NO FUNDING OFFERED … Montpelier School District Treasurer Carla Rice explains three pieces of legislature that may become unfunded mandates for school districts around the state. (PHOTO BY TIM KAYS, STAFF)
By: Tim Kays
At the February 9 meeting of the Montpelier Board of Education, Legislative Liaison Shawn Owen reported that Governor DeWine signed the executive order that formalizes the budget reductions for the 2021 fiscal year.
Owen said, “They’re pleased to report the cuts with the Department of Education budget are not as significant as the cuts in the 2020 year, which means we should see more funding than what they expected. They’re monitoring 67 different house bills and 37 Senate bills that have been introduced, but haven’t seen any action as of yet.”
Treasurer Carla Rice added, “The governor’s budget that was sent to the legislature, school funding was frozen at the fiscal year 2019 level. But also at the same time the governor acknowledged that there is in the process, the new fair school funding plan, or basically legislation is going through for a new funding formula. So he acknowledged that whatever plan comes from the legislature is what he would be approving.”
As indicated by Owen, there are a lot of other things that may be coming out of the legislature, and some of them may carry a steep price tag.
Rice reported that at a meeting at the Northwest Ohio Education Service Center earlier that day, she was updated on three house bills that the Ohio School Board Association (OSBA) referred to as, ‘unfunded mandates’. They were trying to give us a heads up that these are things that are coming,” she said, “…and to be prepared.”
The first was House Bill 123. “This is dealing with reporting programs and school threat assessment,” Rice said. “There’s basically three things the school is required to do. The first one is and then an anonymous reporting system needs to be in place by the beginning of fiscal year 2022. So we need to have a way for people to anonymously report a threat that they know of.’
“They told us that there is a state reporting system that is free to all entities. That is something that we’ll probably be looking into and how to hook up to that. The second thing was to develop a threat assessment team. This team has to be trained, and it has to have certified PD (Professional Development). So they’ll be coming up with another PD program.”
“The team focuses on students in grades 6 through 12, and this team must be in place by fiscal year 2023. Members of the team would be for example, the SRO, social workers, some teachers, administrators, the local police department…some different things like that related to safety issues. All the cost for this team is unfunded at this time.”
“The third part of that,” Rice continued, “…was to develop a curriculum for grades 6 through 12 to include suicide awareness, prevention, safety and violence training, and social inclusion. A couple of these I think we already do – suicide awareness and prevention. So there’s some programs already going on that we’ll just have to pretty much formalize.”
“But a staff person will be required to be trained to provide these services. And finally, the threat assessment plan becomes part of our emergency plan. And now instead of filing that emergency plan with ODE, it will be filed with the Ohio Department of Public Safety.”
“So now they are kind of the umbrella over this whole program that we’ll be working with. That will be something that we’ll have to be working on over the next couple years.”
The next measure discussed was House Bill 436. Rice reported, “This one requires dyslexia screening and services. That bill established the state’s dyslexia committee. They’ll develop a dyslexia handbook, which will guide the local districts for whatever their requirements are. The handbook will be completed by December 31, 2021.”
“Teacher PD is required, and there’s hours that will be determined by the committee. Right now, the hours in the law require the 6 to 18 hours. It’s not clear yet if that’s going to be semester hours like a college course, is this a seminar, or is it just hours? They have to all determine all that. The handbook will set the required ratio of teachers that need to be certified.”
“Right now OSBA is going to campaign for one teacher per building that houses a K through 3. The certification of the teacher, they are warning us, is very expensive, and it takes about a year to get through the process to get certified.”
“So we did kind of bring to the forefront that…these costs aren’t funded by legislation either; we’ll probably end up with some extra supplemental-type contracts that allow a person to do this.”
“But by fiscal year 2023, we must screen all K through 3 students for dyslexia, and the teachers will need to be trained to do the screening, which is different than a teacher that’s been certified. It’s not as expensive, but there’ll have to be some PD for staff to be able to be a part of that screening in those grade levels.”
House Bill 68 is a Peace Officer Interaction Curriculum requirement. “The original House Bill 68,” Rice said, “…was originally to be to provide community service for a person who has lost their driver’s license.”
“Well somehow out of the blue, they added in to the bill a requirement that ODE develop a curriculum for how to react when you’re stopped by a police officer. The Board then must adopt this curriculum, and it has to be included in one or more courses. It will be a requirement for graduation that all students have this class by fiscal year 2023, so everybody will have to have this program.”
“There again…unfunded, and we don’t know what the certification is or anything like that. The teacher that teaches it, what’s the certification requirements, and all that stuff.”
While still digesting the unfunded mandates about to befall the district, Ms. Rice tempered the news with the report of additional funding coming Montpelier’s way. “We are in line for the ESSER 2.0 (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) grant,” she said. “So the COVID Act monies, we are going to get four times what we got before. Our number right now is at $643,008.14 that will be in this grant.”
“They announced today that we should have the grant application open shortly, for sure by the end of this month. So we’ll be getting that in process and making plans for that money. The one thing that was good about this grant, it has opened up a little more so that you can use it for things that keep your normal operation going.”
“It translates into we should be able to move some of our salary expenditures maybe over into this fund, which basically gives us that money put back into the general fund.”
Additional Foundation funding will be coming also. “Last year,” Rice said, “…we had about a 1.4% decrease in funding. That equaled for us about $130,000; we’re going to get $71,000 of that back. I’m supposed to see the first payment of that this Friday in our Foundation. That money will be additional; that is not in our five-year forecast at this point.”
Continuing, Rice reported, “The state GRF (General Revenue Fund) funds were having higher state revenues and performing better than projected, so they’re seeing higher sales tax. They think everybody instead of going on vacation, stayed home and bought stuff, so sales tax is higher.”
“Income tax is higher as well, which was kind of surprising, but it exceeded estimates that were in place prior to the shutdown. So that was also the views. Our school district income tax settlement was received the end of January, and it was about 4% higher than it was the same quarter last year.”
“So we are coming back in our income tax, as projected. The actual amount we received was $321,013.84.”
Ms. Rice reported that property values in the district showed an upward tick. “I received real estate values from the County Auditor this week,” she said. “Our values actually increased by 1% to $95,846,930. Ag values decreased by 1% compared to last year, but residential increased by 5% from last year. This kind of translates into your bill probably went up on your house.”
Tim can be reached at tim@thevillagereporter.com
