Saturday Stats

Numeric news from Policy Matters

$7,395: Maximum value of a federal Pell Grant for the 2026-27 school year. That money can be used to pay for college tuition and related costs, and is awarded depending on students’ financial need. It’s an important tool for making college more affordable, though it’s not enough. Ohio’s own need-based aid — the Ohio College Opportunity Grant (OCOG) — can help, but a major design flaw makes it far less effective than it could be. In our recent brief, we show how OCOG is set up to fail many students who choose the most affordable path to a degree. We also spell out some simple changes legislators can make to ensure OCOG works better for the students it was created to help.

32.1%: Share of Ohio school taxes paid by businesses today, down from 52.5% in 1991. (Businesses should be required to pay for a large share of public education; better schools provide a more educated workforce.) Now, some school districts — scrambling to make up for state legislators’ decision to underfund Ohio schools by $2.75B in the current budget — are considering a type of tax that would reduce businesses’ share of school taxes even more. Our new analysis of School District Income Taxes includes an interactive map that shows where SDITs are already in use, explains how they work, and shows that while they may be effective in some districts, SDITs can’t make up for the damage done when legislators ended the Fair School Funding Plan.

2K+: Megawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas generation approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board in 2025. (That’s enough electricity to power roughly 1.4 million homes.) Our recent brief explains how the rapid growth of large data centers drives demand for fossil-fuel infrastructure across Ohio, slowing our transition to clean energy. Instead of using data centers as a justification for more fracking, more pollution, and greater reliance on fossil fuels, Ohio lawmakers should leverage these companies’ enormous financial resources to accelerate the state’s transition to renewable energy.

83%: Share of voters in Missouri who recently rejected a proposal to phase out the state income tax and make up for it with more regressive taxes. That’s a 66-point defeat of a proposal that would have dramatically shifted the state’s tax structure to benefit the wealthy and raise taxes on many others with annual income between $24K and $80K. As we noted, the vote suggests that people are tired of the kinds of tax policies the Ohio legislature has embraced for decades. As Hannah Halbert put it, “This should send a message to those who are proposing to repeal or further cut the Ohio income tax. We need to raise revenue from those who can afford it, with a stronger income tax on the most affluent.”

$350K: Amount collected by the Ohio Department of Youth Services since 2018 through “child support” payments from families of incarcerated children. As Bree Easterling notes in a recent op-ed for Cleveland.com, Ohio allows courts and agencies to charge families for the costs of youth confinement through so-called “pay-to-stay” fees. The practice almost certainly does disproportionate harm to Black families, though a lack of statewide reporting makes it difficult to know the details or the full scale of the burden. Despite limited transparency, one thing is clear: Ohio should stop charging families to lock up their kids. If you agree, download and share this handy one-pager.

Speaking of Bree, they were among those honored with the NAACP Cleveland Branch’s Community Leadership Award for their work with the coalition that passed Tanisha’s Law, a key component of the city’s crisis care continuum. Signal Cleveland marked the occasion with a long-form story about the years of work, led by Tanisha’s uncle Michael Anderson, that made Tanisha’s Law a reality. It’s a great read, and it’s the kind of coverage this extraordinary — and ongoing — work deserves.