LOVELAND MAGAZINE

News and Events from the Loveland, Ohio Area

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Since 2004

Tag: school voucher

  • Ohio Senate passes education overhaul

    Ohio Senate passes education overhaul

    BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

    The Ohio Senate passed an overhaul of the state Department of Education and Board of Education on Wednesday with heavy criticism for what bill supporters say has been years of dysfunction.

    The measure passed 22-7, and now moves on for House consideration.

     Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman. Official photo.

    Senate President Matt Huffman came down from the dais just to support the measure, which renames the education department to include a workforce element and pares down the roles of the state board of education. It was just passed out of committee the day before, against objections from education advocates.

    Huffman called out the Ohio Department of Education for what he called a lack of accountability.

    “Most of us don’t have contact with the people at the Ohio Department of Education, and there’s a good reason for that: They don’t work for us, they work for the state Board of Education,” Huffman said in a Wednesday floor speech.

    In particular, Huffman said there is a certain “malevolence” within the education department when it comes to school choice and EdChoice private school voucher program processes.

    He believes that discord won’t happen if the department leadership is moved within the executive branch’s purview.

    “If this is a cabinet-level position, under the governor … there is going to be a response to this body and the members of the House, the elected representatives of the people,” Huffman said. “Because governors have an incentive to respond to the legislature.”

    Democrats stood in opposition not to changes to the state’s education system, but how the changes are being made.

    State Sen. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron, a member of the Senate Primary and Secondary Education Committee from which the bill originated, said school governance has been debated “almost the whole time that I’ve been a member of the General Assembly.”

    Is change needed? He says yes.

    “I believe we need to review and revise our education governance structure, but we need an intensive and extensive review, giving all stakeholders adequate opportunity to consider proposals and to give input,” Sykes told his fellow Senate members.

    Responding to criticism that the bill is happening too fast for a proper review, state Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, said the bill was crafted over “months” and attempts to make changes have happened multiple times over the years, including the institution of academic distress commissions. Many of the problems, such as decreases in reading comprehension test scores and a lack of an official state superintendent for public instruction, have been years in the making.

    Without immediate action, students will continue to lose learning time and Ohio’s workforce will not be prepared for the new opportunities coming from places like Intel.

    “If kids aren’t literate, they’re not going to be able to do those jobs,” Brenner said.

    Two Republicans, state Sens. Kristina Roegner and Niraj Antani, voted against the measure, but did not make comments during the session.

    State Representatives will need to move fast to get the measure passed by the end of the year, which also marks the end of the 134th General Assembly. If it doesn’t pass, the effort starts over at the beginning of the year.

    House Speaker Bob Cupp said he has yet to look at the bill or discuss it with House colleagues, according to Huffman.

    “We talked generally about it and I expressed the fact that I’m in favor of it and Governor (Mike) DeWine expressed that also,” Huffman said after the Senate vote.

    The Senate president said he does think there is support for it already in the House, but if it doesn’t pass, that won’t spell the end of the matter.

    “I’d like to move that this year and if, for whatever reason, that doesn’t happen in the House, it’ll be coming right back in February,” Huffman said after the Senate vote.

    After the vote, groups on either side of the education debate spoke out on the measure.

    Public school education coalition Honesty for Ohio Education panned the fast-tracked vote.

    “Instead of collaborating with policymakers, the Department of Education, educators, administrators, and communities to build a sustainable solution that would address these very complicated issues, lawmakers are prioritizing a solution that creates more problems than it solves,” said coalition director Cynthia Peeples.

    The Buckeye Institute, a think tank that supported the bill in committee, said passage of the bill was an opportunity for Ohio.

    “By reforming the State Board of Education and the Ohio Department of Education, Senate Bill 178 will better align education with the needs of employers and help overcome historic learning loss in the wake of the pandemic,” said Greg Lawson, research fellow for the institute.

    A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education declined to comment on the statements made Wednesday in the Senate or on the bill itself.

  • ‘Backpack Bill’ sponsors seek new school voucher funding formula

    ‘Backpack Bill’ sponsors seek new school voucher funding formula

    BY: SUSAN TEBBEN AND OHIO CAPITAL JOURNAL

    The sponsors of a bill that would promote the use of private school vouchers and “school choice” came together on Wednesday with a religious lobby group to bring the bill back up.

    House Bill 290 was originally introduced in May as a “legislative intent” bill aiming to allow students to have the funding they need “follow them” to private schools of their choice, should parents decide the public school system is not working for them.

    “We want to fund students, not systems, and empower parents to make the best decision for their children,” said bill cosponsor state Rep. Riordan McClain, R-Upper Sandusky.

    The bill came before passage of the new budget bill, which included the Fair School Funding plan, an overhaul of the public school funding model.

    Under the new budget, EdChoice private school vouchers, along with the EdChoice expansion, the Cleveland Scholarship Program, the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program and the Autism Scholarship Program, are all directly funded by the state, rather than being deducted from monies distributed to public school districts.

    “Ohio parents and students overwhelmingly want quality local public schools. They don’t want the radical defunding of public schools that this bill would likely cause.”

    Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers

    In the new language being added to the bill, if a family applies to be a part of the private school voucher program, sponsors say the taxpayer money the state would use to fund EdChoice or Cleveland scholarships would be put in individual educational savings accounts for the students use.

    The bill’s other cosponsor, state Rep. Marilyn John, R-Richland County, said the bill isn’t meant to discredit public education, but to allow student who learn differently to be able to have different options.

    “One size fits all doesn’t work,” John said. “It certainly doesn’t work for education.”

    McClain said they don’t have an estimate of how many students would be impacted by the so-called backpack bill, though they don’t expect to see a mass exodus of students headed to private schools, more of a gradual upward trend.

    “It’s something that, once we set the agenda for where we want the future of the state to be, the hope is that that network gets built up and those opportunities are created,” McClain said.

    Included in the press conference was religious advocacy and lobbying group Center for Christian Virtue, which backs the bill because of its focus on school choice and to make public school districts perhaps think twice about instituting what they see as controversial policies.

    Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, said amidst debate in the General Assembly on critical race theory — which CCV has called “a racist ideological grandchild of Marxism that’s being taught in schools across the state” in a fundraising email in support of anti-CRT legislation — parents should be able to take the lead in their student’s education.

    Baer also brought up the Upper Arlington school district, which tried to implement some bathrooms at their schools that were gender neutral, before the city of Columbus said that was against city code. The school district had said students who used the gender-neutral bathrooms had been doing so without incident.

    “A bill like this would be able to say: Look, Upper Arlington, if this is what you want to do, if this is the policy you want to have, okay,” Baer said. “But now…those families are allowed to go elsewhere and maybe you’re going to think twice about doing something that parents don’t like.”

    The bill was already spurned by education associations and public school advocates when it was introduced, but the new language has done nothing to change minds.

    “Ohio parents and students overwhelmingly want quality local public schools,” said Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “They don’t want the radical defunding of public schools that this bill would likely cause.”

    The backpack bill current sits in the House Finance Committee, but has not been scheduled for a hearing.