Without funding, Ohio’s State Board of Education superintendent says they may not be able to fulfill mission
Ohio’s superintendent of instruction once again laid down a grim picture for the State Board of Education should funding come up short in the next state operating budget.
Superintendent Paul Craft explained at a monthly meeting of the board on Monday the impact of the budget and the work he and his team have done to engage with lawmakers as the budget process continues.
“We are trying to be visible and meet with as many members as we can,” Craft said.
Since the 2023 overhaul of Ohio’s education system created the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the board has seen its power reduced. The main focuses of the board are now educator licensing, district territory disputes, and teacher disciplinary matters.
With that change in power distribution, the main revenue for the board became fees from teacher licenses, something that ebbs and flows from year to year, and typically boosts the coffers toward the beginning of the year, then fades as the year goes along.
Craft and the board aren’t looking to increase the teacher license fee if they don’t have to, partly because they don’t want to give potential teachers a reason not to enter the workforce and apply for licenses.
“The pipeline is tight right now, we have districts right now with dozens of unfilled teaching positions because they just can not find candidates,” Craft told the Ohio House Education Committee in a recent hearing on the budget. “We want to hold off on fee increases as long as we can, only because I don’t see this pipeline suddenly becoming flush again, absent something really changing.”
Craft came to the state in August, asking for emergency funding to keep them from having to raise teacher licensure fees that year as well and to cover a $3 million shortfall. This request came after Craft gave the board a dismal outlook for their funding in 2024.
The Ohio Controlling Board allowed the $4.66 million emergency funding request, which Craft said would allow the board to get through the fiscal year, but didn’t eliminate “tough times” for the agency.
Without help from the state operating budget this year, the administration will have to look into another year of cuts, and this time, the cuts to staff that could be crippling.
The board has 58 full-time positions within its ranks to cover administration and the roles the board plays, including issuing about 140,000 educator credentials per year, according to an analysis of the agency conducted by the Legislative Budget Office of the state’s Legislative Service Commission.
Craft said the agency went down to 56 employees in the last year, and he said his team has been slow to start the process of hiring to full capacity as they make sure the board will make it to through the fiscal year.
“(Without the budget funding) We would have to go down from 56 … to about 26 folks to experience those savings through personnel cuts,” Craft told the board. “I don’t know of any way we would fulfill the mission that we have at that level.”
Craft compared his staffing with the State Board of Nursing, which licenses a similar amount of people as the Board of Education.
“They’re doing it with 79 folks, we’re doing it with 56,” he said.
Craft, who was hired in December 2023, at an annual salary of $190,000, told the education committee that one of the reasons he applied for the job in the first place was to help the agency as they began a “rehab project, we’re rebuilding trust with this organization and with the (school) districts of Ohio.”
“There are people in both (legislative) chambers who have said ‘we will never give a dime to the State Board of Education,’” Craft said.
The board had $14.8 million in “dedicated purpose” funds in fiscal year 2024, with no funds coming from the state’s General Revenue Fund. In fiscal year 2025, estimates showed $15.3 million in dedicated purpose funds, plus $1.35 million in federal funds.
In the new executive budget submitted by Gov. Mike DeWine, he recommended a $2 million bump from the General Revenue Fund each year, as dedicated purpose funds go down to $13 million and $13.5 million in the next two fiscal years, according to a rundown of the governor’s board of education budget proposal by the budget office.
“The (DeWine) administration included $2 million because they knew we’d need at least that much,” Craft said at Monday’s board meeting.
With another $1.35 million in federal funds planned for the next two fiscal years, the board will have a total of $33.2 million over the biennium if the governor’s recommendations make it into the final budget draft from the Ohio legislature.
Craft asked the Ohio House committee for additional help with expenses to help with costs like the background check system called the Retained Applicant Fingerprint Database (Rapback) system, which alerts administration official if any of the more than 450,000 educators and staff within the system has been “arrested, enters a guilty plea or is convicted of a criminal offense,” Craft told the committee at a recent meeting.
“We are asking for the direct funding of the Rapback system for all individuals required under (the Ohio Revised Code) to be entered into the system through the SBOE,” Craft said.
To save $1 million, the agency is proposing the elimination of the Resident Educator Summative Assessment, which he says can be conducted in individual districts as part of the existing Ohio Teacher Residency Program, without the official assessment.
“After conversations with various stakeholders, including associations, administrators, and individuals with personal experience with the program, it is our belief that districts and schools are best suited to attest to the ability of those teachers in the Ohio Teacher Residency Program,” Craft said.
Savings from the assessment and boosts from the state budget as asked for by Craft would “at least keep me from having to cut anymore,” which Craft has said led to cuts ranging from IT supports to slow-walking the hiring of the two other full-time positions that would bring the board to full staff. He went so far as to mention the Elon Musk-run agency currently trying to chop funding and budgets throughout the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.
“We were DOGE before DOGE was cool,” Craft said. “I’m convinced we are the most cost-efficient organization in the state of Ohio right now. We didn’t set out to be that way, but that’s what’s been placed upon us and it’s a mission that we’ve taken on.”
Budgets hearings are ongoing in the Ohio Statehouse, toward the deadline to get the governor a final budget by the end of June.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.