- Lt. Governor Jon Husted and State Supe Paolo DeMaria were among the dignitaries visiting KIPP Columbus earlier this week to showcase—and celebrate—the Covid vaccine clinic underway at the school, reaching out to older teens and their families alike. Kudos! (Spectrum News 1, 5/5/21)
- What do parents in the city of Cleveland think of their schools and the education on offer within? A new survey released this week tells us, and kudos to Baldwin Wallace University’s Community Research Institute for including parents of charter, private, and district school students alike. Cleveland.com’s coverage paints a fairly rosy picture overall, but I was struck by this statistic: When asked what respondents would recommend to a family with school-aged children, 14 percent chose a Catholic or other religious school, 10 percent chose a charter school, and 9 percent chose a CMSD school—the same percentage of respondents who would recommend the family move to a suburban area. There’s lots more data where that came from. Take a look! (Cleveland.com, 5/5/21)
- If your news feed is anything like mine (minus alerts related to a certain obscure North Carolina-based band and weird time-travel TV shows of course), you have been inundated with notices on this development for the last couple of days: A bill proposing universal private school vouchers was introduced in the Ohio House. It is short, only two pages, and lacking in lots of important details. This is by design, says the sponsor, who wants to start a conversation on the idea before fleshing out the plan. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/6/21) Unsurprisingly, and probably fueling those news alerts, a very predictable
conversationmonologue has already begun… (Ohio Capital Journal, 5/7/21) …on both extremes of the issue. (Heartland Institute, 5/6/21)
- Not only do we have a first look at Columbus City Schools’ fall 2021 plans (fully in-person with a number of options available), but we also have some intriguing detail on longer-term remote learning options that look, dare I say it?, reasonably promising. (10TV News, Columbus, 5/5/21) Officials in Toledo City Schools are sounding a very different, far more downbeat, note, as I read it. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 5/6/21)
- Finally this week, the editors at Cleveland.com opine on the school funding plan currently being debated as part of the state budget bill. (Cleveland.com, 5/7/21)
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