After 2024 levy, bond issue failures, Ohio school districts prepare to ‘punt and patch’

By India Gardener and Josh Aponte/Kent State NewsLab

Of the 142 school funding issues on ballots across Ohio in November 2024, 71 passed. 

While some districts, including Akron, will have funding to rebuild schools and offer continued programming, others — like Ravenna, Twinsburg, and Mogadore — may struggle to bridge the gap in funding for school programs and building repairs. 

“Ohio votes at the local level on levies far more than any other state,” said Howard Fleeter, a consultant with the Ohio Education Policy Institute. “We are a state that delivers a lot of services for levies at a local level.” 

School levies and bond issues generally raise voters’ property taxes. Many voters are already burdened with rising costs of living, including increased property taxes due to reappraisals, and are reluctant to approve more tax increases. 

A recent poll from Ideastream, Signal Ohio, and WKYC showed that a majority of voters in Northeast Ohio, including in areas like Strongsville and Medina, have become more resistant to supporting new school levies, even if they recognize the need for better school funding. 

“The problem is the motivation to get people to vote yes on a levy. They have to see cuts” to be convinced that additional funds are necessary, said Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro. “You never want to see that; you start cutting transportation, sports, increase pay-to-play fees. You lay off teachers, increase class sizes, cut electives, and then, you’re directly undercutting the quality of education and that’s just a really hard position to be in.”

In the Aurora City School District, Issue 32 would have built a new high school if it had passed. Aurora Superintendent Mike Roberto says the district is facing problems with the current high school and middle school buildings.

“The good work that’s happening in the classrooms is still going to take place, but we’re dealing with like leaky roofs and our potholes in our roads,” Roberto said.  “And we do have students that are in trailers in two of our elementaries because of the capacity of those particular buildings.”

Roberto and the rest of the district now need to fix the current issues within some of the buildings.

“Punt and patch,” Roberto said.  “You kick the can down the road a little bit, and then you just try to keep the school district afloat — you literally work on one roof at a time, one parking lot at a time, one boiler at a time, and you just triage what’s happening there.” 

The Ravenna school district is at risk of fiscal emergency after failing to renew critical funding. Without that funding, Ravenna may be forced to make critical cuts that could impact classroom resources and staffing, district staff told NewsLab prior to the election. 

Ohio leaders have proposed measures to bolster education funding, such as the Fair School Funding Plan, which was aimed to address disparities in state funding and ensure schools receive resources based on student needs. But he also emphasizes the role of local levies in complementing state funding to maintain essential programs. 

“The Fair School Funding plan is a good mechanism for dealing with the issues of equity and adequacy, but it’s only as good as the data that’s behind it,” Fleeter said. “The state-local share part of it will work better once property values stabilize, which I think is already happening.”

Property taxes play a significant role in funding schools through local levies, impacting the resources available to districts. 

“The big picture in all this is that since the 1970s, Ohio, had House Bill 920, which says that once the voters approve a levy for a certain amount of property taxes to go to the schools, and can’t grow with inflation,” said DiMauro. That means districts must continually pass levies to keep up with the rising cost of education.

DeRolph V. State School Funding case, decided in 1997, declared Ohio’s school funding system unconstitutional, citing an overreliance on local property taxes and the resulting inequities between wealthy and low-income districts. 

“Fixing it is going to involve an investment that’s more than just inflation,” said Fleeter. “It’s not that we don’t know what to do to solve some of the problems with the school funding formula. It’s that we have lacked the consistent political will to actually tackle those problems.”

This story was originally published by the Kent State NewsLab, a collaborative news outlet publishing journalism by Kent State students.