- There are five seasons here in central Ohio: winter, spring, summer, back-to-school whining, and fall. Guess which one we’re in now? [OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY PUTS ON SCREECHY VOICE] “The school year is starting toooooooooo early nowadays. What happened to summer you guyyyyyyyys? I remember when I was a kid….” Testing is, of course, to blame. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/8/16) [OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY PUTS ON SCREECHY VOICE AGAIN] “The school day starts tooooooooo early nowadays. Middle schoolers will be on the bus in the dark and sleep through claaaaaaaass. And high schoolers will die driving to schoooooooooooooool!” Going to bed early is, apparently, impossible. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/8/16)
- How about a little good news for central Ohio and beyond? 32 graduates of Ohio’s Bright New Leaders program are starting their first year as principals and lead administrators in schools across the state. These are “mid-career professionals” who left their business or administration tracks to train intensively for the last year to become education leaders. Kudos to the Ohio Business Roundtable, the Fisher College of Business and the Ohio State University, and all the other partners who came together to make this project a reality. Great to hear the voices of superintendents expressing their appreciation as well. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/7/16) Good news in the Mahoning Valley too: It may have a crazy name, but the first standalone STEM school in the area will admit its first students in just a couple of weeks. (No, it’s not too early.) It is called Valley STEM+ME2, it is not a charter school (as the article says) and it covers grades 9 and 10 so far. It will add a grade level per year for the next two years. And it has no admissions boundaries. If you can get there, you can apply. Kudos and best wishes to everyone involved. (Youngstown Vindicator, 8/8/16)
- Some bad news from the Mahoning Valley: Youngstown Schools CEO Krish Mohip has yet to be paid after nearly six weeks on the job. You’ll recall that there was some “confusion” as to how the pay was going to work: the board believing that the state would pay the CEO directly; the state believing that they would reimburse the district. Turns out they were both wrong: the state will pay the district on a quarterly basis and the CEO will be paid only after the state payment has cleared the bank. Sheriff Mohip is cool with it in this piece, blaming himself for a “paperwork delay”. (Youngstown Vindicator, 8/6/16)
- Nothing but bad news this week in the ongoing story of META Solutions – a statewide educational-services entity with a ton of school districts as clients, rapid expansion, and apparently not much oversight. First up, the story of SCOCA (the South Central Ohio Computer Association), a public agency which provides internet and technology services and support to tons of school districts around the state. It is the scuppered merger of SCOCA with META Solutions back in February that began unraveling the whole story. SCOCA, it seems, had huge undisclosed liabilities and may well have been forgetting to pay service providers. The numbers quoted here are enormous, they include federal E-rate funds and therefore triggered a federal investigation, and it doesn’t seem to be over yet as new information continues to emerge. What’s worse, even though the formal merger never happened, META appears to be on the hook for cleaning up the mess because they are now the day-to-day operators of SCOCA! (Lancaster Eagle Gazette, 8/6/16) In an unrelated note (says the skeleton remainder of META’s administration and board), a number of districts have left the META consortium in recent months and found another service provider. (Marion Star, 8/6/16) And to round things off for now, here’s an in-depth analysis of the tangled web of META’s birth and explosive growth, including SCOCA and other connected entities. All spending public dollars at some pretty astronomical levels. Hard to believe that this crazy behemoth came to life just a year ago. Story developing, as they say. (Marion Star, 8/7/16)
