Dogged Advocates for Justice Protest Ohio State School Takeovers of Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland
After January, John Kasich will no longer be governor of Ohio. House Bill 70, the law that paved the way for the Youngstown—and now Lorain and East Cleveland—school takeovers is the biggest stain on his legacy. In gerrymandered Ohio, with huge legislative Republican majorities after the November 2018 election—62 Republicans and 37 Democrats in the Ohio House and 24 Republicans and 9 Democrats in the Ohio Senate—it remains unlikely that HB 70 will be overturned.
House Bill 70 prescribes that any Ohio school district which has received “F” grades for three years running on the state’s school district report card be managed by an appointed Academic Distress Commission instead of the locally elected school board. The state takeover law was sprung on an unsuspecting public at an afternoon hearing of the Senate Education Committee in late June of 2015, when Senate Education Committee chair Peggy Lehner introduced a 66-page amendment to a House bill which had already been moving forward with widespread popular support to expand wraparound full-service Community Learning Centers. Senate Bill 70 was rushed through committee and passed by the full legislature within 24 hours. The amendment—which had been cooked up by Governor Kasich, then-state superintendent (and now discredited) Richard Ross, and Ross’s assistant, David Hansen, the husband of Governor Kasich’s chief of staff—fully changed the content of what had been House Bill 70 to enable the state to nullify the power of elected local school boards and insert state overseer Academic Distress Commissions, which appoint a CEO to run the district on behalf of the state.
Three years have passed. Lorain joined Youngstown under state takeover, and now East Cleveland has been added. In May of this year, northeast Ohio Democrats Kent Smith (whose district includes East Cleveland) and Teresa Fedor (Toledo) introduced HB 626 to overturn Ohio’s state takeover law. The Elyria Chronicle-Telegram‘s Carissa Woytach explains: “The bill would suspend the creation of new academic distress commissions, keeping other failing Continue reading: Dogged Advocates for Justice Protest Ohio State School Takeovers of Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland | janresseger
