Ohio’s embattled public schools were confronted with a new lawsuit Monday challenging whether students within each district being treated equally.
Ironically dubbed Brown v. Board of Education like the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools the action strikes at the heart of the state’s school funding dispute.
The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly declared the state’s school funding system unconstitutional, saying a heavy reliance on the local tax base created inequality between districts because a poor district can’t raise as much money as a wealthy one. Monday’s lawsuit argues that two buildings within one school district can also be unequal.
“We made a tremendous mistake thinking we could just fix a system on a district-to-district basis,” said Republican mayoral challenger Bill Todd, who filed the lawsuit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court. “The question for the 21st century is how do we get the resources to the individual student to compete in a global economy.”
