COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Lottery Profits Education Fund, which helps support K-12 education, has a balance of more than $207 million. The Lottery Profits Education Reserve currently has more than $174 million, according the Ohio Office of Budget Management.
That money supports the state's education budget for about 900 schools and 1.7 million students in Ohio.
But critics of the lottery system say the state could be contributing more of the lottery profits, but instead uses extra lottery profits for the state budget.
“The state adds lottery money into the education budget line items, and then uses other funds that they had previously set aside for education on other things, so the lottery money is merely replacing the money they were already going to use rather than being used as additional money to support to support schools,” said Tanisha Pruitt of Ohio Policy Matters.
A spokesperson with the Ohio Department of Education said the General Assembly has committed $1.34 billion to the state's education budget through the lottery this year.
A windfall in lottery profits from Mega Millions and Powerball does not immediately get distributed to schools. The General Assembly uses revenue estimates from the lottery to appropriate funds through the budget. If lottery profits are higher than expected, this just gives the General Assembly more funds to appropriate in future budgets,” said Lacey Snoke with ODE.
While lottery profits are not directly sent to individual school districts, profits from casinos and racinos are sent to schools.
“We do not receive direct funding from the Ohio Lottery Commission so if there's a big Powerball jackpot and a lot of people are playing, we are not going to receive any additional immediate funding from that,” said Jerry Ellender, the treasurer for Mad River Local School District.
This is why he believes the state needs to change the profit sharing so schools can receive direct payments and taxpayers can see how much each district receives in lottery profits.
“I think there would be a lot more confidence with the average Ohio taxpayer if they could see that lottery profits were distributed directly to their school district so they could know how much it's benefitting as a taxpayer,” Ellender said.
For Mad River Local Schools, it receives direct profits from casinos and racinos which totals about $200,000 a year.
That money is spent on computers for students.
“In our district, we dedicate that money towards technology purchases for students so we have 1 to 1 laptops for students,” Ellender said.