Gadfly Bites 8/11/25—One piece at a time

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1. We noted last Wednesday that there was a possibility that transportation for other choice-using students in central Ohio could get a bit easier in the upcoming school year since United Schools Network went out on a limb (wahoo!) to take on the busing of hundreds of their own students for the first time, thus obviating that requirement for the perpetually-perplexed Columbus City Schools. Today, however, we learn that letters designating hundreds of Columbus charter, private, and STEM school students “impractical to transport” have already been received by families across the city who had been counting on hoping for desperate to get a bus ride to and from school this fall. Our own Aaron Churchill spells it out bluntly: “Districts have traditionally treated [choice-using students] as second-class citizens,” rather than “as residents of the district, whose parents are paying property taxes to the schools”, creating the busing mess we currently see. Several solutions are mooted here, including some which would take those taxpayer transpo dollars out of the hands of districts and put them into the hands of someone—anyone—who can create a workable plan. (Columbus Dispatch, 4/10/25)
   
   

2. Case in point: Dayton. As we have been following here for weeks, Dayton City Schools finally did the smart thing and gave up on trying to create a workable plan for transporting high school students to school this year. I am pleased that, for the most part, media coverage of the story proceeds from the understanding that the district has fumbled this effort from the start and that anything they would have slapped together in the limited time they had would have been expensive, inefficient, potentially unsafe, and led to excessive tardiness and absenteeism—particularly for charter, private, and STEM school students, whose on-time arrival is at least fourth on the list of priorities for this district. (Or is it fourteenth?) Just as I have been saying all along. On top of all of that, I was convinced that whatever plans families, communities, non-profits, schools, and even individuals would come up with would be better, safer, cheaper, and more effective. While we don’t have any info from any charter or private schools yet, this piece does give us one example of district families stepping up, just as I knew they would. Parents of students attending Stivers School for the Arts have already arranged carpools to make sure their kids get to school on time starting on day one (which is tomorrow for ninth graders, BTW.) Recall that Dayton City Schools’ very first suggestion to help themselves create a workable new plan was to cancel intradistrict choices for all high school students—which would have included 99 percent of Stivers kids—and make them all go to the building closest to their homes regardless of what they might have wanted. This is good. This is the first step. This is the way. Look at Dayton go. (Dayton Daily News, 8/10/25)

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