This is the last edition of Ohio Charter News to be published in 2024. Thank you for reading and subscribing. We will return on Friday, January 3 to catch up with the final clips of this year.
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Lame ducks
Ohio’s 135th General Assembly wrapped up its two-year session late Wednesday night. Education bills were moving fast and furious in the final hours, including Senate Bill 295, which was rolled into other legislation and ultimately passed. As we discussed in last week’s edition, this is the bill that makes changes to the closure requirements for poor-performing public schools across the state. The same bill that Fordham Institute Vice President Chad Aldis provided opponent testimony upon earlier this month.
New ducks
Looking ahead to the 136th General Assembly, which will convene in early January, Fordham’s Research Director Aaron Churchill put forward what he calls a “fix-it list” for the Cupp-Patterson school funding formula, all of which could be tackled in the next state budget bill coming up. What’s the issue? Well there are actually six of them, all of which will be needed to make sure the plan lives up to its intention to be a “fair” and “constitutional” replacement for the previous formula.
Giving kudos for giving back
The University of Dayton this week celebrated Jayla Treadwell, who just completed her master’s degree in physician assistant practice and plans to stay in her home town in order to serve her neighbors there. This is awesome enough news for the Gem City, but we can add to the kudos by pointing out that Jayla is a graduate of Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) and that she has created a link between DECA and the UD PA program so that middle and high school students are exposed to it and can clearly see the pathway to success in that field for themselves. Fantastic!
Reverberations
This story is not strictly related to charter schools, but its outlines will be very familiar to charter leaders in central Ohio and beyond. The leaders of Noor Islamic Center have sued the City of Hilliard for denying them the permits needed to convert an empty office building into a multi-purpose community center. Cities and towns across the country have used planning and zoning processes to slow, stall, and cancel charter school creation and expansion that would compete with traditional district schools, and Noor’s inclusion of a school component to their project is likely one of several reasons for the opposition (despite multiple accommodations made by the center to respond to planning and zoning concerns). The results of this case will have reverberations beyond private schooling and far beyond this sleepy Columbus suburb.
The view from Nevada
We regularly note changes in student enrollment among different school types, and new data from Nevada follow the recent trends: Fewer students in traditional district schools, more students in public charter schools. In fact, Nevada Current reported this week that the State Public Charter School Authority, which authorizes the vast majority of charter schools in the Silver State, has shrunk the enrollment gap between it and the largest district—Washoe County—from 2,800 students last year to fewer than 650 students this year. If trends continue, charters will be number one next year. It’s a testament to the importance of parental choice and an incredible example of how incremental changes can snowball into one giant game changer.
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