(C) Ohio Capital Journal
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Not with a bang, but a budget: Ohio lawmakers’ slow violence • Ohio Capital Journal [1]

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Date: 2025-07-09

Some violence is kinetic — sudden and easily seen. Some is systemic — slow, sanctioned, and easily ignored.

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Violence doesn’t always come with screams or sirens. Sometimes it slinks through legislation.

Ohio’s biennial budget is a slow, grinding assault on public education. This is a violence that unfolds over years and generations. It bleeds opportunity and shatters potential. It’s not breaking news, but it breaks futures all the same.

This is slow violence. Coined by scholar Rob Nixon, slow violence describes harm that accumulates quietly, invisibly, across years and lives. It doesn’t explode in a single moment; it seeps. Into school funding formulas. Into policy. Into the very scaffolding of what’s possible.

Budgets may not detonate, but they can destroy lives. What we fund is what we value. What we refuse to fund is often where the quiet brutality begins. Because budgets aren’t just bureaucratic documents. They’re moral ones.

The bipartisan Ohio Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) calculates the actual cost of educating a child and funds public schools accordingly. It accounts for factors like student-teacher ratios, minimum staffing levels, local demographics and special education needs.

It’s not perfect, but it ensures that education, opportunity, and well-being aren’t dictated by skin color, home zip code or socioeconomic status.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed budget kept the FSFP in name but gutted it in function, using outdated cost data that would’ve underfunded schools below even 1997 levels. The Ohio House scrapped it altogether, replacing it with an opaque formula stripped of equity. Ohio Senate leaders insisted they’d fully funded it. They hadn’t.

Before signing a final version of the budget forged behind closed doors by the House-Senate Conference Committee and passed by both chambers on June 25, DeWine made dozens of line-item vetoes. While the governor’s veto pen blunted some of the budget’s abuse, the shape and trajectory of its weaponization remain unbroken.

Like Ohio Senate President Rob McColley and state Sen. Jerry Cirino’s Senate scheme, the signed legislation anchors the Fair School Funding Plan to obsolete cost data, starving public schools of about $2.8 billion.

Ohio Republicans were especially ruthless to districts with high levels of student poverty. The state will pay those districts 107% less than promised. Even low-poverty districts will only collect 34% of what they’re owed — a 65% shortfall.

The cruelty of Ohio’s new biennial budget isn’t just in what it withholds — it’s in how it blocks communities from filling the gap.

First, the state guts its obligation. Then it turns around and rigs the rules: restricting when districts can ask voters for support, capping what they’re allowed to save, even empowering counties to spike local bonds and levies. DeWine vetoed those provisions—for now. But Republicans hold the three-fifths majority to override him. The knife has been sheathed, not discarded.

Meanwhile, Republican giveaway season to the wealthy and well-connected rolls on. The governor left intact $1.1 billion in tax breaks for Ohio’s top earners and $600 million in free money for the out-of-state billionaire Browns owners to pay for their new megaplex playground. The math is clear — and cruel.

Though DeWine vetoed a new school voucher program, the budget adds more than $400 million in public money for private school tuition. All told, taxpayers will underwrite more than $2.4 billion for a privileged 10%, mostly upper-middle-class families already nestled in sectarian enclaves.

These are structural acts of violence — deliberate disinvestment from the conditions that make learning, thriving, and democracy possible.

We know what happens when schools are starved: class sizes balloon, teachers flee, buildings crumble. Graduation rates fall. Crime ticks up. Wages fall. Hope recedes. The research is clear: when we cut education, we sever the future.



Public education is not a budget line item; it’s the backbone of democracy. Disinvestment shifts costs into the future, where they accumulate as inequality, incarceration, ill health, and civic decline.

No sirens. No endless news cycles. Just lines of a ledger that quietly strangle the systems our kids depend on. The damage is cumulative and eventually catastrophic.

To end slow violence, we need a politics of flourishing.

Flourishing means every Ohio student has what they need to learn and grow, regardless of race, place, or means. It provides the qualified teachers, safe buildings, engaging curricula, and mental health support they deserve.

A politics of flourishing lifts whole communities. Higher wages, lower crime, better health, deeper civic life — these are the dividends of investing in public education. It’s a politics that rejects the lie that public education and children are negotiable line items.

DeWine’s signature committed Ohio to violence by increment — consolidating cruelty day by day, month over month, year after year. The state’s Republicans didn’t just pass a budget — they legislated a slow violence.

Yet history gives homework: grassroots groundswell and relentless advocacy precipitated the DeRolph rulings that found Ohio’s public school funding system unconstitutional and led to Fair School Funding in the first place.

As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen writes, freedom is not the absence of restraint — it’s the presence of capability. The harmful Republican budget makes people less capable. Yet, we have the power to heal.

Slow violence thrives in silence. It feeds on apathy, distraction, and the space between outrage and action.

The assignment is to practice democracy — showing up, organizing, speaking out, voting, resisting.

The real test of democracy isn’t belief. It’s practice.



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[1] Url: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/07/09/not-with-a-bang-but-a-budget-ohio-lawmakers-slow-violence/

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