Gadfly Bites 6/8/26—Web surfing

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1. More discussion of student transportation to start the week. First up is the (strongly district-centric) view from public media in Cincinnati, where we learn that nearly 1,000 non-district charter and private school students were declared “impractical to transport” by the district and given payments between $607 and $1,214 as recompense. That does not seem like enough to get a kid to and from school every day for a year to me, but the elected board member quoted here doesn’t seem to care mind. Luckily, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill is on hand to offer a contrasting take. Transporting resident students to charter and private schools “is not overburdensome,” he says, “because we’ve been doing it for 50 years. This is something that should be a basic expectation of local government, which a school district is, to provide the public service to the students in their communities so that they can get to school.” Well said, sir. Well said. (WVXU-FM, Cincinnati, 6/7/26) Meanwhile, public media in Cleveland gives us more detail on the draft report from the Ohio School Transportation Workgroup, expected later this summer. The report seems to cover all the relevant bases to me—focusing on getting all kids to school no matter what type of school they attend, creating options to district-controlled busing systems, and funding the services to benefit families. The coverage still seems a bit district-centric to me—including the aside that “several provisions that favor nonpublic schools were added to the draft report recently that weren’t directly discussed” by the workgroup—but kudos to Ideastream for at least allowing United Schools leader Andy Boy to explain how difficult the current model is for his public charter schools here in Columbus. (Ideastream Public Media, 6/8/26)
   
   

2. A whole lot of opining on education topics in Cleveland this weekend…I think. I’m not sure what specifically former Plain-Dealer editor Brent Larkin is complaining about here, given the 60-year time span of this op-ed and the copious targets at which he aims his ire. I think he’s bothered that CMSD’s Collinwood High School is now closed, despite the litany of very good reasons he cites that led up to it. I definitely don’t understand how expanded pre-K could possibly have saved a 1,500-student building operating with less than 250 kids from shutting down, but dude seems really sure that it would have. A weird one. (Cleveland.com, 6/7/26) This op-ed, from current Cleveland.com editor Leila Atassi, has a similar vibe in that she hates the idea of closing school buildings, but it is much clearer in focusing on the source of her ire: Legislators who want to allow closures/transformations/takeovers of persistently low-performing schools. Doesn’t matter that the goal is to, you know, make them stop underserving their students. “Public schools belong to the communities that built them, fund them and depend on them,” she writes. “They are not the state’s to take, and they are certainly not the state’s to give away.” (Cleveland.com, 6/8/26)
   
   

3. Speaking of “community”, this piece paints a generally-positive picture of a community-funded afterschool program in Akron, although the impacts on student absenteeism focused on in the story are ultimately lackluster. Nevertheless, we learn that the City of Akron is dropping another $300K on the program in its 27th year of operation. As I usually do in response to these kinds of stories, I conducted an internet search to see if the Akron After School program was open to charter or private school students—a.k.a. members of the community, but not those attending Akron City Schools—were eligible for this, but I hit a dead end when the only parent information I could find on their website was a handbook hailing from 2020. So I’ll just have to go out on a limb here and suggest that if you have to ask, the answer will be no….and everyone who needs to know that already does. (Signal Akron, 6/4/26)
   
   

4. Finally today, here’s a look at the recent commencement ceremony for the Class of 2026 at Maumee Valley Country Day School, a bougie (I assume) private school in the Toledo area. Their keynote speaker was nationally-known red carpet personality, actress, journalist, and MVCDS alum Zuri Hall. She talked about how much the school helped her to come out of her shell as a child, to find and embrace opportunities, and to be tenacious in chasing her future. How awesome. While Hall’s family was dependent upon a test-based scholarship to afford to send her there in the early aughts, I did a web search to discover that yes, they do accept EdChoice vouchers these days (I know you were as curious about that as I was). Their website even notes that they have a dedicated EdChoice Navigator on staff. I love it when my web surfing internet research leads me to good answers. (Toledo Blade, 6/5/26)

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