Opinion: Columbus City Schools and the looming iceberg

Columbus City Schools is facing a crisis decades in the making. The district has just signed off on a $50 million cut to its budget. Administrative staff will be let go, four school buildings will be closed down, and transportation will be axed for K-8 students who are not in their home schools or 100 percent lottery schools. Busing for high school students has survived for now, but what the future holds is another question altogether. The schools themselves are in physically bad shape, with underenrolled campuses. The district has poor rankings from the state. 

The problems with CCS are a result of two intertwined issues: racist resistance to desegregation and the city’s own aggressive annexation strategy. After years of activism and litigation, the case Penick v. Columbus Board of Education ruled in 1979 that CCS engaged in de facto racial segregation, the district drawing boundary lines that kept Black and white students in separate schools. In response to this ruling, parents began moving out of the district to the suburbs en masse in order to avoid school integration. This came with shocking declines in student enrollment. In 1971, 110,725 students were enrolled. Today, it’s just 46,054. This is a familiar narrative elsewhere: Suburban white flight created fiscal crises for cities that in many cases stopped growing in the 1970s.

Concurrently, Columbus pursued aggressive annexation schemes because the city has an uncommon degree of control over the water and sewage systems. Amid this aggressive growth, it either forced parts of the suburbs into joining or it expanded past them so that they became islands rather than barriers (see: Bexley). This provoked battles over the schools, however, and amid white flight suburban school districts did not want to join CCS. In 1986, the superintendents of the various school districts met and organized the so-called Win-Win Agreement. Under the agreement, current suburban school districts’ boundaries would become permanent regardless of municipal annexation, future unincorporated land would be transferred to CCS upon annexation, and tax revenues from new development in common areas would be shared between them.

For the suburbs, it most definitely was a win. They kept their school boundaries and continued to exist even after annexation. Whether CCS could have gotten a better deal at the time is debatable at best. Protracted legal battles likely would have taken years to play out, with no guarantee of victory and continued financial losses in the meantime. But it relegated CCS to permanent second-class status compared to the suburbs, and left the suburbs with little reason to negotiate a better deal. They have everything that they want. And owing to Columbus’ odd ward system, there’s little incentive for the City Council to fight for CCS because they’ll likely be punished for it by voters elsewhere in the city. 

The city’s reliance on tax abatements for developers has meant a further loss of funding for CCS. (The City of Columbus ranks sixth nationally in the amount of school taxes abated.) When combined with the increasing number of CCS students attending charter schools, which led to the loss of more than $200 million in 2021-22, this has left citizens footing the bill through large levies.

There’s no support likely to come from the Statehouse right now either. The legislature abandoned the Fair School Funding Plan in 2025. And after close to three decades of ignoring the DeRolph ruling, things are unlikely to get better. It’s also safe to say that there’s no help coming from the federal government, given that it is currently trying to dismantle the Department of Education. Solutions have to come from Franklin County and the city; nobody’s going to do it for us. 

So, what can we do? What we don’t want are band-aid solutions coming from the city or anybody else, because those will perpetuate and drag out the crisis. Raising funds for short-term building repairs or having the city library system donate books won’t fix the fundamental problems that plague CCS. An obvious tactic for a long-term budget solution is to close the system of tax loopholes and abatements that have drained money away from education, which is something teachers’ unions have advocated for some time. While bonds and levies can and will continue to be used, the city needs to consider other sources of income to equitably fund the schools. Euclid has its own dedicated municipal income tax to fund its schools, distinct from school district income taxes. Oklahoma City revitalized its schools using sales taxes.

But on a broader level, it’s time for the City Council and the mayor’s office to provide a long-term fix to the school system and take responsibility for CCS. This is not a problem that the school board can solve by itself. This is a situation that was created in no small part because of annexation, and Columbus’ ward system has meant up until now that nobody has wanted to take responsibility for fixing it. That may mean going back to the negotiating table to revise the Win-Win Agreement, which never went far enough with the support that it offered to CCS. It may mean a series of bonds over several years, not just one, solely aimed at fixing the infrastructure in the city’s broken schools.

Whatever the fix or fixes look like, we can’t wait for help to come from the outside. To do otherwise is to fail another generation of Columbus’ children and hold the city back from its true potential.