Your Lottery Dollars and School Funding. Yeah, that's it.

Where’s the pea? An old con game designed to fleece onlookers of their money used three half walnut shells and a small pea. The con person would turn one of the shells over and show the pea’s location and then bet that he could move the shells in such a way that the onlooker could not locate the pea.
After a few trial runs where the onlooker always knew the location of the pea the betting would begin. Of course the con person would then work his magic and the pea was never where the victim believed it to be. Such are the dollars from your state lottery.
Last Wednesday’s school board meeting saw the presentation of the most recent five year forecast for your district’s finances. Further explanation of the overall forecast is to be found elsewhere in this publication. It’s never a pretty story but serves as a warning and signals changes required to continue operations.
The bottom line is we are projected to next year spend nearly $900,000 more than we take in. But we are not technically “broke” yet as there are some reserves. We will exhaust the reserves by the end of fiscal year 2011 and be about $2.8 million in arrears unless expenses and revenues are adjusted. And adjust is what we plan to do in light of the forecast.
So what about all the promised lottery dollars that were to be sent to schools to solve funding problems? Aren’t we getting that money? Where is it?
Good questions. Especially if you are a lottery player and believe you are at least in part helping education when you do not win. Let’s have a look.
Permit me to quote from a recent communication from CORAS (The Coalition of Rural and Appalachian Schools).
“According to the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) web site, the appropriation to the lottery profits education fund group was $688.9 million in fiscal year 2008. Of that amount, $666.2 million was designated to support Foundation Funding, which supports formula aid, special education weighted funding, career technical education weighted funding, poverty based assistance, parity aid, charge off supplement aid and other forms of aid to districts as well as education service centers. ODE said the 2008 lottery profits were distributed as follows:

Total Lottery Funding Fiscal Year 2008 to School Districts, $551,908,697.97. Educational Service Centers, $24,597,560.64. Community Schools,$62,756,709.32. Joint Vocational Schools, $26,935,032.06.
The balance of the appropriation was designated for the retirement of bonds used to support school construction.
What ODE does not say is that the state used a formula to calculate general fund school district state aid, removed $666.2 million from that total, and added in the $666.2 million dollars from the lottery fund....and then used the $666.2 million general fund money that was removed from the state aid calculation somewhere else...or at least that's the way we see it. There was no additional money for school districts beyond the calculated state aid formula.”
The money the lottery put in to education was exactly matched by the money the legislators took out of education funding and put elsewhere. They hid the pea.
There was a brighter side to the board meeting that can lead to changing our finances. Our new building program is projected to achieve operational savings of over half a million dollars a year or more as well as deliver better educational services and increased safety to students.
More exciting, after nearly two years work, the District Professional Learning Community representatives presented a vision and mission statement adopted by the board. Much more on this soon to come.