Rep. Sweeney's bipartisan House Bill 1, the Fair School Funding Plan, signed into law as part of state budget

COLUMBUS — State Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney (D-Cleveland) today announced that her bipartisan House Bill 1, the Fair School Funding Plan, was signed into law as part of the state operating budget. Historic legislation jointly sponsored with Rep. Jamie Callender (R-Concord), House Bill 1 finally addresses Ohio’s broken school funding system, which the Ohio Supreme Court found unconstitutional four times, beginning with the original DeRolph decision in 1997.

“I am overjoyed that the Governor has signed the Fair School Funding Plan into law. By working together not as Democrats or Republicans but as Ohioans, we accomplished something that no one else could for over 24 years. Ohio finally has a fair and constitutional school funding formula, one that looks at the real cost of educating a child and a community’s actual ability to pay its share of those costs,” said Rep. Sweeney.

“While this is a historic step toward a brighter future for all of Ohio’s children, the work is far from over. Supporting the plan in future budgets is absolutely essential to ensure the transparency and predictability that it promises our constituents. Doing that demands informing the public and for bipartisan cooperation like this to become the rule and not the exception at the Ohio Statehouse.”

Also known as the Cupp-Patterson Plan after its original sponsors now Speaker Bob Cupp (R-Lima) and former Representative John Patterson (D-Jefferson), the Fair School Funding Plan was carefully crafted over the course of nearly four years by a determined group of lawmakers and education professionals from every part of the state – from the hills of Appalachia to the banks of Lake Erie. The plan addresses the true cost of educating children in the modern world and distributes those costs fairly between local communities and the state.