From The Buckeye Institute

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Next Tuesday, there will be 194 schools with levies of varying sizes on the (Ohio) ballot.
Many supporters of increasing education taxes, such as the Ohio Education Association (OEA), are arguing that the reason that so many school districts introduced levies is due primarily to funding cuts from the state level.   This is a disingenuous argument.  Rather than too little revenue forcing districts to go hat-in-hand to voters, by in large, Ohio schools have a spending problem that long pre-dates any revenue reductions forcing them to do so.

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The newest Policy Brief by the Buckeye Institute shows that state spending on education has far outpaced inflation for years while the total compensation packages of school district employees have been on a glide path to almost uniformly unsustainable levels.  In many cases the median salary of teachers within a district far exceeds the median household income in the surrounding area and leads to a situation where the overall compensation consumes the vast majority of districts’ revenues.  In some cases, over 100 percent of projected revenues over a five-year time period go to nothing but compensation, meaning that there would not be revenue to pay for maintenance, utilities, technology expenses or anything else that facilitates a strong learning environment.

This unsustainable rate of growth stands in stark contrast to the median salaries for most Ohioans, which has dropped precipitously over the last decade. This disproportionate growth in employee compensation spending is the result of a collective bargaining law in Ohio that ties the hands of management when hard decisions are most necessary.  Instead of reforming compensation packages, school boards are typically forced into asking for more tax revenue or into making cuts with a meat cleaver rather than a more appropriate scalpel.

The data shows that long-term unsustainable costs at the local level are driving districts into the red, not cuts from Columbus.  If the spending problem is not addressed, then taxpayers are going to be on a never ending hamster wheel of local levies.