Ohio school board may raise teacher license fees as budget shortfall looms

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Ohio’s state board of education is facing a budget cliff – and says for it to survive the fall, it must either raise teacher licensing fees or receive immediate funding from the state.

At the board’s March meeting, members mulled over a proposed licensing fee increase, from $200 to upward of $300, to prevent a $3.5 million budget shortfall by next June. With Ohio’s teacher licenses already among the most expensive in the region, education professionals – and board members themselves – argue that a fee increase disproportionately impacts newer, lower-paid teachers and would discourage prospective teachers from becoming licensed in the state.

The state school board is still navigating its new role as separate from the Department of Education and Workforce. Under the state’s two-year budget passed last June, the school board lost most of its powers – and a large portion of its funding. Instead of funding for staff salaries, travel expenses, IT costs and other board operation expenditures coming from the state, the vast majority of the school board’s money now comes from teacher licensing fees. 

“This is a problem 100% created by the state legislature and the governor when they changed the law taking away state funding from the state board of education while still giving the state board of education responsibility over licensure, teacher discipline, territory transfers and a number of other functions,” Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, said in an interview.

Dan Tierney, spokesperson for Gov. Mike DeWine, said examining the school board’s budget is, at present, like “looking at a cake that’s half-baked.” The board is still in the middle of its budget analysis process, he said, meaning it would be premature to say whether the body is facing a budget crisis that requires state intervention.

“It went from a regulatory board to a licensure board. This was very clearly a change in scope of the agency,” Tierney said. “We would assume that as a result of the direction in the legislation, that the board would not have the same needs for staff."

Although the school board lost most of its powers, it gained some responsibilities that Superintendent Paul Craft told board members is racking up expenditure costs. Included in the state budget, for instance, was the mandate that certain unlicensed school personnel be enrolled in the state’s criminal background check system. The school board is on the hook for an expected $600,000 in increased costs associated with that new requirement.

The board has eliminated $300,000 in estimated expenditures, according to board meeting materials, including by consolidating board meetings into one day and axing three staff positions it couldn’t afford to fill. But its predictions are even worse than before; in January, Craft estimated a $2 million budget shortfall by June 2025. Now, the board is expecting to be $3.5 million in the red.

The school board claims that upward of $6 million of its expenditures are nonnegotiable. It plans to ask the legislature for $10 million, or else it will need to raise teacher licensing fees. 

“We shouldn’t look at this situation and assume the state board has done everything they need to do to transition,” Tierney said. 

With licenses needing to be renewed every five years, an additional $100 or so may not seem like a significant amount, DiMauro said, but many teachers hold multiple licenses. And any increase will most strongly impact those at the bottom of the pay scale – the minimum salary for public school teachers is $35,000 -- and new teachers more generally, as they face additional up-front costs for exams and provisional licenses.

Increasing teacher licensing fees would only add to the larger “tax on teachers,” Gregory Mild, a professional educator at Columbus City Schools, told the school board. He pointed to an analysis from the Learning Policy Institute that found that in 2023, Ohio teachers spent an average of $480 on classroom supplies. Most teachers are also responsible for the costs of their continuing education, which can run thousands of dollars every five years.

“Ohio’s legislators must be held accountable to foot the bill for the operations of the State Board of Education related to professional conduct investigations, teacher evaluation, territory transfers, and all other board functions required by Ohio Revised Code,” Mild said. “Licensure fees should never be viewed as a possible funding source for anything other than the operations directly related to the Office of Licensure.”