- A busier-than-usual weekend in a couple of northeast Ohio hotspots, it seems. Despite ongoing negotiations between union and elected school board reps, the Youngstown Education Association announced this weekend that they have scheduled a strike vote for 5:00 pm today. (Mahoning Matters, 8/21/23) And in Parma, a special meeting of the elected school board was held over the weekend to try and get some clarity around that high school demolition project we talked about on Friday (but has been ongoing for some months now). I, personally, am still unclear why more “clarity” is needed at this point. The district’s superintendent has already been really clear that they haven’t had enough kids for several years to efficiently utilize all the buildings they have and that right-sizing is only way forward since several levies have failed over that same period. The only thing that’s muddy is the interference stirred up by outside folks who don’t seem to care about efficient use of district funds and only want this old building saved (and housing district students) by any means necessary. And at least one of them is willing to invoke the charter school boogieman—more directly and with more venom as you will see in the piece—to make that happen. (Cleveland.com, 8/20/23)
- And we also have a couple of bits of leftover news from late on Friday. Governor DeWine told his Executive Workforce Board at its meeting last week that the administration is “in the process of interviewing” candidates to serve as director of the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW). Yay! Efforts to fill two deputy positions—career-technical and primary and secondary education—will begin in earnest when the director is in place. (Gongwer Ohio, 8/18/23) A few months ago, we learned that all Ohio students will have access to Zearn math resources for free for the next two years. On Friday, the newswire told us that the Ohio Department of Education had contracted with Varsity Tutors to provide a similar on-demand 1-on-1 tutoring service for any school district interested in providing such support for its students. Hopefully we’ll get more info on this in the media or from schools themselves soon. Especially things like whether non-district public schools, private schools, and homeschoolers can get in on this goodness. (EIN BusinessWire, 8/18/23)
Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
Policy Priority:
Topics:
