I listened to this story on my way to work today, and was disheartened by the facts regarding state education funding that were skewed in the reporting. It was especially disheartening in the wake of yesterday's interesting and informative WKSU reporting about Nate DeRolph, whose work spurred several Ohio Supreme Court decisions about our state's inability to fund our public education system adequately and fairly.

I have an interest in this story because I am the parent of three children attending public schools in a restructued School District due to enormous reductions in state education funding.

State Senator Peggy Lehner commented that cuts in education were due largely to recession and a decline in federal stimulus dollars. Many cuts in state funding were due to the recession. What is not stated, is that the federal stimulus dollars were never meant to be relied upon on a long-term basis. They were given to Ohio and other states as a temporary measure because the nation was in a recession. And, they helped tremendously - preventing many teaching and education-related jobs not to be lost even at the height of the recession.

The federal stimulus dollars accomplished what they were set out to do. Even given the temporary nature of the federal stimulus dollars, the most recent data available on the State's Ohio Department of Education website (2010-11) shows that federal revenue as a share of total revenue in my School District continues to increase and is at its highest level ever.

State Senator Peggy Lehner neglects to take responsibility for the state funding that school districts and municipalities lost because of her decisions and those of her colleagues in the legislature. One decision was to eliminate the TPPT (tangible personal property tax), a local revenue source collected by the state and returned largely to the School Districts and municipalities that generated it. These school districts and municipalities relied on TPPT revenue to finance large portions of their school and city budgets. My School District has had many cuts as a result of this lost revenue source, and my city has proposed an increase in our local income tax because of the loss of this state revenue source.

State Senator Peggy Lehner asked Innovation Ohio "to stop looking back and look ahead" regarding state spending on public education. Clearly, we cannot stop looking back because it affects what is happening today. My school district will continue to lose state funding for many more years given the phase out of the TPPT tax. It was her past actions and her legislative colleagues who cut our sources of education revenue, which hurt schools in the past, and continues to hurt schools today - in lost teaching jobs, in school closings, and in lost school programs.

Posted by: Theresa (Wooster, OH) on January 30, 2013 8:01AM