A continuing operating levy on the November 3, 2026 ballot will refill a cash reserve drawn to zero over a decade of disciplined budget management. Without it: more teaching positions cut, larger classes, programs eliminated for the first time since 2015. With it: the teachers who built one of Ohio's top-ranked districts stay in our classrooms, paid and supported.
Sycamore Community Schools is one of the highest-performing districts in Ohio. Montgomery Elementary is ranked 16th out of more than 1,700 public elementaries in the state. Sycamore High School graduates land at every flagship state university, every Ivy, every conservatory and engineering program parents in this part of Cincinnati grew up hoping their kids would reach. The district has earned a national-grade reputation on a budget that is structurally constrained by 1976-era Ohio law and a state legislature that, in the last three years, has chosen to compress school funding rather than expand it.
That reputation was not built by buildings. It was built by roughly 450 certified teachers, the classified staff who keep buildings running, and the administrators who recruited and retained them. Every dollar the district spends is, ultimately, spent on people. 81.5% of the operating budget is salaries and benefits. The November 2026 levy is a vote on whether that compensation structure can continue.
This page tells the story of how we got here, what the levy actually does, and how to vote yes.
It is easy to lose sight of what a school district is. It is not a building, or a board, or a forecast. A school district is the adults — overwhelmingly teachers — who walk into a classroom each morning and do work that is unusually hard, unusually consequential, and unusually difficult to compensate at market rates given how the work is funded. Every cost pressure that lands on Sycamore's General Fund eventually lands on a teacher.
~450
certified teachers and other professionals represented by the Sycamore Education Association, plus classified staff in OAPSE Local 243. Both contracts are being renegotiated this fiscal year.
Sycamore Education Association
81.5%
of the FY26 operating budget is salaries and benefits ($84.94 million). When people talk about district spending growing, they are mostly talking about teacher and staff compensation.
certified (teaching) FTE already cut between 2024-25 and 2025-26 — before the 2nd-grade position currently on the table for FY27. The district has been quietly thinning the teaching ranks while stretching the cushion.
One teaching position is roughly $90,000 to $120,000 of total compensation.
That is not just a salary. It is salary plus the statutory STRS Ohio pension contribution (14% of wages, set by Ohio law and unchanged for forty years), plus health, dental, and vision insurance for the teacher and frequently their family, plus life insurance, plus contractually required step-and-base movement that recognizes years of service and continued professional growth.
Teachers who have built careers at Sycamore have done so at compensation rates set by collective bargaining agreements that depend, year over year, on the General Fund staying solvent. The 2026 levy is the instrument that keeps those agreements honorable.
14%
Statutory STRS Ohio employer pension contribution. Unchanged since 1984. Tracks every salary dollar.
3% + 2%
Forecast assumption for base wage increase plus contractual step movement — roughly 5% combined per year, the structural rate of teacher compensation growth.
10%/yr
Forecast assumption for health insurance trend across all five forecast years. The largest non-wage driver of personnel cost growth.
How a district keeps its promises — fifteen years of discipline
If you have lived in the Sycamore district through this period, what you have actually experienced is a district that did not ask for much from voters and did not cut programs. That is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate strategy by three successive treasurers and several boards: cap growth, build a reserve, spend it down rather than return to the ballot. The 2016 levy was the last operating ask voters faced. Every year between then and now is the story of stretching that levy past its design life.
2015 · LossOhio ends Tangible Personal Property tax reimbursements. Sycamore loses approximately $9 million per year permanently — about 12% of the operating budget at the time.
Nov 2016 · YesVoters approve a 6.5-mill continuing operating levy, generating roughly $11 million per year. The campaign tells voters it will last "at least five years."
2010–2021District is a longtime member of the Butler Health Plan consortium for purchasing leverage. Signs a $4.08 million / 14-year energy-performance contract covering six older buildings. Operates under a 2005 Financial Parameters Resolution capping General Fund growth at 2.5% per year.
FY15 → FY22Cash reserve climbs from low-$20M's to a peak of approximately $58 million — held there as a buffer against future cost pressure rather than spent.
Nov 2019 · YesVoters approve a $127.5 million bond for facilities — replacement of E.H. Greene and Sycamore Junior High, renovation of Sycamore High School, expansion of Symmes Elementary, new Transportation Facility, Natatorium, Stadium, Field House. Bond debt service is paid from a separate 2.4-mill levy and does not hit the General Fund.
2023 · StateHB 33 makes EdChoice vouchers universally eligible regardless of income, starting school year 2023-24. Voucher recipients statewide jump from 23,272 to over 100,000 in two years; statewide voucher cost rises from ~$354M (FY22-23) to $1.095 billion (FY25).
June 2025 · StateHB 96 freezes the Fair School Funding Plan at outdated 2022 base-cost inputs. Policy Matters Ohio: Ohio public schools will receive $2.86 billion less over the FY26-27 biennium than the FSFP would have provided.
FY26-27 · NowThe cash reserve is exhausted. Both teacher contracts (SEA, OAPSE) reopen this year. Without new operating revenue, the cash balance falls to 19% in FY28 (first year below policy floor), to roughly 6% in FY29, and turns negative by FY30.
Nov 2026 · NowThis is the levy. The first new operating ask Sycamore voters have faced since 2016 — ten years of disciplined management later.
If you want a more granular reconstruction of every dollar in this story — the $58M cash reserve drawn to zero, the $15.96M of capital transfers and advances from the General Fund, the three Ohio statutes that compressed revenue while costs ran on contract — that's the budget story. This page summarizes; that page documents.
No Sycamore building has closed, no academic program has been eliminated, no transportation route has been cut, and no extracurricular has been sacrificed since 2015. The district that walked into 2026 with a forecast cliff is a district that did its part for fifteen straight years.
— On Sycamore's track record, FY15 through FY26
The clearest single picture of why a 2026 levy is necessary is the General Fund cash balance over time. The reserve was built deliberately. It was spent deliberately, on holding programs and teachers steady. And it is now running out — exactly on the schedule the treasurer projected to the board in October 2024.
Read it as a story. The forest-green climb (FY15–FY22) is the district building a cushion under the 2016 levy. The ochre descent (FY22–FY26) is the cushion being deliberately spent down to keep teachers and programs in place. The brick-red crash (FY27–FY30, dashed) is the forecast trajectory without new operating revenue. Anchor figures from forecast slide 17: FY27 cash balance ~27% (above floor), FY28 drops to 19% (first year below the 25% policy floor), FY29 ~6%, FY30 ~−10%. Pre-FY22 values are interpolated from the financial-parameters reporting trajectory; the curve, not the precise dollar at each intermediate year, is the point.
The choice in front of voters in November 2026 is not abstract. It is whether to keep that brick-red dashed line from being what actually happens.
An honest case for a levy starts with what the money is actually for. Operating levies in Ohio are restricted by law to the General Fund, which is the fund that pays for the day-to-day work of running the district. They cannot be redirected to athletic facilities, capital construction, or administrative bonuses, and they are not paying off the 2019 building bond — that has its own dedicated 2.4-mill levy and does not draw on operating revenue.
The Levy Funds
Teacher and staff compensation
Salaries, the 14% statutory STRS/SERS pension contributions, health insurance, dental, vision, and life insurance for the people who teach and support students. This is roughly 81.5% of the General Fund.
The Levy Funds
Classroom programs and instruction
Curriculum, special-education services, English-language learner support, instructional technology, library resources, classroom supplies, and the assessments teachers use to identify students who need more help.
The Levy Funds
Day-to-day operations
Heat, electricity, water, custodial staff, food service, transportation, school nurses, building security, and the dozens of unglamorous functions that quietly determine whether a school day works.
The Levy Does Not
Pay for new buildings or athletic capital
The 2019 bond covered facilities and is paid through a separate, dedicated 2.4-mill levy. The Permanent Improvement Fund and the Athletic Fund are funded by transfers, not by the operating levy.
What yes preserves, in plain language
The contracts our teachers signed up for. Step-and-base wage progression, pension contributions, health insurance — the basic terms of teacher employment that depend on the General Fund being solvent.
Class sizes that haven't yet been hollowed out. Sycamore has already cut 14.31 certified FTE in one year. Without new revenue, the next round of cuts targets sections — meaning more children per classroom across more grades.
The programs that have been protected for fifteen years. Music, art, world languages, after-school programming, full-day kindergarten, athletic offerings, transportation. The standard Ohio cost-saving moves that other districts have used since 2015 are still on the table here only because the reserve absorbed the pressure.
The cash cushion that keeps a district stable. A district running below its 25% policy floor borrows for cash flow, accepts higher risk on every decision, and loses the flexibility to respond to enrollment changes, special-education caseload spikes, and unexpected building repairs without crisis.
What yes doesn't resolve
An honest levy case acknowledges the limits. The November 2026 levy refills operating capacity. It does not reverse HB 920, repeal universal vouchers, or unfreeze the Fair School Funding Plan. Those are state-level decisions that will continue to compress the revenue side of every Ohio public school district until Columbus revisits them. What the levy does buy is time — five or more years of operating stability under existing state law — and the chance to keep the teachers we have while a longer-term fight over Ohio school funding plays out in courts and at the ballot.
Ohio is not done. Here is what's already coming next.
A district levy is a local instrument. The pressure that requires it is not local — it is a deliberate, ongoing legislative trajectory in Columbus. The three statutes documented above (HB 920, HB 33, HB 96) are not the end of the squeeze. They are where the squeeze stands today. Every signal from the 136th Ohio General Assembly indicates more is coming, faster — on top of a school-funding system the Ohio Supreme Court has already ruled unconstitutional.
First, the constitutional backdrop — Ohio's funding system is, by court ruling, unlawful
Ohio's reliance on local property taxes to fund public schools is not a legitimately settled policy question. It is, by the Ohio Supreme Court's own repeated ruling, unconstitutional.
On March 24, 1997, in DeRolph v. State, the Ohio Supreme Court held that Ohio's school-funding system violated Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution — the clause that requires the General Assembly to "secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state." The court reaffirmed that ruling three more times — DeRolph II (2000), DeRolph III (2001), and DeRolph IV (2002) — each time finding that the legislature's attempts to fix the formula still failed constitutional muster. In 2003, after six years of legislative non-compliance, the court withdrew jurisdiction and returned the matter to the General Assembly with an order to fix it.
The 2021 Fair School Funding Plan was the legislature's first serious attempt at compliance — a bipartisan, six-year phase-in tied to actual cost-of-education inputs. HB 96 (June 2025) abandoned that phase-in, freezing base-cost inputs at outdated 2022 figures. And on June 24, 2025, a Franklin County Common Pleas court ruled in Columbus City Schools et al. v. State of Ohio that the EdChoice voucher program also violates Article VI, Section 2 — the same "thorough and efficient" clause DeRolph found violated nearly three decades earlier. Attorney General Dave Yost has appealed.
This is the constitutional context against which every Ohio school levy is now decided. The state has been told four times, by its own Supreme Court, that the way it funds schools is illegal. It has spent the years since widening the violation, not repairing it.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled four times that Ohio's school-funding system is unconstitutional. The legislature has spent the three decades since widening the violation rather than fixing it.
— On DeRolph I–IV (1997–2002) and what followed
The voucher bill, in three numbers
Universal EdChoice eligibility under HB 33 (effective school year 2023–24) didn't just expand the program. It tripled the state's voucher spending in two years, almost entirely by subsidizing families whose children were already attending private schools.
$354M
State spending on all five Ohio voucher programs, FY22–23 — the last year before universal eligibility took effect.
Voucher spending budgeted for the FY26–FY27 biennium in HB 96 — a 20% increase over the prior biennium. The same K–12 pool that funds the Fair School Funding Plan, which the legislature has refused to fully phase in.
About one detail worth sitting with: in 2023–24, the first year of universal eligibility, Ohio issued roughly 70,000 new EdChoice Expansion vouchers, but private-school enrollment grew by fewer than 3,000 students. Policy Matters Ohio's analysis estimates roughly 65,000 of those new vouchers went to families already in private school. In the same year, the share of voucher recipients from low-income families dropped from 67% to 17%. Whatever the program was once designed to do, it is now overwhelmingly a state subsidy to wealthier families who had already opted out of public education — funded from the budget line that determines what public schools receive.
⸺ The mechanism, accurately
Vouchers don't directly debit Sycamore's check anymore. They drain the pool the check is drawn from.
Through FY21, Ohio voucher amounts were literally deducted from the resident district's state foundation aid — the classic "vouchers steal from public schools" framing was mechanically accurate. Since FY22, vouchers are paid directly by the state, not deducted from the district's check. But the dollars come from the same K–12 General Revenue Fund pool that funds the Fair School Funding Plan, and that pool is finite. Every voucher dollar is a dollar the legislature does not have to fund public schools — which is why HB 96 was able to freeze the FSFP at 2022 inputs while simultaneously growing voucher spending 20%.
It is the same money. It is just routed through a different door. The harm to public-school revenue is identical to the pre-FY22 mechanism — and now it scales by 20% per biennium with no upper bound.
What was already done in 2025 alone
Beyond HB 96's FSFP freeze and voucher expansion, the 136th General Assembly signed five property-tax bills in December 2025 that further compress school operating revenue. None of these existed in the budget.md timeline because they happened during this fiscal year.
June 2025HB 96 signed by Gov. DeWine. Froze the Fair School Funding Plan at 2022 base-cost inputs. Policy Matters Ohio: Ohio public schools receive $2.86 billion less over FY26–27 than the FSFP would have provided. Same bill budgeted ~$2.4B for vouchers.
Dec 2025HB 335 ("Property Tax Relief NOW Act") — Reps. Dave Thomas, Bill Roemer. Caps inside-millage growth at the 3-year inflation rate. LSC: cuts school revenue $621M–$763M over three years, with state backfill of only $306M year one, $105M year two — partial and temporary.
Dec 2025HB 309 signed. Lets county budget commissions reduce school levies if a district's unencumbered fund balance exceeds 30% of projected expenses. Punishes the exact reserve-building behavior Sycamore practiced for fifteen years.
Dec 2025HB 186 signed. Caps revenue growth at inflation for districts at the 20-mill floor — about 400 of Ohio's roughly 600 districts. Sycamore is above the floor and not directly affected, but the bill signals legislative intent.
What is actively pending in 2026
HB 96 · Item 66 · House Override Passed
Add emergency & substitute levies to the 20-mill-floor calculation
Would eliminate replacement and emergency school levies — two of the ballot tools Ohio districts have historically relied on. House voted 61–28 to override Gov. DeWine's line-item veto on July 21, 2025. Senate has until end of 2026 to act on the override.
SB 68 · Pending
New ESA voucher tier for nonchartered religious schools
Sen. Mark Romanchuk. Creates an Education Savings Account voucher of up to 90% of the statewide per-pupil base (~$8,242 / yr) for students at nonchartered nonpublic — predominantly religious — schools. A new voucher category beyond the existing five.
HB 11 · "Backpack Bill" · Champions in Leadership
Universal Education Savings Account
Universal ESA covering all students, usable for tuition, books, and supplies. Considered repeatedly. Speaker Matt Huffman publicly champions further voucher expansion and has said vouchers are "better for the taxpayers" than per-pupil public school spending.
HB 671 · Punitive · Introduced Feb 2026
Withhold state aid from districts that sued the state over vouchers
Rep. Jamie Callender (R-Concord). Would withhold state foundation funding from the ~330 districts that joined the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit. After backlash, Callender said he'd amend to escrow only lawsuit-related spending. Multiple public-school advocates and legal observers have warned the bill would itself face constitutional challenge as state retaliation against parties exercising the right to seek judicial review.
AxOHTax · Constitutional Amendment
Abolish all real property taxes in Ohio
Citizen-initiated amendment that would eliminate ~$24 billion in annual property-tax revenue statewide — public schools are by far the largest single recipient of that revenue. As of April 2026 organizers had ~305,000 of 413,487 required signatures (deadline July 1, 2026). Likely won't make the 2026 ballot — but will be back in 2027.
Vouchers Hurt Ohio · Lawsuit
EdChoice ruled unconstitutional · Pending Appeal
Columbus City Schools et al. v. State of Ohio. On June 24, 2025, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page found EdChoice unconstitutional on multiple grounds, including Article VI §2 (the same clause underlying DeRolph) and the sectarian-funds prohibition. 300+ Ohio districts have joined the coalition. AG Dave Yost appealed; case pending in the 10th District Court of Appeals, headed for the Ohio Supreme Court. Sycamore is not a coalition member.
After the June 2025 EdChoice ruling, a spokesperson for Senate President Rob McColley publicly characterized the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit as "a shameful case of bench-shopping from a radical organization." Speaker Matt Huffman, the architect of much of the recent voucher direction, has stated publicly that voucher programs save taxpayer money when implemented and has consistently opposed fully funding the Fair School Funding Plan. These are not isolated signals. They are the announced legislative direction of the people who set Ohio school funding.
Why this trajectory makes a 2026 levy more urgent, not less
It is reasonable to ask: if the state is going to keep doing this, what good does a local levy do? The answer is direct. A 2026 levy doesn't reverse any of the trajectory above — but it gives Sycamore the operating cushion to absorb every next state action without losing teachers immediately. Without a levy, Sycamore's cash balance falls below the 25% policy floor in FY28 and turns negative by FY30, with no buffer against Item 66 (already overridden in the House), SB 68, HB 11, the next budget bill, or the next constitutional amendment. With a levy, the district preserves the ability to keep teachers and programs intact while the longer-term fight over Ohio school funding plays out in courts, at the ballot, and across the next two general assemblies.
The honest framing is that Columbus is not going to fix this on a calendar that helps next year's second graders. Local voters are the only people who can act on a calendar that does.
How to vote yes — and how to help between now and November
Operating levies in Ohio are won and lost by turnout, not by persuasion. Most voters who care about Sycamore schools live in the district, but November 2026 is a general election with a long ballot and competing demands on attention. Five concrete things make a difference.
⸺ Between now and November 3, 2026
Five things that actually matter
Confirm your voter registration at voterlookup.ohiosos.gov. Registration deadline for the November election is October 5, 2026 (30 days before).
Vote yes on Election Day, November 3, 2026, or earlier through Hamilton County's early voting and absentee program — early voting typically opens in October.
Talk to three neighbors before October. Levies pass when voters who don't have kids in the district understand what's at stake. Property values, neighborhood character, and Cincinnati's appeal as a place to raise a family are all downstream of school quality.
Show up at Board of Education meetings in spring and summer 2026 when the specific levy amount and ballot language are being decided. Board meeting schedule is on the district's board page.
If you teach, taught, or know a teacher in this district — your voice carries weight that no campaign mailer can match. Tell your story, in your own words, when the public-comment portion of board meetings opens.
The specific levy amount, mill rate, and household cost will be set by the Board of Education in the spring or summer of 2026 once the FY26 closing cash position is known. Watch this page and the district's communications for those numbers as they become available.
⸺ The choice on November 3
A district is not a building. It is the people who teach in it. Sycamore Community Schools spent fifteen years protecting its teachers from every cost pressure that landed on the General Fund. The 2026 levy is how we return the favor. Vote yes.