The Cleveland Metropolitan School District will get $10.5 million less than it anticipated to support students from low-income families this school year.
Kevin Stockdale, the chief financial officer at CMSD, raised alarm about the diminishing state funding at a Board of Education meeting in early November.
“What’s happening is funding is shifting from high, high poverty districts to really middle-income districts,” Stockdale said, discussing CMSD’s updated financial forecast.
Ohio puts extra money toward educating students that it considers “economically disadvantaged.” Students from families with lower incomes can face more barriers to academic success than their wealthier peers, so the state gives districts money to fund programming to address those issues.
In Ohio, students qualify as economically disadvantaged if they receive free or reduced-cost meals at school or if their family receives government food assistance. Ohio, like many other states, has used students’ eligibility for free school meals to determine their economic status for decades. Students used to have to send in income verification forms to receive free school meals, but that has changed in recent years.
Free school meals have become much more universal over the last decade thanks to a federal program. Whole districts can qualify all at once if just a portion of their students come from lower-income families. That has made free school meal eligibility an unreliable indicator of economic status.
‘Misstating’ how many students are low-income
Take the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, for example. All the district’s students receive free meals through the federal program. That means the state sees nearly all CH-UH students as economically disadvantaged and gives the district aid based on that. But the federal meal program uses a more individualized method to determine students’ economic status, identifying about 57% of CH-UH’s students as coming from lower-income families.
“We’re basically misstating the number of students who are low-income,” said Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a national education think tank. “It’s just not correct to say that 100% of students in a number of districts in Ohio are economically disadvantaged.”
Data drives state funding for economically disadvantaged students, Churchill said, so making sure the data is reliable is crucial for the money to go where it’s intended.
What makes the numbers unreliable?
Starting this school year, the federal program for free school meals relaxed its eligibility requirements. A school district is eligible to receive free or reduced-cost meals for all its students if at least 25% of them receive government assistance for food and healthcare. The requirement used to be 40%.
In Ohio, 90 additional school districts have opted to participate in some way in the federal free meal program. Overall, about one-third of Ohio’s school districts—including public, private and charter districts—get federal free meals for all their students. Four of the five highest-enrollment urban districts, including CMSD, get federal free meals for most, if not all, of their schools.
More districts enrolling has triggered a sharp increase in the number of students across the state who are considered economically disadvantaged. The state estimates that, in 2025, about 60% of Ohio’s students will qualify as economically disadvantaged. That’s up from about 46% in 2022.
Because of the way the state calculates the amount of aid each district gets for economically disadvantaged students, a higher statewide average means less funding for districts such as CMSD that have long been in the free meal program.
“Cleveland can’t get any poorer than 100%, right?” Churchill said. “There’s sort of a ceiling at the top.”
The state projects that CMSD will get about $37.8 million in state aid for economically disadvantaged students this school year. That’s several million less than the district got last year, and the funding will likely continue to decrease, according to CFO Stockdale.
“This is during a period of time when the state … has intended to invest additional dollars in districts with economically disadvantaged students,” Stockdale said during the CMSD school board meeting. “The methodology is just not working right now.”
Are there ways to fix this school funding issue?
Since the federal free meal program lowered its eligibility, two states have moved away from using free meals to identify students’ economic status.
Massachusetts, for example, began counting students as low-income based on their participation in other safety net programs this year. Most states still use free meal eligibility, though.
Ohio is looking into whether or not it should change how it determines students’ economic status. Earlier this year, the state commissioned research into the needs of economically disadvantaged students and the costs to support them. The report should be finished by the end of the year.
“Students from low-income backgrounds do have more barriers to learning. In general, they need more resources to succeed and achieve,” Churchill said. “If we don’t know who they are and where they attend school, then it makes it very hard to get the resources where they need to go.”
Cleveland Documenters detailed CMSD’s financial presentation, including an explanation of the loss of state funding.
Learn more from Documenter Chau Tang’s live tweets.
