Ohio's congressional delegation has been boasting about the infusion of money the Buckeye State's public schools would receive from the federal stimulus package. Newspapers published charts showing how each district would fare.???? School leaders started making plans for the money. The trouble is, so did Governor Strickland.???? Details now emerging about how the governor intends to use the education dollars included in the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act are leaving school leaders unhappy and lawmakers crying foul.
Take the case of Trimble Local Schools in rural Athens County.????Trimble is oft-described as the state's poorest school district (based on its property wealth valuation per student) and has become the poster child for school funding reform in Ohio. According to the feds, Trimble is due roughly $600,000 from the stimulus bill to provide educational services to low-income students. But under Strickland's budget proposal, Trimble would actually see a $136,000 funding cut over the next two years.
Governor Strickland is using more than $1 billion in one-time money to boost state spending on K-12 education over the next two years. The governor does have some discretion over how the federal stimulus dollars are allocated in his state, so the pleas of rural districts like Trimble and urban ones like Cleveland (where district leaders think the governor's plan will short their schools by about $40 million) may not matter much.
In addition to concerns about the fairness of reallocating money seemingly intended for one district to another are serious questions about whether the governor's spending plans mesh with federal timelines for using the money. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has promised a quick release of funds over the next month and a half to protect jobs and maintain education services, but Strickland intends to use the money in FY2010 and beyond. The state budget process is already expected to drag through the end of June (Ohio must pass a balanced budget by July 1), leaving districts in the lurch when it comes to planning for next school year. But if the feds determine that Ohio has misused the stimulus money, the situation could get even worse, with Strickland and lawmakers left to hash out a major budget corrections bill early in the biennium and in the worst economic climate in decades.
