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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > June > 30 > Entry
Funding amendment group suspends efforts
The consortium behind a proposed amendment to address school funding woes has suspended its efforts after nearly 15 months of work, according to a newsletter from the Ohio School Boards Association.
Getting it Right for Ohio, consortium of state education and parent groups, announced its efforts in 2007 and started collecting signatures. When the group didn’t collect enough signatures for the November 2007 ballot, it was announced they would continue with the hopes of having the amendment on the ballot this November.
With 200,000, or less than 50 percent, of the needed signatures, the group has decided to stop collecting signatures, according to the OSBA. There was no announcement about this on the group’s Web site. The campaign had to turn in 402,276 signatures to qualify for the ballot.
The Getting it Right campaign was one of the most successful volunteer only campaigns in recent Ohio history. Typically backers pay people to collect signatures for an issue to get n the ballot.
According to the OSBA, the group hopes to continue to work with lawmakers, Gov. Ted Strickland and the State Board of Education to find a fix for school funding.
If approved by voters, Getting it Right for Ohio would have made a high-quality education a right for every Ohio child and would have gradually reduced the local share of funding while increasing the state share.
Ohio’s funding system has been ruled unconstitutional four times in the last decade, with judges ruling that it relies too heavily on property taxes and is inequitable between wealthy and poor communities.
The proposed amendment’s critics pointed out that it did not specify a funding source for the tax relief.
Did anyone sign the petition? Why or why not? What do you think could have been done to make the effort more successful?
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