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COLUMBUS, Ohio -Ohio has 607 public school districts for just under 12 million people. Now, as state leaders push to lower property taxes, at least one official is asking whether that’s too many. Chris Galloway, the Lake County auditor who served on Gov. Mike DeWine’s Property Tax Working Group, said that the changes instituted by the legislature and suggested by the working group are just “nibbling around the edges of reform.” “You have to be willing to touch the third rail of Ohio school funding,” he said. “There’s no way around it because it’s over 60% of people’s property tax bills.” But people who work with the state’s public school districts say they’re already running efficiently, with services that consolidate payroll, purchasing and IT across many school districts. Districts work together to figure out how to cut energy costs and workers’ compensation claims. They say that if school districts are consolidated to one per most counties, there will need to be assistant superintendents and other professionals over different areas of the county, which will not meaningfully save money. The real cost savings will come in building closures, which the public generally does not like, they said. Consolidation comes up in Ohio every 10 to 15 years, said Tom Hosler, CEO of the Ohio School Boards Association. But Ohio families like the local control of school boards, with members who they may see around town or who are just a phone call away. That’s a different experience than for parents of the 549,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, or the 316,000 students in Chicago Public Schools. They say Ohio is just about in the middle of the pack, nationwide, in the number of school districts per capita. Related story: Ohio’s proliferation of school districts ranks 19th in nation, topping all its neighbors Nothing in current law prohibits Ohio districts from merging, but very few do, Hosler said. “Forced consolidation takes away families’ right to choose, and that is something certainly we’re very protective of,” he said. “… Public schools are the purest form of democracy that we have. There are no gerrymandered districts for school board members to run in. There are no partisan primaries that they have to go through. Board members are in the grocery store. They’re in the church parking lot.” It wouldn’t be the first time Ohio had large-scale school district consolidations. About 100 years ago, Ohio had 2,600 school districts that had to consolidate into a system close to what exists today, with just over 600 districts, Galloway said. The educational environment was different back then, and many of the districts forced to merge were one-room schoolhouses, said Craig Burford, executive director of the Ohio Educational Service Center Association. Labor costs Galloway, the Lake County auditor, said that duplicative administration costs add up. School districts spent on 78.7% of their general funds on salaries and benefits in 2024, according to the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, the nonpartisan research staff for the General Assembly. “It comes down to delivering services,” Galloway said. “Most of the costs, around 70%, are its labor.” Each school district has a superintendent and treasurer, often six-figure positions. “We’ve become administratively top heavy in schools,” Galloway said. “You’d be surprised how quick this adds up.” Districts can have assistant superintendents, directors of curriculum or instruction, operations people, a communications team, human resources, a bus garage and mechanics, among other roles, at their central offices. Consider these factors: - Ohio’s lowest enrollment school district is the 73-student Put-in-Bay local district. Superintendent Scott Mangas’ salary was $128,750 for the fiscal year of July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, according to the Ohio Checkbook, a resource by Ohio State Treasurer Robert Sprague’s office. But the job also requires Mangas to be a school principal. - The second smallest is Vanlue Local Schools in Hancock County with 121-students. Traci Conley, then-superintendent in 2024 fiscal year, earned $110,500. - Cuyahoga Heights Local School District is the smallest of Cuyahoga County’s 31 districts, with 743 students last school year. Matt Young, who started on the job Aug. 1, 2024, earned $115,000 for the fiscal year. Tom Evans, the previous superintendent who retired, earned $154,000. - Columbus schools, with 46,000 students, has the highest enrollment in Ohio. Superintendent Angela Chapman made $274,600 that year. - Cleveland Metropolitan School District paid CEO Warren Morgan $285,000 in Fiscal Year 2024. The district also paid Eric Gordon, who left CMSD a year before, $99,000, a partial payout of his accrued sick and vacation leave, district spokesman Jon Benedict said. A factor in these salaries is that not just anyone can become an Ohio public school superintendent. It’s a career path that requires specialized education and credentials – at least a master’s degree and at least three years of successful work as a principal before someone can be accepted into a graduate-level superintendent licensure program. Depending on the university, the graduate programs can take 12 or more months to complete. For people who don’t have principal backgrounds, the state has approved an alternative path to become superintendents. Canceling out savings? Hosler, of the Ohio School Boards Association, said that there’s still going to be overhead, even if districts merge. “If you have a district with 5,000 students and another district with 5,000 students, now you have 10,000 students. Now you have multiple high schools, whereas before maybe those districts had one. And you know, it’s the nature of these larger districts that you need support to operate it.” Hosler, who previously was superintendent of a district in Perrysburg, near Toledo, said it’s not just a matter of eliminating one district’s human resources department upon a consolidation of, for instance, two districts. Some of those employees will still be needed to handle the extra duties the new department will have to take on, as will bus mechanics. An assistant transportation director may need to be hired, and well as other positions in the central office, he said. “What ends up happening is the people who are in those positions in the other district would fold into that,” he said. “So you don’t often realize that kind of savings.” Large geographical districts may need additional administrators, which also cost money. Worthington City Schools in suburban Columbus, for example, has about 10,000 students – the size of Hosler’s hypothetical example of two 5,000-student districts merging. The Ohio Checkbook shows the district paid an assistant superintendent $168,000 in 2024. Akron City School District has almost twice as many school students, at 19,700, and paid its assistant superintendent $178,000 in 2024. Ohio public schools employ more than 245,000 Ohioans full-time. Any job eliminations from consolidations could hit local economies, Hosler noted. This employment is especially important in rural counties. Of Ohio’s 607 school districts, 280 are rural. “For many communities, schools are the largest businesses,” Hosler said. School finance would also be complicated through consolidations. “Certain districts have established taxes,” he said. “When these things change it gets pretty complicated in terms of how do you reset that?” Columbus response Galloway’s idea hasn’t taken root in Columbus yet, although state Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican who chairs the chamber’s Education Committee, last week introduced a bill that would remove local school district property taxes, replace it with an increased sales tax and require one centralized busing system in each county, among other provisions. School districts would be able to merge and consolidate under Brenner’s bill. Brenner said that he left school district consolidation as optional because “you’re going to have everybody raising holy what-for,” he said. “They’ll get on their legislators’ cases, saying, ‘We don’t want our local school district to merge into that district because it’s not as good as our district.’” But if a proposed constitutional amendment eliminating property taxes makes the ballot and passes, “it will force the legislature to make changes, because we’re not going to be able to make up for the tax losses,” he said. Student enrollment has been stagnant over the last five years. In the 2024-2025 school year, 1.65 million students attended traditional public, charter, joint vocational school districts and state-supported schools, such as those in the juvenile justice system. In 2020-2021, enrollment in these schools was 1.66 million. “I think there needs to be a major discussion of this,” Brenner said. “It’s a come-to-Jesus moment, so to speak, of our forms of government.” Brenner also notes that the 607 school districts are just part of Ohio’s local government system. In all, there are just under 4,000 local governments – cities, counties, townships, fire and police districts, among others. It’s time to look at all of these structures, he said. Current efficiencies School districts are served by 51 educational service center -- almost one for each county -- which provide teacher professional development, instructional coaching for teachers, and other services, depending on the agreements that districts reach with the ESCs, said Burford, executive director of the Ohio Educational Service Center Association. Some ESCs manage the substitute teacher pool for their districts, and some are over district personnel recruiting and hiring. They can train new employees at districts. They can run payroll, and provide school treasurer and administrator services when there is a vacancy in a school district – all depending on the unique agreements ESCs have with local districts, Burford said. ESCs are involved in cooperative purchasing for many of the districts they serve, as well as purchasing liability and health insurance. The centers can house school psychologists and occupational therapists, who offer services at the ESC or who travel to schools to offer the services. “We run a lot of multiple disability classrooms that include medically fragile students,” he said. “We also run classrooms for students with severe behavioral handicaps or emotional disturbance. We also have a number of ESCs that run alternative schools, for those kids who are in lieu of suspension or expulsion, and sometimes even court-appointed students.” ESCs do about $2 billion in business with school districts a year, providing direct student services to about 15% of students, Burford said. They also have agreements with charter schools. Prior to the pandemic, ESCs offered services to about 100 private schools, and that has since grown. “Whether it’s for political expediency or other things, too often we’re starting with answers instead of asking questions,” Burford said. “And I think there’s an idea – instead of just jumping into this – we need to ask, ‘What are the services we want to provide? What does it take to deliver those?’ And then that gets us to, ‘What’s the right delivery model?’” The last time state policymakers discussed consolidating school districts and other local government entities was in 2012 when former Gov. John Kasich’s administration put out a report called “Beyond Boundaries: A Shared Services Action Plan for Ohio Schools and Governments.” It noted that Kasich and the legislature had changed the law to make it easier for districts to enter agreements with other governments to provide services. At the time, districts were only doing about $1.2 billion of business a year with ESCs, as well as a handful of statewide information technology centers. It recommended that the momentum of using market forces to provide school services must continue. The Management Council of the Ohio Computer Education Network is another service that school districts use, which Ohioans rarely hear about. It’s been around in one form or another since 1977, said Geoffrey Andrews, CEO of the Management Council. Today, the Management Council supports 16 regional information technology centers, also known as data centers. Programmers manage computer systems for high school student schedules, school library catalogues, student attendance and grades and teacher pay. The management council is required to send some this information to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, to ensure funding the General Assembly directs to schools is correctly allocated. Perhaps most importantly, data centers provide internet to schools at a discount. “It runs on substantial machines,” Andrews said. “School districts can’t afford, in general, to run these very efficiently, so these data centers have been around for 45 years.” The Management Council maintains an online collection of teaching and learning materials that’s free for all students and teachers in the state. This makes Ohio schools more efficient than in other states. Andrews said he attends a Midwest conference of superintendents, and has learned Ohio’s school IT model is rare. “Every little school in Nebraska and Iowa and Indiana and Wisconsin has to try and figure out this stuff on their own,” he said. “And every time we talk about it, they’re so envious about the situation that Ohio schools are in.”
