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If you can’t beat ‘em, run ‘em out of business
The Toledo Federation of Teachers provided the sole proponent testimony on a new piece of legislation introduced in Toledo City Council. It is an effort to codify in ordinance all of the ad hoc zoning and permitting roadblocks that have been thrown up against competitors to Toledo City Schools over the years, be they charter schools or private providers. (Think traffic, sewer, lot line, and land use restrictions.) It is also fully retroactive such that nearly 300 existing schools, including many daycare centers and the well-regarded Toledo School for the Arts, will immediately be in violation the day it passes and need to either shut down, move, or spend millions of dollars to come into compliance. There was vehement opposition from both witnesses and at least one city councilmember, so it is to be hoped that this blatant attempt at weaponized bureaucracy will not succeed.
Congratulations to the Class of 2025
In some better news from Toledo, here’s a nice look at the graduating class of Ohio Digital Learning School, whose in-person commencement exercises were held last week in Maumee. Kudos and best wishes to the 160 non-traditional students who earned their diplomas and will go out to make their way in the world.
Overly simplified
A surprising piece published by Teen Vogue this week—dateline: Dayton. A student journalist from the Gem City lays out for a wide audience some details of what are termed “Ohio’s Private Charter School Wars” through the lens of the school busing mess in her city. While she does highlight some deep problems in her city—not least of which is safety and security for all citizens using RTA bus stops—she unfortunately elides many other important facts about the way student transportation operates in Ohio. Most pertinently: that everyone pays the taxes that fund yellow buses (including the families of students attending charter, private, and STEM schools), that the laws requiring districts to transport school choice-using students are decades old, and that the only “war” going on in this regard has been waged by districts like Dayton City Schools, who are solely in charge of how all student transportation operates and who have been trying to evade or invalidate the inconvenient parts of those laws for many years. Turning a national spotlight on this issue demands a full and nuanced accounting of the details—a benchmark which this piece does not reach.
Do the right thing, adults
Chavez-Huerta K-12 Preparatory Academy is closing its doors after 25 years of operation in Pueblo, Colorado, due to financial troubles. While the text of this brief story indicates that the adults who run the charter school and the traditional school district in which it is located met together to “support all students in our community” as they seek out new schools for next year, some of the additional rhetoric indicates that the usual adult interests will likely get in the way of harmonious, family-centric efforts.
Hot in Florida
A similar story out of Florida, where the first community-voted district-to-charter conversion in the state (Newberry Elementary in Gainesville) was approved—grudgingly—by the elected county school board this week. Said one board member after her affirmative vote: “What we are witnessing is not a grassroots education reform effort, but a state-imposed maneuver, enabled by local actors who have prioritized ideological agendas over open community dialogue.” An appeal of the whole conversion infrastructure is still pending. Meanwhile, we also learned this week that traditional educational models across the Sunshine State are feeling the heat of school choice competition: more than half of all K-12 students in Florida don’t attend their zoned district school building, including more than 300,000 who opt for interdistrict open enrollment and magnet schools in their own districts among many many available options.
Ohio budget update
Last week, the Ohio Senate released its version of the biennial state budget, making changes from the House-passed version, which itself made changes to Gov. DeWine’s original proposals. Thankfully, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill published this helpful analysis of education-related policies—focusing on those impacting charter schools—that tracks the various proposals and lays out where they stand now. Spoiler alert: he calls it two steps forward and three steps back. The Senate passed HB 96 on Thursday and it heads to conference committee next week to hammer out all the various iterations into a final bill.
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