 1991, the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School
Funding, representing more than five hundred school districts in Ohio, filed
suit in the Perry County courts against the State of Ohio for failing to provide
adequate funding to educate the state's students. The case was known as DeRolph
v. State of Ohio and was named for Nathan DeRolph, a student in the Sheridan
High School, in the Northern Local School District in Perry County. The
districts claimed that the state failed to provide an "efficient" educational
system, as dictated by the Ohio Constitution of 1851, by relying so heavily upon
local property taxes to fund schools. The districts contended that school
systems in areas with higher property values could much more easily meet the
needs of and provide more opportunities for their students, while students in
poorer areas suffered.
In 1994, Perry County Court Judge Linton Lewis, Jr., ruled that "public
education is a fundamental right in the state of Ohio" and that the state
legislature had to provide a better and more equitable means of financing
education. Lewis's decision overturned an earlier Ohio Supreme Court ruling from
1979, which claimed that Ohio's school financing system was adequate.
The Ohio legislature appealed the decision to the Fifth District Court of
Appeals, which overturned Lewis's decision, stating that he did not have the
power to overturn an Ohio Supreme Court decision. The school districts then
filed an appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court, which agreed to consider the case
in 1996. The next year, the court ruled that Ohio's current method of funding
schools violated the Ohio Constitution. The justices ordered that the state
government "enact a constitutional school-funding system."
Unfortunately for state officials, the Ohio Supreme Court provided no real
guidance on how to create a constitutional school-funding program. The
legislature, instead of implementing an entire overhaul of the system, simply
authorized more state funds to schools. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, the Ohio
Supreme Court ruled again that the school-funding process in Ohio remained
unconstitutional, but the court eventually determined that the Ohio government
had made a good-faith effort to change public school funding, and the justices
overturned their earlier rulings. Critics of school funding in Ohio remain
active in calling for a complete overhaul of the system and an end to the heavy
reliance upon property taxes.
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