Gadfly Bites 8/29/25—Using, refusing

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1. The next time you hear folks opining about how awesome it would be if “every kid” got free meals at school, you would do well to remember this op-ed from Traci Woodard, Parent Task Force Director for Ohio Parents for Education Freedom and all-around incredible supporter of school choice and student success. In it, she reminds us all that the tens of thousands of virtual charter school students across our state do not receive any kind of school-based food service, no matter if their family income would make them eligible in a district or brick-and-mortar charter or indeed if every student in a district is given free food regardless of their income. “You might meet the same income rules as the student getting on the bus down the street,” Woodard writes, “be counted in the same census numbers that bring federal meal dollars to Ohio, and still be told, ‘No lunch for you’.” To make matters worse: Virtual charter students were offered lunch (and breakfast and more) during Covid, but the waiver allowing this has ended. Despite that, Ohio gets (and has always gotten) its federal school lunch funds based on enrollment counts that include these students. That means the money is there, and only the will is lacking. “The only thing worse than a hungry child,” her op-ed concludes, “is a hungry child that we have the ability to feed but choose not to.” Which is as succinct a condemnation as I can think of. An unacceptable situation that needs to be fixed. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/28/25)
   
   

2. We learned yesterday via Gongwer that the Ohio Supreme Court has unfortunately rebuffed Attorney General Dave Yost’s legal effort to force Columbus City Schools to transport a group of choice-using students while their “impractical to transport” determinations are adjudicated for a second year. Somehow the district’s argument that “numbers are down this year” and the “Department of Education and Workforce’s adjudication process is working just fine” swayed them. Charming. (Gongwer Ohio, 8/28/25)
   
   

3. Hey hey, Ohio Capital Journal, slow down! You can stop selling these awesome-sounding small private schools that accept EdChoice vouchers so hard. You don’t have to convince me that school choice is great—I’m already a fan! (Ohio Capital Journal, 8/28/25) I jest of course, because I’m pretty sure the OCJ is not in the business of pitching private schools or vouchers to their readers. As an example, here is a follow-up piece about two families who opted for private schools—one using EdChoice, the other refusing on principle. Their stance: Not wanting to take away resources from their district of residence via a voucher. While any parent is entitled to believe that, to act upon it, and to say so, I do wish the OCJ would have at least pointed out the important factual inaccuracy inherent in that stance to any of their readers thinking of doing the same. To wit: The primary “resources” (state per-pupil funding, to the tune of over $18K last year) is unavailable to the district immediately when the child is not enrolled. Poof! Same as if he would have moved to Bexley or New York instead. By contrast, this family’s sliding scale voucher amount is maybe a quarter of that. But no matter how much it is, a) it doesn’t come out of a district’s coffers, and b) state EdChoice funds don’t get sent to the district if an eligible family doesn’t use it. It’s just unspent state funds. So yes, I say feel free to stand on your principles folks, and to shout them from the rooftops; but I also say that it’s reasonable for me to expect news outlets to stand on theirs and correct the record when necessary in a non-opinion piece. Or maybe I’m missing something. Oh, and kudos to the private school for both accepting EdChoice students and for allowing whoever wants to refuse a voucher to do so (no matter the reasoning) and to pay full freight on their own. And that's as fair as I can be about the matter. (Ohio Capital Journal, 8/29/25)
   
   

4. Finally this week, y’all know that I am a cellphone ban skeptic, trepidatious that implementation will be bad in many schools and positive outcomes minimal in most. There’s a lot of reasons for my stance, but they all boil down to one word: Adults. We talked about one example of this on Wednesday, where adults believe so fervently that having phones is so detrimental for kids’ attention spans that the devices must even be banned from lunchtime, while simultaneously believing that kids are so bad that not having phones at lunch will cause them to act out and get up to “mischief”. Even books are not enough to soothe these savages. Thus the kids must be distracted the entire time with every board game, craft circle, and foosball table that money can buy (not to mention a raft of adult eyes). Here’s another example, in which a parent says, “The kids have become a little hypersensitive to the ideas of needing these phones, being very codependent on these devices, where it builds up an anxiety within them.” Thus, a complete bell-to-bell phone ban is the only rational response to save them from themselves. (ABC 6 News, 8/29/25) But also on Wednesday, we paraphrased a social media wag who insisted he had proof that his school’s phone ban was airtight because not a single student reported the Kelce/Swift engagement news when it dropped during class. As a counterpoint, I offer this insanity from EdWeek, that not only describes teachers interrupting their classes to announce the news to their poor phoneless kiddos, but also disrupting entire buildings with PA announcements, and even filming TikTok videos of them performing these stunts. The mildest response I have to this nonsense is that it’s more proof that student phone bans are a “do as we say, not as we do” sort of decree. (I am well aware of how these usually work out; are you?) A bit more salty response would be that these adults are clearly missing the obvious clues that they care more about mid-30s celebrities doing anything than today’s high schoolers do. (To which I say: grow the heck up.) And indeed that they care more about such things than they do school—the same thing they accuse kids of doing…with less evidence. And at worst: Phone bans are obviously doomed to failure because the adults implementing them are clearly the ones with anxiety and hypersensitivity and mental angst related to constant connectivity and FOMO and nothing at all is being done to rein in these juvenile delinquents cosplaying as authorities. In fact, they are even more firmly in charge of the asylum than ever these days and will, as ever, say or do anything to keep it that way. (EdWeek, 8/28/25)

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