Welcome to a special Thursday edition of Ohio Charter News Weekly. We’re back after three weeks’ break, with this edition covering Ohio-specific news published between 3/3/25 and 3/20/25. We’ll be back again tomorrow with a national catch-up.
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State budget update
Debate on Ohio House Bill 96, the next biennial state budget, is underway in the legislature, and it covers a plethora of issues relevant to charter school leaders, supporters, and families. The Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill published a high-level look at charter funding, school facilities, and dropout recovery accountability provisions that is worth a read…with much more to come.
Busing woes detailed
While Charter News was on vacation, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) released a report on the status of school district transportation failures over the last two school years. That is, the amount of daily fines levied against districts for failing to properly transport charter, private, and STEM school students to and from school. According to testimony provided to the Senate Education Committee and covered by Gongwer Ohio, Columbus City Schools was fined $9.6 million and Youngstown City Schools was fined $1.9 million in the 2023-24 school year, for just two egregious examples. So far this school year, Columbus has racked up $1.9 million in fines already. Sounds like a seriously-troubled system in need of fixing. It seems that the Ohio Association of School Business Officials (OASBO) would concur with that assessment, seeing that the organization’s leader recently asked for a legislative-level student transportation committee to be created for that very reason. “The complexity of pupil transportation in Ohio requires a comprehensive review and strategic planning approach,” said executive director Katie Johnson in testimony. “We believe it is essential to establish a Pupil Transportation Working Group to evaluate Ohio’s transportation funding structure and make recommendations for systemic improvements.” Definitely couldn’t hurt.
More important data from DEW
The Department of Education and Workforce also recently released a report on the number of public schools (district and charter) that were required to submit a reading improvement plan to the state last year due to low test scores for students in early grades. Cleveland.com’s coverage notes that 46 districts and 104 charter schools were required to submit such plans—described as blueprints for how those schools plan on raising student achievement in reading—which is a slight decrease from the numbers reported in the 2022-2023 school year. Obviously there is more work to be done, but this is vital information to have available to the public.
Update from Dayton
The last time we published the Charter News, we discussed a sad case in which a Dayton City Schools basketball team had to forfeit a tournament game—ending their postseason run—because an ineligible student had played in that game. District leaders, saying no one informed coaches that the charter school student was ineligible, reacted by banning all charter (and private and STEM) school students from participating in district extracurriculars until a new communications plan was hammered out. Today, it was reported that such agreements had been signed—individually—with a number of Dayton schools, including Liberty High School, DECA, Richard Allen, and Temple Christian. An agreement with the Dayton Regional STEM School was nearly completed in the same time frame but not yet formally signed. Hopefully more will be finalized in the near future, allowing those school choice students to participate in sports and other extracurriculars through their resident district…as state law requires.
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