The worst-kept secret in the state has become the must-read document for school district leaders.
Unfortunately for the potential constitution amendment billed as a solution to the state's school funding mechanism, the devil got left out of the details.
For all the detail about empowering the State Board of Education, setting up and Education Accountability Commission and vanquishing the plague of phantom revenue, the proposed amendment is missing the piece most likely to win over voters -- a concrete way to pay for it.
While educators will applaud the end of phantom revenue (the biggest unplaced piece of the puzzle for many Central Ohio school districts), the nebulous condition of the other funding necessary to provide adequate education would be massive.
State Rep. Larry Wolpert (R-Hilliard), criticizing the plan as soon as it was announced, said he is most concerned with how pushing more money to the state level would impact fast-growing suburban school districts like Hilliard, Dublin and Olentangy.
Though the issue backers brought a diverse panel of speakers to hawk the amendment at its unveiling last week, those fast-growing districts were noticeably without representation.
The state's formula for aid is "skewed toward urban and rural districts," Wolpert said, noting that a district like Dublin leans more heavily on local taxpayers than those in Perry County, in which per-pupil funding comes almost exclusively from the state.
As with many suburban-district legislators in post-DeRolph days, Wolpert doesn't want to see the state play Robin Hood.
"That is my biggest concern with the districts I represent -- the redistribution of wealth," he said.
There's a good reason for that -- the levy quagmire afflicts districts of all wealth levels.
Still, the amendment isn't without selling points in places where levies spring eternal. South-Western City Schools Superintendent Kirk Hamilton said, "This will allow us to provide higher quality education without the ballot frequency," he said. South-Western is a Franken-district, with urban, suburban and rural sections sewn into a whole.
For those not keeping tabs, South-Western appeared on the ballot four times since November 2004: A 9.7-mill operating levy passed on the third try, but failed to provide enough revenue, and a 1-percent income tax last November lost in a landslide.
But selling the state amendment for school funding to voters, Hamilton noted, "will be a challenge. But we have an opportunity to go to our public and say, 'Here's the statewide solution you've been asking for.' This is an indication we've been in the thick of this."
Our new governor, Ted Strickland, tapped a solution to the school funding issue as a linchpin to his candidacy.
But the amendment backers aren't waiting for Ted.
"So many of us involved have watched commitments to solve school funding over the decades," said Jim Betts, president of the Alliance for Adequate School Funding.
Yes, politicians past and present have promised solutions to the issue and failed to deliver -- or handed useless tools back to school districts to solve the issues themselves.
Last year, the legislature gave districts the ability to put levies on the ballot which allow them to reap inflationary growth in property taxes, which House Bill 920 prevents with all existing Ohio property taxes.
The "inflation levy" hasn't been touched yet and probably won't ever be; Voters would frown at such an open-ended commitment.
Despite its billing as a panacea, this school funding amendment poses an even larger open-ended commitment.
Dangling a property tax rollback for seniors as a carrot ignores the fact that those lost tax dollars have to come from somewhere.
This amendment pushes forward one model for a long overdue solution to school funding.
But until its backers conjure up a price, it's a heavily flawed one that voters won't accept.