Your property value went up. The schools got nothing.
Medina County reappraised every property in 2025 and values jumped. If you assumed Wadsworth City Schools collected more as a result, that is a reasonable assumption. It is also wrong, and there is a 1976 law that explains why.
House Bill 920, in one paragraph
When you vote for a school levy in Ohio, you are approving a dollar amount, not a permanent rate. If property values later rise, the state lowers the rate the district actually collects so the levy brings in about the same money it did the year you passed it. That rule has been law since 1976. It is why a reappraisal can raise your home's value without raising the district's income.
What that looked like here in 2025
The 2025 reappraisal raised the district's assessed valuation by 19.25%, an increase of $205,660,450. The rate the district collects was rolled back to match, almost exactly cancelling it out.
rolled back
"Since Wadsworth City Schools are not at the 20-mill floor, our effective millage rates are rolled back, resulting in no increase in revenue from reappraisal on voted levies."
Some districts are protected from this. Wadsworth is not.
Ohio law stops the rollback once a district's operating rate falls to 20 mills. Districts sitting on that floor keep collecting more as values climb. Four districts in Medina County are in that position. Wadsworth is above the floor, so the rollback still applies here in full. The district put the difference in numbers:
"In other words, if Wadsworth was on the 20-mill floor our revenue would increase by $5.47M."
That is $5.47 million a year the district does not receive, purely because of where its rate sits. No vote caused it. No spending decision caused it.
What does still grow
Two things, and both are small. The district collects 5.1 inside mills that are not subject to the rollback, and it collects on genuinely new construction. Everything else on your tax bill that grew with your value was rolled back before it reached the schools.
That narrow exception is also closing. House Bill 335 ties the growth on inside mills to a deflator calculation. The district expects those 5.1 mills to be rolled back at the 2028 triennial update as a result. Separately, the homestead exemption the county commissioners passed in 2025 is projected to cut about $555,000 a year from the district's property tax income.
Which is why the ask is an income tax
A property tax levy in a district above the 20-mill floor is frozen at the dollar figure voters approved. Costs are not frozen. That gap is the structural problem, and it is the reason the November request is written against earned income rather than property value. Earned income is also narrower than most people expect: retirement income, Social Security, pensions, interest, dividends and capital gains are all outside the tax base.
One more number from the same document, for anyone who believes this is a local problem. In 1991 local property owners carried 46% of the cost of education in Ohio. By 2025 they carried 67.5%.
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