Gadfly Bites 4/15/26—Exemplary disasters

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1. In case you might have missed it, Fordham Ohio’s newest Senior Research Fellow is OSU professor Vlad Kogan. He is quoted extensively in this Spectrum News piece because the topic is one of his specialties: Why so many districts are facing fiscal crises right now. The answer is that they used temporary federal Covid relief funding to make long-term spending commitments that they can no longer afford. While Prof. Kogan talks about the exemplary disaster that is Columbus City Schools, the main point of the Spectrum piece is actually the opposite of that: One central Ohio district that managed to avoid the fiscal cliff. It’s was a two-step process for them, from what I can see. A) Be New Albany-Plain Local Schools, one of the wealthiest districts in the state, and B) “When we were thinking about how are we going to spend this money…I always made it very clear that we should probably do more one-time purchases.” Easy peasy. (Spectrum News 1 Ohio, 4/13/26)
   
   

2. While we danced around it a bit in the above Bite, “long-term commitments that school districts can no longer afford” generally means staffing. Cleveland Metropolitan School District, the OG disastrous exemplar on this front, announced more than 400 layoffs this week in an attempt to right their listing fiscal ship. These include teachers, classroom aides, principals, and assistant principals. The pushback from employee unions, students, and parents has been immediate and loud. But these long-term staffing decisions originally paid for by temporary funding that has since dried up are a bedrock cause of the looming budget collapse in CMSD and cutting the unsupported spending is absolutely vital to staving off that collapse. (Signal Cleveland, 4/13/26) Another bedrock issue impacting district finances across the state: Facilities. Once again, CMSD is a standout example…and not in a good way. Student enrollment has been falling sharply and steadily in CMSD (and elsewhere) for many years, accelerating after Covid-era disruptions and schools’ response to them. However, districts have refused to right-size their physical footprints in response. They have been inefficiently operating “zombie buildings” (filled to 50 percent or less of capacity and thus costing a ton per student to run), repurposing buildings that are empty of students for other low-capacity uses (like monthly board meetings or even textbook/furniture storage), and paying tens of thousands to demo buildings as a last resort (yet holding onto the land and paying to maintain and secure it). All of thi$ to avoid state law which requires unused district buildings to be sold to charter or private school operators. This piece grudgingly indicates that district leaders may be coming to their senses in this regard—only because of that looming budget bomb and only with the promise of spending big to build something new in its wake. But it’s seems to me that CMSD is at last running out of excuses to close the underutilized Collinwood High School and out of loopholes to save them from offering it to a competitor. (Signal Cleveland, 4/13/26)

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