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New choice for rural Ohio families
Here’s an interesting story about Westwood Preparatory Academy, a Columbus-based charter school specializing in serving students with special needs. Westwood is apparently expanding far from home—to rural southern Ohio—replacing a previous educational program run by the Lawrence County Developmental Disabilities board. This coverage is a little downbeat, focusing more on the ending of a 60-year-old program, but hopefully we’ll get to hear more positive details about the new school’s plans as its fall 2027 opening draws closer.
Mulling transportation changes in Columbus
The elected board of Columbus City Schools is once again looking at ways to fill a projected budget deficit, and ending yellow bus transportation for high schoolers is near the top of their list. It is not mandated by the state and costs more than $7 million per year to operate as a voluntary service to students. Options under consideration are to cancel all busing and provide no replacement, to cancel all busing and provide public transit passes as a replacement, or to cancel most busing and provide transit passes only to those impacted by the cancelation. Board discussions are ongoing, but whatever is decided for district students will also be the fate of charter, private, and STEM high school students who currently rely on Columbus for transportation.
Competition
Richardson Independent School District in Texas has already made many changes to the way it operates in order to compete for students with the plethora of other educational options in Dallas County. That includes a slew of specialized magnet schools and programs from K-12. The latest change: Aligning the application windows for all magnet programs in all grades and moving the opening date for all of them to November 1 for the 2027-28 school year. Some magnet schools previously didn’t even start taking applications until mid-January. Now everything will be done and dusted before Christmas. All to get the jump on charter and private schools. “It’s just critically important that we move up our timeline,” says the district’s executive director of enrollment, “to make faster decisions and to protect our district’s enrollment and retain our families.” Charming.
Coexistence?
The CEO of Mastery Schools published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Citizen this week, comparing charter school governance in New Jersey to that in Pennsylvania. (Mastery operates schools in both states.) Dr. Joel Boyd says that having traditional school districts oversee charters—especially accountability structures and final say on which new charters and renewals are granted—creates an unnecessary antagonism between the two school types, which has been playing out for years across the Keystone State. He suggests Pennsylvania adopt a statewide charter authorizer, as New Jersey does, which would allow for more peaceful coexistence of schools at the local level and state-level accountability for both.
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