I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying summer. I know our family has been busy at the ball fields, basketball courts, church camps, and 4-H meetings. I am extremely excited to get all of our students back into the building here soon and get to see them grow to find their “E”.
One question I have received multiple times this summer are issues around the state budget and property tax issues. I wanted to give some updates from work our Eastern team has done working with legislators.
State Budget Updates
Our team at Eastern spent a lot of time advocating for the kids and families at Eastern Local and the Appalachian Region throughout this process and I think we got some wins for our students, but there were also some things that came out of the budget that will affect our students and community I wanted everyone to be aware of.
Vouchers for private schools
In this budget the legislature set aside 2.44 billion dollars for voucher programs for private schools. This equates to about $205 per Ohio resident. Not one student in all of Meigs County, Vinton County, or several other Appalachian Counties received one of these vouchers last year.
I am not opposed to private schools, but I will always advocate for programs that help Eastern kids and this one just isn’t one of them.
We have advocated hard for less regulation from the state to allow us more of the freedoms private schools get that would enable us as a district to lean even more into the small town rural values that I think we demonstrate at Eastern, but that with less regulation could allow us to be even better.
Unclaimed funds
An interesting piece of the budget was that the legislature plans to use unclaimed funds to fund the construction of a new Cleveland Browns Stadium.
I won’t get into my personal opinion on if I think the State of Ohio should be funding a stadium for a billionaire owner of a football team, but I will say if you have not looked to see if you have any unclaimed funds I would recommend checking (unless you would want to help fund the stadium, in which case disregard this part), but if you don’t, search yourself and your family to make sure you don’t have any unclaimed funds. I didn’t find any of my own, but I found several family and friends who had unclaimed funds. It is a pretty painless process. I put the link below.
https://unclaimedfunds.ohio.gov/app/claim-search
Property Tax
I frequently get asked about property tax reform. The current proposals from the legislature in the budget on property tax reform would not affect our school financially or help our residents with lower taxes because Eastern doesn’t have any type of operating levies like other districts do. I also wanted to point out that one of the things that our team and other schools have worked to advocate for is property tax reform. I know many would have a hard time believing that, when property taxes are the main funding mechanism for schools, but we truly have advocated for helping out our families with some form of inflationary cap to slow down rising costs and expansion of the homestead exemption to help our seniors more.
I also understand that it may seem odd to try and run a property tax levy while also advocating for property tax reform, but when the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission gave the district the opportunity to pay for 75% of the renovation to the schools with state funding if we could raise the remaining 25% locally, we felt it was in the best interest of the school and the community to try. The district looked for the option that would be the smallest cost for our residents, and after evaluating all the options the property tax levy was the cheapest option for our residents, even those residents who are home and property owners compared to income tax options.
I truly love this district and this community and want to do everything I can to help Eastern stay what it is, whether that be advocating in Columbus or working to create opportunities for our students in the form of the renovation levy. Our team will continue to meet with legislators and try and do as much as we can to help our kids and our community. If you ever have questions or want to talk about how things are going or what we can improve, please reach out to us.
Nick Dettwiller - Superintendent
Eastern Local School District
740-667-6079