Ohio school officials just got the green light to break out of Washington’s rigid funding boxes, gaining the freedom to merge more than $38 million in federal education dollars to tackle their own classroom priorities through 2029.
Under an agreement announced Friday by the U.S. Department of Education, Ohio becomes the eighth state granted a “Returning Education to the States” waiver. The move scraps standard federal mandates that historically silo grant money into narrow, single-use streams, letting the Buckeye State pool four different funding pots into a single engine for reading, student health, and job-readiness programs.
Ohio follows Iowa, Louisiana, Indiana, Vermont, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Mississippi into the program, pushing total state-diverted federal dollars nationwide past $158 million…