Gadfly Bites 10/1/25—Dripping with contempt

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1. In case you might have missed it, every building in Mentor City Schools was closed yesterday—with the announcement sent at 6:15 that morning—due to an excess of bus driver absences. How very big city of them! (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 9/30/25) All indications are that Mentor is back to business today, according to this piece, but you can also read all the details about the precarious nature of the district’s system that led to yesterday’s issue…and which makes such “calamity days” almost guaranteed to happen again in the future. (Fox 8 News, Cleveland, 10/1/25) This morning, it’s Lakota City Schools. They are on a two-hour delay due to an electrical problem that, among other things, impacts radio communications, refueling, and other services for their buses. Again: sounds like big city problems to me. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/1/25) As a side note to these clips: I needed to do some research recently on transportation-related problems experienced around the state so far this school year—above and beyond the big ones in Dayton and Columbus. I found some stories that I had missed when they originally occurred, including two suburban districts who also cut out high school busing due to lack of drivers and/or general budget problems. These didn’t make international news like Dayton did because, I think, they are obviously not blamable on school choice. (And I know you remember how the Dayton story was missing some important context in that regard anyway.) But the common thread seems clear enough to me: If big city transpo is cooked and the suburbs are heading that way too, regardless of the reason(s), we now have plenty of evidence that it’s time to scrap the old way and come up with something new. Stat.
   
   

2. The comments given by the superintendent of Olmsted Falls City Schools on Ohio’s school and district report cards are called “sarcastic” and “facetious” in this piece. This is an inaccurate take, if you ask me (which no one has ever or will ever do). The proper description of those words is “dripping contempt”, and the target in my estimation is every poor family in Ohio. Unless I’m reading this wrong, Bossman seems convinced that standardized tests are so unfair to low-income students that those kids will never be able to pass them as long as their family income remains under a specific level. And indeed, if their family income were to be boosted to that specific level, I think he feels that their ability to pass those exact same tests would miraculously go up. Incredible. I definitely disagree with this mindset. But if it is true, it would also have to mean that low-income students are also unable to achieve positive academic growth, graduate from high school, or successfully transition to college/career. Because all those things are also part of the report cards he reviles. So while the contempt is clear, I’m hopeful that his vitriol is inadvertently clouding whatever it is that he actually means and that it is somehow less repugnant than what I read here. (Cleveland.com, 10/1/25)

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