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Tag: Vouchers Hurt Ohio

  • Public school advocates take issue with new Ohio Speaker’s claim that funding model ‘unsustainable’

    Public school advocates take issue with new Ohio Speaker’s claim that funding model ‘unsustainable’

    (Stock photo from Getty Images)

    By:  – Ohio Capital Journal

    As Ohio’s 136th General Assembly begins, the newly minted House Speaker has already taken a stand on education, saying spending for the state’s public school funding model is “unsustainable.”

    Priorities (and for that matter, legislative committees) have yet to be formally established, but comments by Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, have already brought criticism from public school advocates across the state.

    Speaking to reporters after the first official meeting of the Ohio House under his leadership, Huffman was asked about the Cupp-Patterson public school funding plan, also called the Fair School Funding Plan by supporters.

    The funding model for state support of public schools has been through most of its six-year phase-in, seeing funding through the last two budget cycles. This year was set to be the last phase-in for the funding, but Huffman said there is no such thing as a “three-generation roll-out” and pointed to his comments when Cupp-Patterson was first considered by the legislature. Back then, he did not support funding the full measure all at once, because he said it would tie down future state legislatures with a funding method they may or may not be able to afford.

    “I don’t think there is a third phase to Cupp-Patterson,” Huffman said this week. “I guess the clearest statement I can say is that I think those increases in spending are unsustainable.”

    The new speaker went on to say the state needs to look at “whether these dollars are being spent wisely in some districts, we know they are in many.”

    Public school advocates have fought for the funding model, a model that focuses on real-time costs from district to district, rather than a blanket amount of state funding for all schools. While the comments from Huffman were criticized by advocates, they didn’t necessarily come as a surprise.

    “It’s certainly disappointing, but it doesn’t change anything for us,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association. “Implementing the Fair School Funding Plan is still our top priority.”

    YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

     

    Without the funding, public schools will have to reach further into the pockets of taxpayers with levy-increase requests, something that shouldn’t have to happen under a system that constitutionally supports public schools.

    ” If the speaker thinks there isn’t enough education funding to go around, Ohio law is very clear,” Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told the Capital Journal. “The legislature must fund public schools and make cuts to the costly and ineffective universal private school vouchers that were put in place by Speaker Huffman (as an Ohio senator) and other legislators,” said Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

    Those who support the funding model pointed to the $1 billion that went to scholarship funds including the EdChoice private school voucher program in 2023, which the legislature approved to give Ohio students near-universal eligibility to move to private schools of their choosing if they live in public school districts considered under-performing.

    “If the speaker wants to talk about sustainability, you have to start with those numbers,” DiMauro said.

    Late last year, the legislature also removed provisions of a bill that would have added accountability measures to the private school voucher program, despite education advocates asking that accountability measures for private schools match those of public schools.

    That demand for accountability includes an ongoing lawsuit that seeks to eliminate EdChoice from the state’s educational portfolio. The group Vouchers Hurt Ohio is leading the effort in a court battle that has specifically targeted Huffman for answers on the process of passing legislative measures that support and fund EdChoice.

    Eric Brown, former Ohio Supreme Court chief justice and chair of the steering committee for Vouchers Hurt Ohio, said the group “never trusted that state lawmakers would fully fund public schools.”

    “Instead they are intent on giving refunds and rebates to wealthy families to pay for private schools and forcing homeowners and taxpayers to pay more for their local public schools,” Brown said in a statement. “We believe this system is unsustainable and unconstitutional.”

    DiMauro acknowledged that the Fair School Funding Plan will require inputting the real costs on an ongoing basis to account for inflation, and having the funding method keep up with those costs, but to do so would only be keeping up with what the constitution asks of state leaders, he said.

    “It means finally having a system that will meet the requirements of the constitution and serve the needs of the nearly 90% of students who are in our public schools,” DiMauro said.

    Aaron Churchill, Ohio research director for charter school advocates The Fordham Institute, said the cost of the Cupp-Patterson plan is “something that the legislature is just going to have to grapple with over the longterm.”

    Charter schools in Ohio have “long been underfunded,” Churchill said, and the fact that public school enrollment has seen a decline in recent years shows that public schools “should have less need for funding” but also more focus on putting the funding “where the needs are the greatest.”

    “Our school funding should be driven by enrollment and head counts,” Churchill said. “There’s a lot of money going to our public schools, so the dollars are going even further than they would if our state had a growing student population.”

    The enrollment in public schools has gone down slightly over the past few years, though some experts attribute that to a national decline in birth rates more than participation choices. The National Center for Education Statistics sets projections for enrollment, and estimates Ohio’s public school student enrollment will go down by 7.6% by 2031, a loss of more than 127,000 students.

    The most recent data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce showed more than 1.75 million students in public schools, versus 173,156 students in the state’s non-public schools.

    The public school numbers showed a loss of 5,400 students compared to numbers reported by the ODEW in fiscal year 2023. That’s down from 2022 as well, but public schools saw an increase of nearly 18,000 students between 2021 and 2022, according to state data.

    Non-public schools have seen gradual increases since fiscal year 2021, when enrollment was reported at 162,917.

    Still, in the 2022-2023 school year, the ODEW reported 88% of schools in Ohio were traditional public schools, followed by community schools at 9.4% and vocational schools at 2.1%.

    YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

    _________________
    Susan Tebben
    Susan Tebben

    Susan Tebben is an award-winning journalist with a decade of experience covering Ohio news, including courts and crime, Appalachian social issues, government, education, diversity and culture. She has worked for The Newark Advocate, The Glasgow (KY) Daily Times, The Athens Messenger, and WOUB Public Media. She has also had work featured on National Public Radio.

    Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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  • Another Ohio school district joins EdChoice lawsuit, despite Lt. Gov.’s attempt to dissuade

    Another Ohio school district joins EdChoice lawsuit, despite Lt. Gov.’s attempt to dissuade

    Stock image from Pixabay.

    BY:  – Ohio Capital Journal

    The Upper Arlington City Schools Board of Education chose to join a lawsuit seeking to eliminate Ohio’s EdChoice private school voucher program, despite Lt. Gov. Jon Husted telling the group it would be a waste of money.

    Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted threw in his two cents in a letter emailed to the school board as they considered signing on to the suit.

    In the email to the board, Husted said the “case of school vouchers was long ago litigated,” and on the basis of that U.S. Supreme Court case, the EdChoice private school voucher program was “created and structured.”

    “I know because I created it in 2005 when I served as Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives,” he wrote.

    A spokesperson for Husted confirmed on Tuesday that the statement, which was shared by the conservative advocacy group Ohio Value Voters, was indeed written by him.

    The letter comes as a lawsuit works its way through the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas that would, if plaintiffs are successful, eliminate the private school voucher program in Ohio entirely. Public school advocates who filed the lawsuit argue state funding of the private school vouchers creates an unequal system of education that violates the state constitution’s requirements for a properly supported public education system.

    Husted’s letter

    Husted said joining the lawsuit would “serve as an attempt to deny 348 Upper Arlington families and students currently using a state voucher as their choice of education for their children, many of which are attending other schools because of autism or other special needs.”

    “If after reading this email, you choose to fund this lawsuit, you will knowingly be wasting thousands of dollars on attorney fees for a lawsuit that has no chance of succeeding in an attempt to thwart the will of students and families who pay the property taxes that fund Upper Arlington schools,” Husted wrote.

    A court case cited by Husted was Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, an Ohio case that made its way to the nation’s highest court in 2002 in an attempt to decide whether voucher programs were valid under the U.S. Constitution.

    The split (5-4) decision upheld a state law that allowed Cleveland students to attend public or private schools through the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, which the legislature attached to the 1995 budget “as part of a test of the impact of school choice on academic performance,” according to a Case Western Reserve University breakdown of the case.

    Cleveland was the target of the program because the program built under state law was to be used on any district that required “supervision and operational management of the district by the state superintendent,” according to the ACLU of Ohio.

    Ohio’s program was the first to include religious schools, which was part of the reason the program was challenged in court.

    Husted also cited a 1999 Ohio Supreme Court case, in which the state court struck down the school voucher program, but Husted argued it was “good law,” in that the voucher program did not violate provisions of the state constitution regarding school funding.

    The state supreme court in the 1999 case, also involving the Cleveland City School District, ruled that the school voucher program that existed at that time “does not involve the state in religious indoctrination.”

    The court disagreed with one of the “priorities” set forth in Ohio law to dictate the order in which registered private schools could admit students, a priority which allowed students “whose parents are affiliated with any organization that provides financial support to the school.”

    That priority, the court ruled, “provides an incentive for parents desperate to get their child out of the Cleveland City School District to ‘modify their religious beliefs or practices’ in order to enhance their opportunity to receive a school voucher program scholarship,” and was therefore unconstitutional, according to the majority in the 1999 decision.

    The voucher program in 1999 was found to have a “secular legislative purpose, does not have the primary effect of advancing religion, and does not excessively entangle government with religion.”

    The state supreme court ended up striking down the voucher program for a different reason: a violation of the “one subject” provision of the state constitution, in which legislation can only pertain to one issue. In this case, the voucher program was tied into the state budget, which the supreme court found to be a violation of the state constitution.

    For and against

    The Upper Arlington Board of Education was split in their decision to join the lawsuit, with three of the members urging the district to push forward in order to protect the tax dollars of those who elected them, and two other members expressing concern about the time and money a lawsuit would take.

    Board member Liz George Stump disputed “myths” about the aims of the EdChoice voucher program and its expansion to help low-income students avoid underperforming districts, citing Ohio Department of Education and Workforce data in her argument in support of the lawsuit.

    Data from the ODEW show less than 8% of UA’s 2024 voucher recipients for EdChoice are considered low-income, a number that only rises to 17% statewide.

    “As we watch our state funnel this billion dollars into the voucher program, that threatens our state’s ability to meet its constitutional requirement to fully fund our system of common schools,” Stump said in a Tuesday meeting of the board. “Because that voucher money is uncapped and it is tied to the level of public school funding, and as that pot shrinks year over year, which it is, that’s less money (the school district) has to get split two places.”

    Board VP Lou Sauter and fellow member Lori Trent voted against joining the lawsuit, hoping for a different way to change the way funding is distributed and public education is supported.

    “Joining this lawsuit would be an unnecessary distraction from the hard work that we have ahead of us,” Sauter said.

    Trent acknowledged that a GOP state supermajority who generally favors the EdChoice program creates a political climate that “may not be conducive” to legislative changes, but she also said there was “way too much conflicting information out there” to support joining the litigation, like how long the suit would last and whether things would change.

    “With so many unknowns and the complexity of the the situation, I am not in support of joining the lawsuit at this time,” Trent said.

    The group that shared Husted’s letter publicly, Ohio Value Voters, praised the lieutenant governor for supporting the voucher program. The group’s president, John Stover, said in a statement that families across the state “appreciate the opportunity to have their children enrolled in the EdChoice Scholarship program.”

    The group’s website says they also support the “Parent’s Bill of Rights” legislation introduced by Ohio House Republicans to require public schools to inform parents about “sexuality content” in curriculum and which has been likened to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    They have a separate website called “Protect Ohio Children,” which includes an “indoctrination site map” with the goal of “putting daylight on the darkness of critical race theory, comprehensive sex education and social emotional learning.”

    A coalition supporting the lawsuit against the private voucher program released its own statement about Husted’s letter, calling the information in it “misleading and wrong.”

    “We have worked for more than three years to build a solid case challenging the constitutionality of the harmful EdChoice private school voucher program, and we are prepared to go to trial on Nov. 4 in Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page’s courtroom,” a statement from Eric Brown, chairman of Vouchers Hurt Ohio’s steering committee read.

    The group said the issue of private school vouchers can not be considered “settled,” as Husted argued, because of the active lawsuit in Franklin County.

    Vouchers Hurt Ohio also pushed back on Husted’s claim that those on a voucher for autism or special needs would be impacted, saying the lawsuit “challenges only the universal voucher program known as EdChoice.”

    Motion for dismissal

    Most recently in the case, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, the state’s legal counsel, asked the judge to end the case via summary judgment,  which would end the case before it could go to trial. A summary judgment is used in a case “when the law is clear and no factual dispute is material,” according to court documents.

    In his motion for a summary judgment, Yost argued that the challengers of the voucher program “have not shown any constitutional violation that harms them” and that the state supreme court “has already upheld vouchers and the broader school-choice principle that per-pupil funding may follow students to various types of schools.”

    “Plaintiffs’ claims are a repackaging and hybrid of claims under the previous voucher cases, the charter-school case, and the DeRolph school-funding case,” the motion by Yost states.

    The DeRolph case is a reference to the multiple Ohio Supreme Court decisions in which the court found the state did not properly fund its public school education system.

    If challengers want to change the policies on education in Ohio, Yost argues “they need to ask the People’s elected, democratic representatives in the General Assembly – not the courts – to do that.”

    “Ohio’s Constitution allows educational choice, and this Court should tell Ohio’s parents and students that it will not take their choices away,” Yost concluded.

    Susan Tebben
    SUSAN TEBBEN

    Susan Tebben is an award-winning journalist with a decade of experience covering Ohio news, including courts and crime, Appalachian social issues, government, education, diversity and culture. She has worked for The Newark Advocate, The Glasgow (KY) Daily Times, The Athens Messenger, and WOUB Public Media. She has also had work featured on National Public Radio.

    Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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  • Ohio public education supporters look to 2024, lawsuit to hold private voucher system accountable

    Ohio public education supporters look to 2024, lawsuit to hold private voucher system accountable

    Getty Images

    BY:  – Ohio Capital Journal

    While marijuana legislation and other bills still sit on the horizon in the second year of this term’s General Assembly, education policy can always be counted on to be a part of the discussion. 2024 should be no different.

    Ohio’s private school voucher program has been a source of strong debate among legislators and education advocates of all kinds since the 1990s, when the program began as a way to allow lower-income students to access private schools, proposed as an effort to improve education outcomes in poor-performing public school districts.

    But as public school advocates still hope to see full funding of the Fair School Funding Plan for districts across the state, they saw eye-popping increases in private school funding through vouchers that worry them almost as much as the foot-dragging that they believe has occurred when talking of public school funding.

    “You should be funding the public schools,” said Stephen Dyer, former state representative and former chair of the Ohio House Primary and Secondary Education subcommittee for the House Finance Committee. “If you want to fund the private schools, fund the private schools, but there’s no reason you can’t do both.”

    Private school voucher expansion by the numbers

    The Ohio Department of Education reported 23,272 participants in the voucher expansion for the 2023 fiscal year, up from the 20,702 reported in 2022 and even more from the year prior, when 17,155 students participated in the state-subsidized program.

    In 2021, 85% of the voucher expansion participants were below 200% of the federal poverty line, and 93% of 2022 participants were below 250% of the poverty line.

    In 2023, language on the ODE data changed to “low-income qualified” to “not low-income qualified,” removing the breakdown of federal poverty percentages. In this year’s report, 67% of participants were “low-income qualified” and 32% were “not low-income qualified.”

    With the most recent state budget, passed this summer, a GOP-led effort to expand eligibility for private school vouchers led to a ballooning of the poverty level allowed for the voucher program to 450% of the poverty line, or a household income of $135,000 or less for a family of four.

    Those receiving a scholarship can move to a private school with $6,165 in state funding for K-8 students, and $8,407 for high schoolers.

    Families with incomes above the $135,000 threshold can still be eligible for at least 10% of the maximum scholarship, even with a higher income, Senate President Matt Huffman’s office said when the budget was passed.

    Public school advocates took issue with the expansion, saying the Fair School Funding Plan, seeking to support public school districts based on their individual needs, should be the focus, considering the vast majority of students in Ohio attend traditional public schools.

    ‘A perversion of the idea behind a voucher’

    Since the most recent voucher participation numbers were released, Dyer did his own analysis of the voucher program, finding “a very different goal” compared to when it began.

    “It’s now going to wealthier, white families to subsidize the decisions they’d already made to send their kids to private schools,” Dyer told the OCJ.

    In an analysis he posted to his blog, Dyer said ODE data showed nearly nine in 10 new applications to the voucher expansion went to white students, and more new vouchers for high schoolers went to families making more than $150,000 annually than went to families making less.

    Dyer also makes an argument that has been made before by those opposing the voucher expansion: increasing private school voucher program causes “resegregation” in the public schools, with the number of white students who are leaving for private schools, vouchers in hand.

    “It’s frankly a perversion of the idea behind a voucher, which was sold as allowing poor students, students of color, students who haven’t traditionally had access to private schools, to have access,” Dyer said in an OCJ interview.

    The most recent data on Ohio’s EdChoice voucher expansion showed 66.4% of participants are white, with the Black population of voucher recipients coming in at 15%, the second highest number reported.

    In 2022, 65.9% of expansion vouchers went to white students, up from 64.1% in 2021.

    A vast majority – 9 in 10 – vouchers come from just 31 school districts, according to Dyer.

    “Those districts’ racial makeup is, on average, 21% white,” he writes in his analysis. “Yet 46% of EdChoice voucher recipients are white – more than double the percentage of white students than attend the 31 public school districts where nine in 10 voucher students would otherwise attend.”

    At the very least as the voucher program continues in Ohio, Dyer hopes a plan to audit the program is forthcoming for the billions of dollars spent to subsidize it. He pointed to an audit of the defunct Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), which exposed false enrollment numbers and led to court battles to claw back more than $60 million in state funding from the online charter school.

    “It’s all of our dollars, so we have a right to say what happens with all of our dollars, and we certainly have a right to audit where our dollars are going,” Dyer said.

    The lawsuit

    With a Republican supermajority in both chambers of the legislature, support of private school vouchers and “school choice” seems assured at least for the foreseeable future, so public school advocates are looking to other avenues to make change.

    Another court battle is still simmering in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, a lawsuit that seeks to tamp down on the voucher program in favor of the constitutional obligations the legislature has to properly fund public schools.

    The lawsuit was filed in Jan. 2022, accusing the state of Ohio of improperly and unequally funding private schools, specifically targeting the growth of the voucher program as a drain on public school resources.

    “The legislature has only moved to further expand private school vouchers in Ohio,” the leading group in the lawsuit, Vouchers Hurt Ohio, wrote in a recent statement on the program. “We do not stand a chance of changing their minds or direction so we are forced to sue to get a fair hearing in a court of law where the Ohio Constitution is respected and means something.”

    Amidst the nearly two years the case has been ongoing, time extensions have been granted and Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman has asked to be excused from a deposition due to “legislative privilege,” also arguing the testimony sought from Huffman “is neither legally relevant nor necessary.”

    Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page has not ruled on Huffman’s subpoena, but allowed subpoenas for 42 “non-party private schools” in Ohio as part of the case, selected, according to the lawsuit filers “as a representative sample based on their location, demographics, percent of EdChoice students enrolled and total EdChoice funds received.”

    Parties standing against the public school advocates in the case said the passage of the state budget, including an increase in funding for the Fair School Funding Plan along with the voucher expansion should allow for the dismissal of their complaints on funding of public schools.

    “And while plaintiffs presumably still take issue with the new, amendment program, that does not change the fact that their current complaint challenges legislation that ‘is no longer the operative legislation governing EdChoice,” attorneys arguing for dismissal stated.

    A deadline for documents and evidence in the case was Nov. 30, and the court has requested “expert reports” from both sides by Feb. 23 of next year, with a trial date set for Nov. 4, 2024.

    Susan Tebben
    SUSAN TEBBEN

    Susan Tebben is an award-winning journalist with a decade of experience covering Ohio news, including courts and crime, Appalachian social issues, government, education, diversity and culture. She has worked for The Newark Advocate, The Glasgow (KY) Daily Times, The Athens Messenger, and WOUB Public Media. She has also had work featured on National Public Radio.

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  • Education sees some funding boosts, some missed opportunities in 2022

    Education sees some funding boosts, some missed opportunities in 2022

    BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

    Next year is sure to be a busy one when it comes to education in Ohio, with potential state agency overhauls and funding changes still on the agenda for the state legislature.

    The end of 2022 was capped by an 11th-hour push and ultimately failure for an attempted overhaul of the Ohio Department of Education and the state Board of Education. Senate Bill 178 was never passed in an Ohio House committee, so it was folded into another bill with controversial provisions, House Bill 151.

    House Bill 151 included bans for trans youth in participating in sports based on their gender identity, and after SB 178 was included, the bill came in at more than 2,000 pages. But despite delaying the vote until after 2 a.m. on the last day of the legislative session, the bill and its many provisions failed to garner enough votes in the House.

    LGBTQ advocates hailed the failure of House Bill 151, which still would have required the use of birth certificates to prove a student’s gender, despite the elimination of a provision that would have required a genital exam.

    “I can not begin to express my gratitude to the hundreds of community members and advocates who stood up for the rights of all transgender youth to participate in all parts of life as whole people, including sports, just like everyone else,” said Alana Jochum, executive director of Equality Ohio, after the bill failed to pass.

    Dr. Rhea Debussy, director of external affairs for Equitas Health and former facilitator for the NCAA’s Division III LGBTQ OneTeam Program, said the thrill of seeing the legislation voted down was tempered by concern that the bill even existed.

    “It’s very alarming that a group of legislators thought bullying gender expansive and intersex youth was an urgent need for the final hours of Ohio’s 134th General Assembly,” Debussy said in a statement.

    Senate Bill 178

    Education officials not only celebrated the failure of HB 151’s anti-trans legislation, but the downfall of the rapid-fire education overhaul they overwhelmingly said needed more time and more vetting.

    “OEA believes it is worth taking a hard look at how Ohio’s schools are governed and supported at the state level,” said OEA President Scott DiMauro in a statement. “However, collaboration is key.”

    Senate President Matt Huffman said he was “disappointed that our school reform bill and our attempt to do something about girls’ sports … I’m disappointed that those things failed.”

    But Huffman maintained the stance he took after the Senate passed HB 151 on to the House for a vote earlier this month, that if the education overhaul part of the bill didn’t pass during the 134th GA, it would move on to the 135th.

    “I’m glad we took the vote because we kind of have on the record who’s where, and there probably is a lot more due diligence that needs to be done on that issue,” Huffman said.

    Some ups, more downs

    While some funding changes were implemented — such as $56 million in state funding for Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid, increases in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds and federal monies for school security and safety — public schools are still looking for full funding of the Fair School Funding Plan (formerly called the Cupp-Patterson plan, after Speaker Bob Cupp and former state Rep. John Patterson, the legislators who created it). The plan was previously funded for the two years of the current General Assembly, but needs another four-year commitment of funds to be fully phased in.

    That plan, according to the OEA, “represents the first constitutional school funding system in the state in decades.”

    The effort for better public school funding is flanked by a lawsuit moving forward in Franklin County Common Pleas Court that seeks to nullify the EdChoice private school voucher system in the state. A coalition of school districts and individuals joined together to file the lawsuit, and Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page recently ruled against the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, who argued the lawsuit should not be allowed to continue.

    “This means we will put vouchers on trial in a court of law,” the coalition behind the lawsuit, Vouchers Hurt Ohio, wrote in an email newsletter, though the timeline for the court case could go on for some time.

    Private school vouchers are on the minds of congressional Ohioans as well, with U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown pushing for more investment in federal Head Start programs and more funding for public schools.

    “We have a state government, one of whose major aims seems to be to privatize public schools,” Brown said in a press call. “They have moved more and more money out of public education into religious schools and other private schools … and really undermined what state government should be doing and that is funding public education for the great majority of students in our state.”

    Teachers unions and public officials alike wanted to see efforts to stem the state’s teacher shortage, a rise in the teacher wages that have stagnated over the last 25 years and changes to the third-grade reading guarantee, both of which saw action in the legislature, but did not come to fruition.

    As the state’s Board of Education awaits the fate of the department and the board itself, they still have a decision to make: the search for a superintendent of public instruction.

    The board spent months on issues such as a resolution condemning racism in education, then a resolution repealing that racism measure, and finally a resolution urging the federal government not to include gender identity in anti-discrimination language that would impact education policy.

    But in their December meeting, they decided to punt on the issue of hiring a search firm to select candidates to fill the open position that heads the department.

    The board voted to wait until SB 178 was passed or rejected by the legislature, for fear that candidates for the position might change their minds once they found out how the roles of superintendent would change under the new bill.