COLUMBUS, Ohio — Six years ago, Youngstown City School District officials could boast that teachers had on average 14 years of experience.
Now it’s five years, the district’s Board of Education President Ron Shadd said.
Since 2016, two different CEOs have run the district, thanks to the Ohio legislature. The CEO doesn’t answer to the school board but rather to an academic distress commission, with most members appointed by the Ohio superintendent of public instruction.
Changes brought by the CEOs have resulted in higher turnover among faculty and staff.
In addition to Youngtown, state has taken over the Lorain and East Cleveland city school districts, due to low standardized test scores.
District report card grades have largely stayed the same since.
But with the two-year budget bill passed in June, the Ohio General Assembly has created a path out of state control that lawmakers and education experts say can realistically be achieved.
All three school districts have taken the first steps to return to local control.
House Bill 70
The words “academic distress commission” didn’t exist when Ohio House Bill 70 was introduced in 2015. The 10-page bill was to allow schools to partner with local organizations and offer health care and social services.
Then came the 67-page amendment - added into the bill, then passed by the full Ohio Senate and House on the same day, June 24, 2015.
The amendment required academic distress commissions, which had previously run low-performing school districts, to appoint a CEO to replace superintendents if the district had prolonged “F” grades on the state report card.
The amendment gave the CEOs more control than the district superintendents ever had.
CEOs can replace principals, close a school, reopen it as a charter school, and find a nonprofit or company to run a school. If that doesn’t improve report cards, CEOs can suspend or alter any provision of a collective bargaining agreements with unions, except for reducing insurance benefits or the base hourly pay rate.
The amendment was “shrouded in secrecy,” according to a lawsuit that ended up before the Ohio Supreme Court. Many lawmakers were in the dark about details until the last moment. Court documents allege that former Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio Department of Education rammed the amendment through. Nevertheless, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the law.
A spokesman for Kasich didn’t reply to a request for comment.
CEOs took over schools in Youngstown in 2016, in Lorain in 2017 and in East Cleveland in 2018.
Prompted by local dissatisfaction in the three communities, the legislature twice passed moratoriums that prevent the Department of Education from placing new districts under state control. The current moratorium expires at the end of the 2022-2023 school year.
The fallout
In Youngstown, families once had the option to send kids to a STEM school specializing in science, technology, engineering and math, but a CEO shuttered it. A 3D printing program ended. The number of foreign language courses decreased. There are two football teams but no marching bands in Youngstown, Shadd said.
Lorain City School District has had three CEOs since 2017. Relations between the community and some of the CEOs have been chilly, said Mark Ballard, president of the district’s Board of Education
“When people are appointed out of Columbus, and they don’t live in this community and don’t understand the dynamics of the community, it’s very frustrating,” Ballard said. “When people bring concerns to a locally elected member, there’s nothing they can do because there’s people out of Columbus really calling the shots.”
Lorain’s enrollment dropped from 6,800 before the first CEO arrived to the current 6,100. With fewer kids, the district lost millions of dollars in state funding needed to improve the report cards, said the district’s current CEO Jeff Graham, who has a better relationship with the community than past CEOs.
The districts under academic distress commissions are some of the poorest in Ohio, said state Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan, a Youngstown Democrat who has been fighting HB 70 since it passed. The bill requires the state to cover administrative costs, such as the CEO’s salary, but doesn’t provide large amounts of money that Lepore-Hagan believes would have better helped the districts hire more staff and implement new programs to improve education.
In Lorain, about 95% of the children qualify for free and reduced lunch based on low family incomes, and so the district offers 100% of children free or reduced lunch, Graham said.
With poverty comes challenging situations that other school districts in Ohio may not face. For instance, before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 45% of children missed a month or more of school in Lorain, Graham said.
A new way out
For the state to return control of a district to local leadership, districts previously had to score an overall “C” grade on the state report card for one year, following two or more years of a grade higher than “F.”
In particular, the overall “C” grade has been difficult for the districts to achieve, especially with the academic setbacks brought on by remote learning due to COVID-19, said Sen. Nathan Manning, a North Ridgeville Republican who helped create the new path out of state control.
The new way out requires the districts to propose, and the Ohio Department of Education to approve, three-year improvement plans, Manning said. If the district meets a majority of the benchmarks after three years, it can return to normal operations.
Each district submitted its plan at the beginning of October. The Department of Education has until the end of the month to review them. It can request revisions, and the districts would have 15 days to respond, Dr. Chris Woolard, the Ohio Department of Education’s interim chief program officer, recently told the Ohio State School Board.
“The expectation is to get those plans approved at some point. There may be some revisions or modifications requested, but once those plans are approved as a three-year plan, that essentially starts on July 1,” Woolard said. “Once they’re approved, that district is no longer under the control of an academic distress commission.”
However, the distress commission will remain on as advisors to the district and don’t completely go away until after the district successfully hits most of the benchmarks in the three-year plan.
If the districts fail to hit most of the benchmarks in their plan, they get two one-year extensions. If they can’t improve in that time, they will return to the control of the distress commission.
The districts would be run by superintendents during the transition, with their salaries paid for by the state if they choose to make the CEO the new superintendent.
In Lorain, the plan is to keep on Graham. East Cleveland City School District’s improvement plan proposes to keep CEO Dr. Henry Pettiegrew II as a superintendent. Youngstown’s board would later determine whether to hire a new superintendent.
The plans differ across the various districts, taking into account their respective strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, Lorain’s plan proposes 30 benchmarks, Graham said.
In state report cards, officials focus primarily on two figures: Whether students achieve targets established in each grade level and whether there is “growth” or improvement from year to year on the percentage of kids who hit those targets. Lorain’s plan emphasizes growth.
“It takes years to get caught up, and our job is to make sure that they’re caught up, and so that’s what we’re trying to do,” Graham said. “Our benchmark piece is based on growth. There are achievement pieces in there, but it is heavier on the growth.”
With the distress commissions gone, will districts improve?
Aaron Churchill, the research director at the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, reviewed some of the improvement plans. He isn’t too impressed.
“Some of the goals are not exactly aspirational or lofty, I would say. Not exactly very high targets,” he said.
The Fordham Institute backed the CEO amendment when HB 70 passed in 2015 but now realizes it didn’t live up to original hopes, due to the lack of community buy-in, Churchill said.
If the Ohio State Board of Education accepts the plans without significant revisions, “it’s pretty likely that they’re going to be able to get out of this (state control) in the next three years,” he said.
Lepore-Hagan, the Youngstown lawmaker, questions whether the plans and revisions will ever be good enough to transition out of state control.
“I hope seriously that this administration and the ODE are acting in good faith,” she said. “We are concerned it might be a façade.”
Lawmakers, board members and others agreed that getting rid of distress commissions and CEOs will take care of the problems created by the distress commissions. But the schools may need more than that to catch children up to their peers across the state.
“We didn’t fund it like we should have,” Lepore-Hagan said. “We should have put more money in it and taken it more seriously.”
Lepore-Hagan pointed to the I Promise school in Akron, supported by the LeBron James Family Foundation, which offers GED programs, legal aid, medical and mental health treatment, financial literacy programs, a food pantry and other resources for students and their families.
“We should just copy that vision that they’ve implemented,” she said. “That took a celebrity and people fundraising and helping the children in the school. Also if you look at public and private partnerships and wraparound services (offering social services to children and families) it’s an organic approach. It’s not just academics.”
Shadd said the Youngstown district may need more assistance and resources.
“Not every resource is funding, as it may be resources in other places - even though that’s all money at the end of the day - but the idea is, is the state researching what best practices will be successful?” he asked.
Shadd believes that after the whirlwind of changes brought by state takeover, students and teachers need consistency. He looks at other Ohio districts, where students returned to teach and later became administrators. They’ve been able to have consistent leadership and curriculum, sometimes for decades, he said. He’d like that for Youngstown.
“They’ve had a level of buy-in from their community and from their staff,” he said. “That’s the one thing we want from this effort: the ability to regain consistency in our district.”
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