The science of reading is being taught in classrooms across Ohio, but the state’s education department stresses it will likely take time to track students’ progress.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is particularly interested in tracking the progress of the current kindergarten students.

“This year’s kindergartners will be the first class that all four years going up to third grade, they’re going to get the science of reading,” state education department director Stephen Dackin said to the Capital Journal. “That’s a pretty good barometer of where we will be as a state in terms of our implementation and then increased outcomes in literacy.”

Ohio’s science of reading law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget, which gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year. The science of reading is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

“While we are certainly making great progress, this is not easy,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said earlier this month during his state of the state speech. “Retraining seasoned teachers, who were taught the wrong way and now have to learn new methods, is certainly an exercise in perseverance. This shift takes time.”

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent that were released in September.

“The report card data is lagging data, so it reports on data from the previous school year, and obviously, not all districts have probably been at the point where they’ve implemented the science of reading in their districts last year,” Dackin said.

He said the education department is not surprised by a dip in performance.

“Sometimes you’re asking teachers who’ve been teaching reading for 20 years to suddenly change what they’re doing and implement something that’s new to them,” Dackin said. “We know it takes a while to do this. That doesn’t mean there’s not a sense of urgency in our state, but we also anticipate that folks are going to need some support in helping to implement.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

College prep programs

A unique facet of Ohio’s science of reading law is the third-party audit of teacher preparation programs.

“Our law is the toughest in the country,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Ohio colleges and universities teacher preparation programs were required to be fully aligned with teaching the science of reading by Jan. 1, 2025, but 10 colleges were found to be not aligned, according to an .

Bowling Green State University, Central State University, Cleveland State University, Defiance College, Ohio Christian University, Ohio Dominican University, Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Toledo, and Wright State University were not in alignment.

Ohio State University had , the most of any university, according to the audit.

“My concern is how seriously Ohio State is taking this process,” Ohio House Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Township, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“By the way I look at it, you’re not taking it very seriously at all,” he said. “Things hang in the balance here, and I’m very serious about this, and I’m not going to play games with it.”

Erik Porfeli, professor and interim dean of Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology, said the university is taking this seriously.

“We mobilized quickly and addressed all 17 (issues),” he said.

Binaya Subedi, professor and interim chair of Ohio State’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said there has been professional development with faculty every week this semester.

“We are concerned,” he said. “After the audit report, we have systematically reorganized our curriculum.”

Any college or university that does not become fully aligned by next December will have their approval revoked by Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor Mike Duffey.

“We need all universities in compliance or we risk incongruity of literacy outcomes throughout the state for our kids,” Ohio House Rep. Tracy Richardson, R-Marysville, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“Ohio State, you cannot drag on this issue. We will be following up.”

Five colleges and universities were found to be partially in alignment and 33 higher education institutions were found to be in alignment, according to the audit.

“I have confidence that every college will be in full compliance by the end of this year,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Having educator training programs be compliant with the science of reading means school districts won’t have to retrain teachers, Dackin said.

Parents for Reading Justice and OH-KID President Brett Tingley said holding the universities responsible is real accountability.

“Our literacy crisis does not begin in the classroom—it begins in teacher preparation programs,” she said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education meeting.

“When a child learns to read, you change the trajectory of that child’s life, and when a state gets reading right, you change the trajectory of the state itself.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Ohio received a bump in funding for child care last week, a small win in a sector that is still facing uncertainty and an affordability crisis.

Analysis by advocacy group Groundwork Ohio shows at more than $9,500 per year for preschool-age care, more than $11,000 per year for toddler care, and more than $12,000 a year for infant care.

The Ohio Department of Children and Youth was awarded $14.7 million in federal grants “to support access to early care and education services,” according to a press release from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

The federal funding comes from the Preschool Development Grant – Birth to Five, distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“This funding will help Ohio better support families and make sure young children have access to quality care and learning opportunities during their most important years,” DeWine said in a statement.

The state said the money will be used to upgrade technology and research, help early childhood education workers with curriculum development, professional learning opportunities, and “business support resources.”

A total of $250 million was distributed through the federal grant program, and Ohio’s director of the Department of Children and Youth, Kara Wente, said the grant would allow the state “to build on the work already happening in communities across the state.”

“By improving coordination and planning, we can make it easier for families to find the services they need and ensure young children get a strong start,” she said in a statement.

The state General Assembly approved funding for child care through its most recent budget, with funding going to the Child Care Choice voucher program and a pilot cost-sharing child care model.

But advocates were disappointed when eligibility for Publicly Funded Child care was left at 145% of the federal poverty level, despite pushes to raise the level to 160% or 200%.

Programs to provide state grant funding for recruitment and child care provider mentorship went down from previous budget drafts, ending up with $2.85 million in funds over the two years of the budget, .

Lynanne Gutierrez, president and CEO of child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, has said Ohio faces after one-time federal dollars fade away for good in 2028.

State child care advocates have been pushing the federal government to bring current and further funding to the sector.

They have around the country to urge the government to continue funding the Child Care Development Block Grant, along with $10 billion in funding that was frozen in certain states after fraud allegations about Minnesota child care facilities were circulated by a right-wing YouTuber earlier this year.

The funding freeze for Minnesota and other states was blocked temporarily by a federal judge in January, but the lawsuit in which the ruling was made continues.

As funding comes and goes, the cost of child care continues to balloon, and a lack of access and affordability is costing the country billions, according to a new analysis by ReadyNation, a research group partnered with the Institute for Child Success.

The study, released this week, showed insufficient child care for children younger than 5 costs the U.S. economy $172 billion per year in “lost earnings, productivity, and economic activity.”

It showed a $5.3 billion economic impact for Ohio alone.

“Challenges mount over time: with less training and less experience, these parents face diminished career prospects, reducing their earning potential,” the study stated. “And less parent income, along with parental stress, can have harmful short and long-term impacts on children.”

National polling also shows bipartisan support for further child care support and changes to the system.

A poll conducted in the beginning of January on behalf of the national First Five Years Fund showed 80% of voters find the ability to find and afford child care as “either in a state of crisis or a major problem.”

The polling also showed 75% of participants believe child care funding should be increased or at least kept at current levels, with 75% of Republicans, 97% of Democrats, and 85% of independents giving that opinion.

A majority in all political parties polled said funding for child care “is an important and good use of tax dollars.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

A panel of economists says that schools in Ohio aren’t producing workers that match employers’ needs.

The state’s labor force has declined by 91,000 between 2000 and 2020, the survey said. During that period, the state’s education system has changed markedly.

Since Republican John Kasich became governor in 2011, Ohio has diverted billions from traditional public schools. Ranked in K-12 education the year before Kasich took office, Ohio schools by 2023.

Ohio also created such as the , which collapsed in 2018. The state couldn’t verify the politically connected school’s claims of student enrollment, much less whether kids were learning anything.

The state also is now spending in taxpayer money on private schools, while the state’s traditional public schools last year saw their .

In the midst of these radical changes to the Ohio’s education system, it still is not adequately preparing students to join the workforce, economists surveyed by Scioto Analysis said.

Eighteen were asked whether they agreed that “Misalignment between Ohio’s education and workforce training systems and employer skill demands is limiting statewide job growth.” Eleven agreed, three disagreed and four were uncertain or had no opinion.

In the comment section of the survey, David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati said that Ohioans tend not to have gone very far in school. He added that even when they train for certain jobs, their training and the jobs available to them often don’t match.

“Ohio has pretty low educational attainment compared to other states, and even 40% of Ohio workers trained for manufacturing jobs tend not to get manufacturing jobs within a year, consistent with a mismatch of skills and demand for skills,” Brasington wrote.

Educational attainment — or how far people go in school — can be important to employers in several ways. Some need students to go far enough to attain a basic education and possibly vocational training. Others need workers who have been to college.

U.S. News and World Report puts Ohio at in its rankings of educational attainment — well into the bottom half of states.

Bill Lafayette, an economist with Regionomics, said schools and employers need to work closely to address the problem.

“Based on my work with educational institutions, linkages between these institutions and business need to be enhanced,” he wrote. “It has always been important for graduates to leave school with the work-ready skills (communication, responsibility, integrity, leadership, teamwork, etc.) that can spell the difference between success and failure in a career. But now with the pace of technological change, schools need to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of business, and graduates need to recognize that they must keep their skills current or run the risk of irrelevance.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

For some programs, the promise of incoming funding will be enough to restart operations. But many won’t be able to open their doors until they receive their federal dollars, which could take up to two weeks, said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the NHSA. 

Sheridan said the Trump administration understands the urgency and is “moving as fast as they possibly can.”

That said, this interruption had an opportunity cost, and it’s led to instability for families and providers, he said, adding that the shutdown caused staff to focus on issues they “should not be worried about,” such as fundraising and contingency planning.

Some providers fear greater delays since the Trump administration shuttered half of the Head Start regional offices earlier this year. 

“They’re going to be working as hard as they can, but they’re going to be doing it with half the capacity,” said Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.

And even once the funding comes through, closed centers will need to go through a series of logistical hurdles, including reaching out to families who may have found alternative child care arrangements and calling back furloughed staff, some of whom have found employment elsewhere. 

“Head Start is not a light switch,” Hamm said. “You can’t just turn it back on.”

This interruption has also further eroded trust between grantees and the federal government that was already shaky, she added.

The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment on when programs can anticipate communication from the office or their funding.

Since Nov. 1, approximately 65,000 kids and their families — close to 10% of all of those served by Head Start — have been at risk of losing their seats because their programs had not received their awarded funding during the longest government shutdown in history. The early care and education program delivers a range of resources to low-income families including medical screenings, parenting courses and connections to community resources for job, food and housing assistance. 

At the peak of the Head Start closures, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services, according to Sheridan. A number of the remaining programs were able to stay open through private donations, loans, alternative funding streams and staff’s willingness to go without pay.

Valerie Williams, who runs a Head Start program with two facilities in Appalachian Ohio, was excited to tell parents that classrooms would be reopening soon. Her centers have been closed since Nov. 3, impacting 177 kids and 45 staff, many of whom already live paycheck to paycheck, she said.

A number of families were doubly impacted, losing access to Head Start’s resources as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, simultaneously. In the days leading up to the closure, Williams and her staff prepared families as best they could, sharing information about resources for food, assistance for utilities and heating and guidance on child care options. 

On Thursday, Williams wrote to parents via an online portal that she hopes to restart the normal school schedule sometime next week. The post was quickly flooded with comments. 

“This is super exciting!!” wrote one parent. “Best news in a long time. Carter has been asking every day. Hope to see u guys very soon.”

“Yayyy,” wrote another. “The kids miss you guys so much!”

Still, Williams knows reopening won’t be seamless. Along with program leaders across the country, she’ll need to call back furloughed staff, place food orders and handle a number of other operational challenges.

And despite the excitement, the transition back may also prove tricky for some kids.

“I do think that it will feel like starting school again for a lot of our classrooms,” Williams said. “They’ve been out for two weeks … You’re going to work on separation anxiety issues, you’re going to have to get into that routine again and the structure of a classroom environment. So I think that will be a big issue for a lot of our teachers.” 

As of Friday afternoon, Williams was still awaiting communication from the federal Office of Head Start with information about the anticipated timeline for next steps. 

“As soon as we get that notice of award, [I want to] start our staff and kids back immediately,” she said. “The very next day.”

Now that the shutdown has ended, what’s next for Head Start?

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. This year, grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November were left scrambling, as the federal shutdown dragged on.

The government began to resume operations late Wednesday night after President Donald Trump signed a bill, funding through Jan. 30 and allowing programs that didn’t receive their funding on time, including Head Start, to use forthcoming dollars to backpay expenses incurred over the past month and a half.

Here’s what Hamm predicts will happen next: The Office of Head Start will recall all staff to resume, including those who were furloughed during the shutdown. The employees will review grant applications, a process which requires them to flag any language that might be reflective of diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Next, money will be sent along to the remaining regional offices, and eventually dispersed to individual grantees. The NHSA is hopeful that this process will be completed by Thanksgiving for all grantees.

There are two things the federal government can do to help centers open faster, according to Hamm. First, they could waive a typical protocol that leads to a period of seven days between when a member of Congress is notified that their state will be receiving funding and when the funding actually goes out, Hamm explained. 

Officials could also notify grantees, in writing, about how much money they’ll get and when it’s expected to come through, so they can begin planning. 

Unlike SNAP, which received guaranteed funding through the budget year, money for Head Start remains uncertain beyond Jan. 30. While the fear of another shutdown has caused “quite a bit of worry” among the Head Start community, Sheridan said it would likely lead to fewer program disruptions, since it wouldn’t fall at the start of the fiscal year.

To prevent similar chaos moving forward, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin introduced in the final days of the shutdown that would guarantee uninterrupted service for fiscal year 2026. 

“The 750,000 children and their families who use Head Start shouldn’t pay the price for Washington dysfunction,” Baldwin, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, wrote in a statement to The 74.

Multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration over the past year have plunged programs across the country into uncertainty. In the wake of that recent upheaval, a leadership change is also underway. The acting director of the Office of Head Start, Tala Hooban, accepted a new role within the Office of Administration for Children and Families and will be replaced by political appointee Laurie Todd-Smith, according to an email statement from ACF. Todd-Smith currently leads the Office of Early Childhood Development, which oversees the Office of Head Start. 

Sheridan described this move as anticipated and not particularly concerning, though others were less sure. Joel Ryan, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, noted that Hooban was a longtime civil servant and strong supporter of the Head Start program. Without her, he fears “there’s nobody internally with any kind of power that will push back,” on future threats to the program.

Another worry plaguing providers: current funding for Head Start has remained stagnant since the end of 2024, meaning that through at least Jan. 30, programs will be operating under the same budget amid rising costs across the board.

In previous years, the program’s grant recipients typically got a cost-of-living adjustment, such as the bump ($275 million) for fiscal year 2024. In May, a group of almost 200 members of Congress signed to a House Appropriations subcommittee, requesting an adjustment of 3.2% for 2026. A recent statement from NHSA suggested that instead, the proposed Senate bill for next year includes a jump of just , or $77 million.

“If we don’t see a funding increase in line with inflation, that means that Head Start will be facing a cut of that degree,” said Sheridan. “It’s just kind of a quiet cut, or a silent cut.”

“I think what will end up happening,” said Ryan, “is you’ll end up seeing a massive reduction in the number of kids being served.”

Public school districts have two options. They can sit back and hope the pendulum of support swings back to public education, or they can use increased competition as a driving force for innovation to best serve their students’ specific needs.

In Worthington, Ohio, where I became school superintendent 11 years ago, the district has embraced school choice as an opportunity. Serving students in a diverse, inner suburb of Columbus, hit its in 2025, without boundary or population shifts. Families are choosing neighborhood public schools despite an abundance of alternatives, and the community continues to invest in modernizing district facilities. 

The lessons learned demonstrate that public schools not only continue to matter to families, but they can set benchmarks for excellence in today’s competitive education landscape.

parents lean toward school choice is that they are searching for more rigorous and challenging learning experiences for their children. To remain competitive, districts need to think beyond the traditional classroom and create academic and extracurricular opportunities that fit students’ learning styles, interests and goals.

For instance, the allows Worthington’s second-semester high school seniors to complete their education in real-world settings, from working alongside business leaders to backpacking across Europe.

offers a mastery-based learning environment that emphasizes taking intellectual risks and reframing mistakes as learning opportunities. A key component of the program is Phoenix’s Connections class, a writing course that deepens students’ critical thinking skills across all core subjects. Teachers encourage inquiry by asking open-ended questions and posing thought experiments, helping students develop basic techniques of analysis, organize arguments and evaluate evidence, and learn how to engage one another respectfully in sustained discussions of current ethical and social issues.

Expanding to appeal to every student’s interests is a tall order on a small budget. However, keeping kids busy with positive learning experiences and connected to school and friends prevents them from filling their time with less favorable activities. Through a combination of community funding and participation fees, Worthington has expanded its extracurriculars offerings to include 33 varsity sports, a variety of music programs and 70 clubs. 

Because real learning happens through relationships, the district has also focused on ensuring that all students know they have an identified, trusted adult within the school system who cares for and believes in them. This one-on-one connection is a clear expectation for every member of the school community, whether they are a teacher, coach, nurse, custodian or other staff member. This individualized attention and support shifts the narrative that public schools can’t provide the personalized experience parents want for their children.

As centerpieces of their neighborhoods, Worthington schools host a variety of community activities, including art shows, Fourth of July fireworks displays and civic events, while sports stadiums and running tracks are open for use by the public. By building these connections, Worthington has in turn fostered essential public-private partnerships. Some of the area’s largest employers, including Worthington Industries, Honda of America, Abbott Laboratories and Columbus State Community College, work with the district to provide on-site job training. Students gain critical career skills, while businesses develop a strong workforce built on local talent, ensuring the region remains an economic powerhouse.

Because Worthington’s relationships with local residents don’t end when their children graduate, there is greater community support for essential capital projects. Over the past few years, Worthington has passed multiple levies and launched a three-phase, 15-year master facilities plan to renovate decades-old buildings into modern learning environments that align with diverse student needs. To secure buy-in from the community, the district has maintained complete transparency and engaged families throughout the planning process.

Between 2017 and 2021, Worthington redesigned four middle schools, and in 2022, voters passed a bond issue to rebuild a 1950s-era high school. Through the support of the community, today’s students enjoy bigger and better classrooms, children with special needs or English learners have access to more flexible learning spaces, and the community itself has new multipurpose rooms for public gatherings and events.  

In today’s competitive education market, when families see firsthand how deeply a community cares about the long-term success of a school district and the funds it is willing to invest in their children’s education, they are more likely to make public school not just their first choice, but their only choice.

The national debate around struggling student enrollment assumes public schools are in decline. Worthington’s experience shows there is another path. Public schools can grow, adapt and remain central to the community when they stay rooted in values, relationships and responsiveness. It’s up to forward-focused school and community leaders to rethink K-12 education and help public schools reclaim their status as the best option for families.

But this Monday, she won’t have a classroom to go to.

That’s because the ongoing government shutdown has forced her Highland County, Ohio, program to shutter, impacting 177 kids and 45 staffers. Across the state, at least three providers will close their doors, cutting off services to at least 1,000 young children and employment to 286 Head Start workers.

And Ohio is not alone. In all, 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico serving are at risk of closing Monday morning as federal funds expire this weekend. Since the beginning of October, an additional six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama have been operating without federal funding, drawing on emergency local resources to keep their doors open. 

In total, these approximately 65,000 kids account for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning and child care program for lower-income families.

News of their Head Start program’s closure has hit Price’s community in the Appalachia foothills particularly hard.

“I had a parent come up and grab me and hug me and she cried and I cried,” she said. “You know, a lot of parents really rely on our program. It’s pretty much invaluable in our county.”

Sarah Allen’s family is among those feeling the pain. Her 3-year-old daughter Hallie attends Head Start while Allen, a former Head Start teacher herself, works on obtaining her state teaching license and substitute teaches at the local school to make extra money. Her husband is a firefighter.

Starting next week, they’ll both have to work fewer hours to stay home with Hallie, creating financial hardship for the family.

“I can’t work if I don’t have a babysitter and prices keep going up for everything — and food costs are crazy,” said Allen, who is also worried about the interruption to her daughter’s education.

Many Head Start families could face a double blow, losing access to the program and food assistance on the same day, with funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, set to run out Saturday as well. An infusion of contingency funding from the White House earlier this month for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, is expected

About 50 miles south of Highland, right along the Ohio river, sits Scioto County, another Appalachian stretch, parts of it so rural that some communities don’t have stop lights. Come Monday morning, Head Start classrooms across 10 centers in the region — serving 400 early learners and infants — will shut down and all 100 staff members, 60% of whom are former Head Start parents, will be furloughed. 

Communities in , leaving many kids to be raised by grandparents or other family members, who are heavily reliant on Head Start programming, said Sarah Sloan, early childhood director of the county’s Community Action Organization. Other parents are in recovery themselves, she added, and lean on Head Start to provide a safe and stable place for their kids.

Their programming is where families already under stress come to get help, she said. 

Despite this, the reception to the grim news that classrooms would close — from both families and staff — ”has just been so generous,” Sloan said Wednesday, her voice cracking.

“I have not heard one negative word from our parents. They have said things like, ‘We are in this together. We understand. We hate it for your staff. We’re worried.’”

Some states find last-minute funding, others don’t

The 74 spoke with over a dozen Head Start Association presidents, providers, teachers and parents in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio and Washington, the six states with the largest number of seats at risk.

Some states, such as Ohio and Washington, are bracing for imminent closures, but others, such as Missouri and most of Georgia, have been able to access other sources of funding, giving them a runway of a week or two. This means that where a young child lives will determine whether or not they have a staffed classroom in a few days and if their families can access the range of other resources Head Start offers, from health care services to parenting courses.

While each state faces it own challenges, a few universal themes emerged: an assertion that even if local Head Start organizations are able to scrape together enough funding to keep their doors open, it will only be temporary, extending access for a few days or weeks; fear that the borrowed funds to stay operational may not be reimbursed once the federal government reopens; and concern that low-income families will lose access to food assistance at the same time. 

Head Start, which turned 60 this year, provides children at least two meals a day. All of this is setting off alarm bells about the unprecedented nature of the government crisis and the devastating effect it will likely have on the country’s most vulnerable families.

They will begin feeling the blowback from D.C. this weekend, as some parents are forced to choose between caring for their kids and showing up for work.

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. Grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November are now scrambling, as the second-longest federal shutdown in history heads into its fourth week.

While there this week, Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum, with some of the severest programming losses falling on red states.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the National Head Start Association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

‘These are actual people’

No state has more seats at risk than Florida, with 9,711. While the majority of centers across the state will be able to remain open through the first two weeks of November, at least one program in West Palm Beach serving children of migrant families and seasonal workers will be forced to shutter this weekend, according to Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association. The closure will impact 386 children and 283 staff across six centers, she said.

Minick wants Congress and the president to understand, “These are not just data points. These are actual people.”

In neighboring Georgia, policymakers were preparing to potentially close centers serving 6,499 children and infants, until a last-minute, bridge loan from The Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta’s Impact Investing Fund came through The $8 million means that three major providers, serving 5,800 kids, will remain open for at least 45 days, though that leaves hundreds of others throughout the state still in a lurch. 

Juanita Yancey, executive officer of the Georgia Head Start Association, expressed her gratitude for the money while emphasizing that it’s only a stopgap measure.

“Time is running out,” she said. “Programs are doing everything possible to keep their doors open, but they cannot run a program on reserves or goodwill. Every day of inaction is another day of uncertainty for families who count on Head Start services.”

“This shutdown is pushing programs to the breaking point when children and families can least afford it,” she added.

The bulk of Head Start seats in Missouri also appear to be safe — at least for now, according to Kasey Lawson, director of the Mid-America Regional Council, which serves 2,350 kids across 17 providers. Though that still leaves about 1,500 seats unaccounted for. 

For Lawson’s 17 providers, the choice to remain open is both temporary and a risk, she said, since the centers don’t have that money “just sitting in the bank,” and they fear they won’t receive backpay once the federal government does reopen.

Lawson said they’ve asked legislators, members of Congress and the federal Office of Head Start, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services, to guarantee reimbursement as they have in the past, yet “nobody’s willing to do that. And so it is the reality of where we sit right now, that it is a true risk that all of our agencies are taking.”

And even though most Head Start families in Missouri will have a place to send their kids Monday morning, many may still face a significant burden as at least 1,100 rely on expiring SNAP benefits.

In North Carolina, where 4,697 seats are at risk, at least one center will be forced to close this Friday, said Terry David, president of the state’s Head Start Association. Classrooms that are based in the local school district should be able to remain open through the end of the calendar year, he said, but that only accounts for about 140 kids.

Across the country, in Washington state, at least one program in the city of Vancouver, which serves at least 175 kids, will close this weekend. Another in the same region, The Margaret Selway Early Learning Center, will remain open through Nov. 7, but each day beyond that is uncertain, according to Nancy Trevena, chief strategy officer at the Educational Opportunities for Children and Families.

Kimberly Gusey’s foster son, Ranger, is a student at Margaret Selway and is especially dependent on Head Start services. The program was able to secure a one-to-one certified nursing assistant for Ranger, who has cerebral palsy, is nonverbal and is fed through a G-tube. 

“It’s amazing,” Gusey said, her voice breaking. “It brings me to tears how much they’ve done for us.”

If the program closes next week, Gusey’s husband will have to quit his job as a mechanic to care for Ranger.

“We’re talking a large amount of money not coming into our home, but we’re willing to do that because we love these children,” she said. “But in so many ways it affects us. Not [just] the pocketbook. The routines for the kids. The routines for us. Everything is affected by this.”

Even with millions spent on new textbooks, and teachers required to take online science of reading training, third grade English Language Arts proficiency fell from 62% in spring of 2023 to 61% earlier this year.

A jump in 2024 to 65% proficiency turned out to be a mirage, as third graders fell right back again last school year.

It’s still unclear whether the scores are cause for alarm or just a as Ohio joins the flood of states shifting to phonics-heavy lessons to help students decode and understand words better. Some supporters of the science of reading believe small gains should happen almost immediately, even if it takes longer for large improvements statewide.

“We haven’t seen much progress yet,” said Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, one of the advocates of adopting the science of reading. “This is disappointing.”

Others urge patience, with some districts that adopted the science of reading early, saying they are on the verge of students showing improvements.

In the Elyria school district about 30 miles west of Cleveland, educators are hoping their patience will soon pay off. 

Andrea McKenzie, Elyria literacy specialist acknowledged that scores haven’t improved since the district switched to the science of reading in 2022. But she said this year’s third graders, the first to be using the new curriculum since kindergarten, are on track for an 11 point jump in proficiency rates, according to scores on standardized progress tests.

“This is the moment I have been waiting for,” McKenzie said. “I’ve been waiting for these students to get to third grade to see this through, so I feel like this is the year.”

Though most schools adopted the science of reading right after DeWine started his push early in 2023, Ohio law gave schools until this fall to fully make the switch. Teachers need time to adjust and embrace a new approach. And even Mississippi, whose “miracle” reading gains are the model for Ohio and other states, took a few years before making gains that caught notice.

“Last school year, we had districts who were in very different places in their implementation of science of reading,” said Chris Woolard, chief integration officer of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. “We had some of those early adopters that have been doing this for a few years. We had others who are (still in) early stages.”

He stressed that this ongoing school year is the first that all schools must be fully using the science of reading, a “really important” consideration when evaluating results

Melissa Weber-Mayrer, Ohio’s chief of literacy, said this year is “pivotal” since schools now have to be fully using science of reading, but she also cautioned that it could be three to five years before scores grow statewide.

“Looking locally, we will see things start to move,” she said. “But it might be in a grade level, in a school, maybe in one elementary building within a larger district.,” she said.

Elyria, a district of just under 6,000 students, could be one of those pockets. The district’s four elementary schools were named Science of Reading Champions by DeWine last spring for quickly adopting materials and instruction, even as that district’s reading scores are still not rising.

Third grade reading proficiency in that district fell from 45.8% of students in 2023 to 43.8% on state tests this spring.

But the district has been pushing hard to adopt the science of reading, with the school board voting in 2022 to shift to the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum and start using it that fall.

The district had 34 teachers start two-year Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading (LETRS) training — a program many consider the gold standard of science of reading — in 2022, with 30 more starting in 2024 and another 22 starting this school year.

The district also hired two literacy specialists in 2022 to help the one already there work with teachers on reading lessons and with students that need extra help.

The change now has kindergarten teacher Lindsay DeCoster giving students focused lessons on letters, their sounds and how to move their tongues and teeth to pronounce them.

“In the past, we have been skipping over this part… like they don’t need to know how to rhyme, they don’t need to know initial sounds and things like that,” DeCoster said. “If you don’t understand how your mouth needs to look and what your mouth needs to do to make those sounds, then you’re not gonna be able to.”

DeCoster, now in her 17th year as a teacher, said LETRS training improved her teaching immensely.

“I just didn’t know what I didn’t know as far as everything that really goes into teaching a child how to read,” she said. “We’ve now broken it down to the smallest, smallest component.”

With so many states adopting the science of reading in just the last few years, experts were unable to point to many strong studies showing how fast scores change after adopting the science of reading. That’s partly because districts and schools adopt new curricula, add coaches, and train teachers at different speed and intensity, often varying within a single school, as in Elyria.

But Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who studied how low-performing schools in California improved using that state’s Early Literacy Block Grants, said changes can happen quickly if classroom methods truly change too.

He found that low-performing California students improved by about a third of a year’s worth of learning over two years, after changing the curriculum, training teachers,and adding tutoring and afterschool programs using the grants..

“I think it’s reasonable to expect measurable improvements in student literacy to follow fairly quickly on the heels of evidence-aligned changes in teacher pedagogy,” Dee told The 74. “The major concern I have is that state declarations for the Science of Reading may not translate quickly—or indeed ever—into responsive changes in classroom practices.”

Teachers, he said, can fall back into old practices of having students “guess” at words using context or pictures – practices that Ohio banned in its 2023 state reading law – but which can’t be tracked.

Aldis also noted that Ohio is not gaining in another important way that can show progress — whether lower-scoring students are doing better and closing the gap to becoming proficient. Fordham reported last month that the opposite is happening. More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before — 20.9% this year compared to 19.1% in 2023.

One factor, Aldis said, could be Ohio dropping its requirement in 2023 that third graders must read well to advance to fourth grade, which motivated students and teachers to show gains on a deadline. 

Casey Taylor, the literacy policy director for ExcelinEd, the education advocacy group formed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, worked on reading efforts in the early days of Mississippi’s shift, as well as in North Carolina, which started a similar push in 2021.

She said Mississppi saw some gains in schools that used literacy coaches extensively within two years, but she cautioned, “It still took several years before we really started to see those performance levels shift at a broad, systemic approach.”

Mississippi, the second-worst worst state in reading when its literacy campaign launched in 2013, didn’t really excel for six years, she said.

“We saw some gains in the 2015 NAEP, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the nation really took note, because that was the first time we reached the national average on fourth grade reading,” she said.

North Carolina, she said, has started seeing gains on standardized progress tests teachers give their students, but not on tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yet.

Though he wants to see faster improvement in Ohio, Fordham’s Aldis agreed with Taylor in one major way – making real gains takes a long-term commitment. 

Ohio, Aldis said, has a history of abandoning improvement projects that don’t show quick results and moving on to something else.

“These reforms are just too important to follow that same path,” Aldis said. “We need to stick with it.”

More Ohio students are being homeschooled now than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of Ohio students being homeschooled was trending upward pre-pandemic, spiked to about 51,500 students during the COVID-19 pandemic and dipped back down slightly.

But homeschooling recently saw another surge with about 53,000 homeschooled students during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The number of homeschooled students in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce:

• 2023-24: 53,051 students
• 2022-23: 47,468 students
• 2021-22: 47,491 students
• 2020-21: 51,502 students
• 2019-20: 33,328 students
• 2018-19: 32,887 students
• 2017-18: 30,923 students

There were about 3.1 million homeschooled students nationwide in 2021-22 — quite the jump from 2.5 million in spring 2019, according to the.

“Homeschooling was already on a slightly slower upward trajectory, and had been for a number of years,” said Douglas J. Pietersma, research associate at National Home Education Research Institute. “What COVID did, from our perspective, is just infused it.”

He expects the number of homeschooled students to keep growing.

“It’s not going to put public schools out of business or anything like that, but it’s going to be a slow growth that is certainly going to be measurable over time,” Pietersma said.

Remote learning during the pandemic made parents become more aware of what was being taught in schools, said Melanie Elsey, Christian Home Educators of Ohio’s legislative liaison.

“I don’t think that it was a mass exodus from the public or private schools into homeschooling, but for parents who felt like they could accomplish more with one-on-one attention to learning … You can tailor the education to meet the needs of their children,” she said.

Not everyone who switched to homeschooling stayed after the pandemic, Elsey said.

“Some of them put their children back in because it was too much of a commitment,” she said. “So I think it was sort of a time period that parents felt comfortable trying something different to see if they could help their children learn more.”

The modern home education movement sprung out of the 1970s and “skyrocketed” in the 1980s, Pietersma said.

“People were either upset with the quality of education in general,” he said. “Then another group of people, it was more about the content of education.”

Today there are many reasons why a family might opt for homeschooling.

“Obviously, the quality of education is still one of the big issues,” Pietersma said. “Safety issues are a huge thing. People who have had their children in schools where they’ve been bullied or assaulted or had exposure to drugs … given the size of school, it may be not impossible to prevent some of those things.”

The reason for homeschooling varies and it is not always because a family is not satisfied with their local school district, Elsey said.

She homeschooled her children, but did not originally think it was for her family. However, she changed her mind after she enjoyed being home with her children through their preschool years.

“We prayed about it and really felt like it was something that was worthwhile,” Elsey said.

Jeannine Ramer has homeschooled her four children — two are now in college and two (ages 17 and 13) are currently being homeschooled.

“Homeschooling has really strengthened our family relationships, my kids are very, very close and supportive of one another, and I think that’s all of the hours spent at home and just really learning together,” said Ramer, who lives in Alliance.

They were not initially planning on homeschooling their children, but Ramer’s sister-in-law homeschooled her children and encouraged them to think about it as their oldest approached preschool age.

They decided to try it for a year or two, but found it worked well for their family.

“We loved it,” Ramer said. “We’ve had the ability to tailor each child’s education to that child.”

A parent does not need to be a licensed teacher in order to homeschool their children, Elsey said.

“It’s amazing how well families do because they have access to resources, really, all over the world, when you can get curriculum from anywhere that meets the needs of your students to learn to pursue their interests,” she said.

Families who decide to homeschool their children enjoy the flexibility, Pietersma said.

“They can tailor the education that they’re providing to their child in so many ways that an institutional school can’t just because of sheer numbers,” he said. “One teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t take the lesson plan and tailor it to each of the 30 students.”

Ramer’s oldest child was interested in printing and design work as a teenager, so they were able to craft his high school education to those areas. Now he is studying industrial and innovative design in college.

“It just allowed us the ability to foster that,” she said. “There was much more flexibility.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

This is largely because the transfer process is inefficient and not designed for non-traditional students. Students who transfer after earning an associate degree often lose significant credits and must retake courses, which is a considerable barrier to earning a baccalaureate, or bachelor’s.

Community colleges could be a big part of the solution by expanding their capacity to offer bachelor’s degrees in fields that are in high demand in their regional labor market, and by doing more to help students transition to four-year colleges.

Today, over 200 community colleges in 24 states offer more than 736 . The focus on business, health care and nursing, education, information technology and other areas that address shortages in these and other fields. The bachelor’s degrees conferred by the community colleges typically cost about half the tuition charged by four-year public colleges. The programs help award four-year degrees to many underserved college students, keeping them close to home, putting them on pathways to good jobs and helping communities thrive.

At MiraCosta College in San Diego, for example, college leaders learned from biotech industry partners such as Pfizer and Abbott Labs that they needed more employees with a bachelor’s degree in biomanufacturing production. After coordinating with four-year college partners, MiraCosta created the first-ever community college biomanufacturing bachelor’s degree program conferred by a two-year college.

The program not only has significant employer buy-in and a 93% completion rate, but it also provides equitable opportunities to students. About two-thirds of MiraCosta’s biomanufacturing graduates are women (62%), two-thirds are non-white (64%) and 20% are the first in their family to attend college. The school is clearly meeting an industry need, employers are engaged, and together they have created a pathway to good-paying jobs in an expensive region of the country. Likewise, graduates of similar baccalaureate programs delivered by community colleges nationwide are 50% people of color and 64% female.  

In northeast Ohio, Lorain County Community College has offered 100 bachelor’s and master’s degrees on its campus for nearly 30 years as part of a voter-approved

University Partnership that includes 13 colleges and universities. The degrees — in everything from biology, human resources, nursing, public safety and respiratory care to computer science and supply chain management — and include the kind of personal attention, career guidance, tutoring, writing instruction and nonacademic assistance with child care, transportation and food that are more common at community colleges than at four-year institutions.

But state officials recognized that more community college baccalaureate degrees were needed to fill talent gaps in emerging fields in the state. Lorain County Community College was given permission to launch an applied bachelor’s degree in microelectronic manufacturing, to prepare workers in fields such as advanced manufacturing, automation, aerospace and biomedical technology.

In the first two years, students spend three days a week working in paid internships and two days in the classroom. They graduate with an associate degree and up to two years of real work experience, then enter the bachelor’s degree program already holding a full-time job, often by the company where they interned. 

The college also launched a bachelor’s degree program to prepare technicians and engineers who are helping companies digitize and automate their operations, integrating robotics, control systems, machine learning and cyber-physical systems into modern factories. More than 100 companies have offered internships, advised on curriculum and committed to hiring graduates. 

But making baccalaureate programs available where they are needed is only one aspect of what community colleges do. Achieving the Dream, the reform network of more than 300 community colleges, includes more than 50 that offer baccalaureate degrees. These colleges are making it easier to transfer to four-year degree programs by creating better advising and support so students can move seamlessly from adult learning programs that provide certificates but not degrees; dual enrollment programs in which high school students also earn college credits from community colleges; and associate degree programs that lead to four-year degrees. 

These community colleges are also working to connect their students and graduates to programs and careers that pay a family-sustaining wage. In focusing on areas from which people from similar demographics have previously been excluded, the schools are sparking upward mobility.

The debate over who and where bachelor’s degrees should be offered is too often driven by institutional priorities and policies set in the past. As jobs increasingly require a bachelor’s degree and employers continue to seek skilled workers, and as too many high school graduates and employees neither master new skills nor earn a living wage, it is time to shift the discussion from what type of institution offers a bachelor’s degree to their programs’ costs, benefits and value to students, employers and communities. 

Community colleges can play a central role in helping graduates achieve a bachelor’s degree. States and all colleges should support these low-cost, high-value degree pathways. 

Whether that ruling — from a Democratic judge in a county-level court — survives appeals to the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court will be the real test. 

If it stands, the ruling would cut off the $700 million Ohio now pays for 140,000 students to attend private, mostly religious schools, through its EdChoice voucher program. Voucher opponents, who say EdChoice takes away money from school districts, hope the money will now go to public instead of private schools. 

EdChoice makes up nearly 90% of Ohio’s voucher programs by giving students and schools nearly $6,200 a year each through eighth grade and $8,400 for high school.

In a late June ruling, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page found that EdChoice, once a small program limited to only low-income students or those at schools with low test scores, has expanded so much after Ohio opened it up to any student in 2023 that it violates parts of Ohio’s constitution calling for the state to fund “a system of common schools.” 

In the EdChoice case, filed by school districts against the state in 2022, Page agreed that the vouchers, which are used mostly at religious schools that can choose who they accept and what they teach, have created a second, parallel school system that’s selective, not common.

“In expanding the EdChoice program to its current form, the General Assembly has created a system of uncommon private schools by directly providing private schools with over $700 million in funding,” she wrote.

Page, though, recognized that EdChoice has grown so fast that ending it would cause “significant change to school funding in Ohio.” She held off ordering EdChoice to shut down until after appeals, even as she ruled against it.

Yitz Frank, a suburban Cleveland rabbi and president of School Choice Ohio, vowed to appeal Page’s ruling. He praised her, though, for delaying ending the vouchers just a few months before the start of a new school year. 

“You would essentially have well over 100,000 students lose their scholarships,” Frank said. “Tens of thousands of them would have no ability to even figure out how to possibly make those tuition payments. I’m sure there are some more middle class families that might be able to figure it out with great sacrifice, but it would be pretty devastating for the families.”

The ruling, if upheld, is high stakes for Ohio, but will have little impact on vouchers in other states because it centers on language in the state constitution and falls under state courts. 

It’s the latest, however, in a string of state court findings against state aid for private school tuition, including in and , where a bid to change the state constitution to allow state money to pay for private schools also failed.

The case is also significant because Ohio’s voucher program is among the largest in the country. Ohio spends the fourth-most of any state on private school tuition assistance, relative to total state spending on education, , the nonprofit school choice advocacy group.

Florida leads the way, with just over 10% of state spending on education going to private school tuition through vouchers, tax credits or related Education Savings Accounts. Arizona is close behind at 7% and Wisconsin at 5% before Ohio and Indiana follow at around 3.7%.

Voucher opponents, though, hope EdChoice clears appeals and ends soon. They disagreed that cutting off vouchers would be so harmful to families, noting that many sent their children to private schools without vouchers until the Republican majority in the legislature lifted income limits over the last few years.

“Taxpayers are being ripped off,” said Dan Heinz, a school board member of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district, the district historically most affected by EdChoice. “Wealthy families that have always used private schools and afforded private schools are now having that tuition subsidized by much poorer families.”

Smaller Ohio voucher programs, including two for students with disabilities and one only for Cleveland residents, are not part of the case. The Cleveland program is well-known as the center of the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that allowed vouchers to be used for students to attend religious schools.

Page also ruled that Ohio’s requirement for “common schools” means that public schools, the “common” ones, should be fully funded. She agreed with districts that the state legislature has not met that mandate, particularly by under-funding the planned phase-in of the “Fair School Funding” formula it passed in 2021.

“The state provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to private schools through EdChoice while at the same time Plaintiffs are unable to educate their students because the General Assembly decided not to fully fund public schools,” Page wrote.

Voucher advocates promise to appeal, saying they are not surprised by this ruling by a Democratic judge in one one the most Democratic-leaning counties in Ohio, even as the state has trended strongly Republican in recent years. 

Advocates including Keith Neely, a lawyer for the Virginia-based Institute for Justice who helped defend EdChoice on behalf of families using the vouchers, said he expects to easily win at the Supreme Court for a few reasons, including that Ohio has no ban on funding additional schools if the state also pays for a “system of common schools.”

“There’s no provision… that prohibits the general assembly from enacting scholarships, or even providing for this other system of uncommon schools,” he said. “I think plaintiffs are wrong to try and argue that there is a restriction in Ohio’s constitution that prevents the state from providing for educational alternatives like Ed choice.”

Voucher opponents, who say they now have half of Ohio’s 611 school districts, including large ones, as plaintiffs in the case, praised the ruling and hope that public pressure will overcome the political leaning of the state Supreme Court. Six of the seven members, all of whom face election, are Republican.

“Put on the political lens for these people (justices) when they’re looking at 75% of the state’s voters living in districts that have signed up for the lawsuit,” said Heinz. ”That’s not a very promising outlook for their political futures.”

Not likely. Yet in Republican-dominated states, that’s exactly what the future holds. This is arguably the most profound change in American education since the development of universal public education over a century ago.

Over the past five years, 14 states have passed laws creating , often known as Education Savings Accounts — public money families can use to pay private school tuition. All are Republican states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. Two more, , have passed refundable tax credits available to all families.

Every family in those states is eligible, or will be within a few years, for somewhere between per student. Counting programs limited to low-income students, more than half of all K-12 students in the U.S. .

This will accelerate the process of the rich getting richer while the poor fall further behind. And now, Republicans in Congress have quietly slipped worth $5,000 per child into their “one big beautiful bill.”

Equal opportunity has always been a fundamental principle of public education: the idea that every child, no matter how poor, would have access to the same quality school. This has long been more an ideal than a reality, but after decades of legal battles, in poor and affluent districts.

States could preserve equal opportunity in a voucher system if parents were barred from topping up vouchers with their own money. But telling Americans they can’t help fund their child’s private school would never fly. So families will add to the value of their vouchers and buy the best education they can afford — because they love their children. 

Other parents will have no money to add. Their kids will attend public schools or the least expensive private schools. And equal opportunity will fly out the window.

Vouchers will segregate students by income, since private school tuition varies widely. Hence, they will no doubt increase segregation by race as well.

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

It’s obvious why vouchers appeal to people who already send their kids to private school, or would like to. But pro-voucher referenda have never won a majority. They have on state ballots, and three of those defeats occurred last fall, even in red states — in .

Yet, GOP funders donate millions to state legislators to support vouchers. And Republican lawmakers are heeding their wishes.

So far, studies have shown in private schools that accept vouchers. This is just common sense: Expensive private schools are often excellent, but cheap private schools are often worse than neighboring public schools.

Yet only one state, Louisiana, denies schools voucher money if their students perform poorly on state standardized tests. In West Virginia, voucher students who fail state tests lose their eligibility for the program. Most states , not even publishing test scores for schools that receive voucher money.

Private schools have the right to select their students, and some will no doubt discriminate — against gay students, transgender students, Muslim students or all of the above. State voucher laws often do not have comprehensive prohibitions against discrimination, and there are reports of bias in Wisconsin’s program, which is only for low-income students.

Finally, recent research suggests another common-sense reality: Heightened demand fueled by vouchers leads schools to .

None of these outcomes would draw support from a majority of Americans. Yet they are happening, and they will surely deepen the growing divide between rich and poor.

Is there an alternative, other than the status quo of struggling public school systems? Indeed there is. States and school districts could reduce bureaucratic controls, empower educators and increase choice, competition and accountability for performance within the public school system, through the spread of charter schools. Cities that have done so, including , have produced some of the nation’s most rapid improvements in student performance.

Voucher advocates are right, in my opinion, to want more choice, more competition, more diversity of school models and more accountability for performance in the nation’s education system. Traditional districts are operating with a centralized, standardized model that emerged more than a century ago, which makes creating quality public schools an uphill battle, particularly in low-income areas.

I also have no problem with vouchers for low-income students who are now trapped in failing public schools. But for too long, American society has been divided — economically, socially and politically — between those fortunate enough to have earned college degrees and those for whom college was out of reach. Turning the K-12 education system into a marketplace, in which the quality of a child’s school depends upon how much their parents can afford to pay, will only widen the gaps between haves and have-nots. Sadly, 16 Republican states have taken a huge step down that path.

“They teach you ABCs,” Pobrega said as he picked up her third grader after school. “They teach you how to write. They teach you small little words and it prepares them for first grade.”

But not all parents value kindergarten as much as Pobrega. So many parents treat kindergarten as less important than other grades that it adds up into a major problem — nationally, across Ohio and particularly at Lincoln Park and other high-poverty schools.

Kindergarten has the highest absenteeism problem of any elementary grade in several states, studies have shown. In Ohio, attendance can be so bad that state data show some kindergartens approaching 90% chronic absenteeism.

Though chronic absenteeism — students missing 10 percent or more of school days — is drawing national attention for high school students, there has long been a second, less publicized, peak in absenteeism in kindergarten and sometimes preschool that is also damaging. 

Hedy Chang, one of the leading researchers of absenteeism and its effects, said kindergarten absenteeism needs educator’s attention, not just high school absences.

“You really want to worry about both,” said Chang, founder of the nonprofit Attendance Works. “You want to care about your youngest incoming learners, because that’s going to be critical for the long term. What you don’t invest in and address early, you might pay for later.”

Consider: In Ohio, more than a quarter of Ohio kindergarteners missed at least 18 days of school in the 2023-24 school year, state data shows, making kindergarten the highest chronic absenteeism rate of any elementary school grade in the state.

That matches findings by nonprofit FutureEd in March that kindergarteners had the highest chronic absenteeism of any grade in Hawaii and Utah last school year. In all 20 other states FutureEd looked at, Kindergarten had the highest chronic absenteeism rates before 7th grade.

“We see this U-shaped curve,” when charting absenteeism by grade, said Amber Humm Patnode, acting director of Proving Ground, a Harvard based research and absenteeism intervention effort. There is high absenteeism in kindergarten, it improves for several years, and typically rises again in late middle school.

She said there are really two separate absenteeism problems — one for the youngest and one for the oldest students — that need different strategies to fix.

Ohio State University professor Arya Ansari, who specializes in early childhood education, called kindergarten absenteeism “problematic” because missed classes add up over the years.

“Kids who missed school in kindergarten do less well academically in terms of things like counting, letters, word identification, language skills.., they do less well in terms of their executive function skills, and they do less well socially and behaviorally,” Ansari said. 

“Days missed in preschool or kindergarten kind of set the stage, or are precursors for future absences,” he added. “So when you’re frequently absent, it kind of begins to have a snowball effect and sets habits that are harder to break later on.”

There’s also another dynamic at play with kindergarten absences: It varies by school, in very dramatic ways.

Though Ohio’s kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate was just above 26% last year, 27 kindergartens had chronic absenteeism triple that rate, coming close to or exceeding 80%. Lincoln Park had the worst rate in the state last year at nearly 90%, with close to 9 out of 10 kindergarteners qualifying as chronically absent.

Adding to the damage, the worst kindergarten absenteeism is happening in places where the students need it most. Ohio’s list of highest absenteeism rates is dominated by schools in, or next to, the state’s biggest or most poor cities — Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo and Youngstown — where students have performed well below suburban students for years.

In contrast, affluent and higher-performing schools easily have less than 5% kindergarten chronic absenteeism, with several at zero.

Students in the high-poverty schools are not only missing days that could start them on a path to catching up, the absences are holding everyone back even more, Chang said.

“I consider high (absenteeism) at 20%, 30% in a school,” Chang said. “80%? That’s an extremely high level of chronic absence. When schools have really high levels of chronic absence, the churn just makes everything harder. It makes it harder for teachers to teach, set classroom norms and kids to learn.”

Some of why kindergarten absenteeism is so high is easy to understand. For many kids, it’s the first year of school, so kindergartens become superspreader sites for colds, flu and other illnesses kids haven’t been exposed to before. Since chronic absenteeism includes any days missed, even for illness, rates could legitimately spike.

The pandemic added a twist to that, said Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and another leader in absenteeism research.

“It used to be that parents got guidance (that) If your kid just had sniffles, you could send them to school,” Balfanz said. “Then, coming out of the pandemic, parents got the message… perhaps overload, perhaps not…that should you have any sign of illness, you could have COVID. That’s another factor.”

Just as important: Only 17 states required students to attend kindergarten as of 2023, according to the Education Commission of the States. That easily leads parents to consider it optional and for school to really start in first grade.

Then there’s kindergartners’ need for parents or siblings to take them to school or to their bus stop. If school and work schedules don’t align, or if a sibling’s school is different, kindergarten falls lower on the priority list.

“A kindergartener not coming to school is not necessarily the kindergartner saying, ‘I’m not going to school today,’ ” said Jessica Horowitz-Moore, chief of student and academic supports for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. “That has to do a lot with the parents.”

Parents oftentimes don’t appreciate how fast absences add up. Another parent picking up children at Lincoln Park was a perfect example. That father said his child only missed school “a couple times a month” when in kindergarten. But twice a month is 10% of the 20 school days in a month (Four weeks of five days each) which is right on pace for chronic absenteeism.

Some of the kindergartens in Ohio with the worst absenteeism in 2023-24 were failing in many other ways too: Two charter elementary schools with kindergarten chronic absenteeism over 87% closed before school began this academic year. Some, including the Stepstone Academy charter school in Cleveland, did not respond to multiple messages from The 74.

Lincoln Park, with the worst kindergarten absenteeism problem in the state, is part of the ACCEL charter schools, a fast-growing multi-state charter network, that had five of Ohio’s 10-worst kindergartens for chronic absenteeism.

Representatives of the network said the schools are often in high poverty neighborhoods with families that move frequently, which disrupts attendance. Students often don’t have reliable transportation, they said, and Ohio’s charter schools have less money to put toward attendance issues than districts.

Lincoln Park school leaders say they’re trying to improve attendance and academic performance. Both the school’s principal and kindergarten teacher are new this year and interim Principal Erika Vogtsberger said she expects the preschool attendance rate to go up from 74% last year to about 80% this school year. 

She said fewer families are moving during this school year than last, and more than 90% of Lincoln Park’s students have signed up to return, bringing stability she thinks will help attendance.

The school has also been trying for a few years to encourage attendance. It has early morning and afterschool sessions so working parents can drop children off at 6:30 am and pick them up as late as 5:30 pm. It holds special events like pancake breakfasts for families to encourage attendance and gives classrooms with 90 percent attendance for five days a chance to spin a wheel for rewards like pizza parties or a chance to wear pajamas to school for a day.

But even at 90% goal to earn prizes still leaves 10% of students absent racking up days toward chronic absenteeism.

“We have to make it attainable,” Vogtsberger said. “If I had it at 95%, the kids who are here without missing a day are going to get discouraged because… we do have a small cluster of people who are out pretty regularly.”

“Nobody would get it,” added Sherree Dillions, a regional superintendent for ACCEL. “At least, with the 90%, peer to peer pressure is a big piece. You say ‘You better come … You better come tomorrow, because we want that pizza party’, or we want whatever … Because the kid wants the prize.”

Voghtsberger said she also does not want to punish students, either, because their parents aren’t doing what they need to do.

“No matter how bad some students want to be at school, if their parents are not getting up in the morning and bringing them, they cannot get to school, and… that’s not their fault.” she said. 

School officials also said parents are a problem beyond not bringing children to school. Parents, they said, are often abusive when called or visited to check on students and have sometimes threatened school officials with guns or dogs. Ohio has also moved away from taking action against students or parents for truancy, so parents face no penalty for keeping students home, as they do in other states, including Indiana, West Virginia and Iowa.

“If I had my way, parents would be held accountable across the board,” Dillions said.

The Toledo school district, whose Sherman elementary school has the worst absenteeism of any school district kindergarten in Ohio, also saw parents push back when the school called or visited about students skipping school. The district decided in 2017 to pay for well-known people in neighborhoods, like football coaches or local volunteers, to serve as “attendance champions” to talk to parents instead of school officials.

“(They) go out to the homes,” Baker said. “They complete home visits. They work with the families to remove barriers to attendance. They’re in the buildings every day, building relationships with students, removing barriers on that end as well.”

“They are not truancy officers,” Baker stressed. “They are not to issue any punishment. That’s not their thing. This is about, ‘How can I help get Johnny back into school?”

The champions have reduced some of the tension between schools and parents, she said.

Baker has seen better attendance this year, so she expects kindergarten chronic absenteeism there to fall from about 87% to 77% — still about triple the statewide rate.

There are some reasons for optimism across Ohio and nationally. Absenteeism at all grades, including kindergarten, is improving yearly since the end of the pandemic everywhere.

Baker said, though, that kindergarten may need to be more of a priority.

“We’re going to have to really hit preschool and kindergarten a little bit harder with our interventions that we are setting up,” she said. “We have been very much focused on high school. But I think for us as a district … we really have to continue to hit this hard across the board.”

Year-round schooling, which gained popularity in the 1970s, avoids long summer vacations in which students can during the school year. Under the plan, students attend classes as part of a normal grading period most of the summer. Their school years aren’t much longer than with a traditional schedule, just spread out differently, with their lost summer vacation days added to other breaks during the school year.

Cleveland’s move comes as some states like South Carolina and Florida have recently embraced or are trying out the approach, along with districts hoping to address pandemic learning loss. The number of schools using year-round schedules nationally fell from about 6% in the 1970s to under 3% before the pandemic, researchers report.

In Cleveland, previous district leaders once considered year-round school a promising way to turn around the struggling district. But it caught on in just six of Cleveland’s high schools, and new school leaders now want all district schools on the same calendar and curriculum so students aren’t lost if they change schools.

Leaders also aren’t convinced year-round school is helping. Athis year with researchers from Cleveland State University and the American Institutes for Research showed the city’s year-round schools often have higher math and English scores than other high schools, but mostly because the schools have more gifted students and students who would do well with any schedule. Research nationally is also mixed.

District CEO Warren Morgan decided gains were not enough to justify the additional $2.6 million in teacher salaries year-round classes cost.

“There was no evidence that there was substantial, meaningful difference in the academic outcomes in our different calendar types,” Morgan said before the school board vote last week. “We also recognize and value the excellence of our many different schools …but there’s also other variables…that make them great.”

David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year Round Education, said the pandemic renewed interest in year-round school as a possible way to tackle COVID learning loss, as well as increasing interest in related strategies, like adding summer learning programs or extra school days to the start or end of the school year.

Hornak estimates about 4% of schools now have a year-round schedule, but the association has scaled back over the years and has no staff to track it.

He said students are less likely to forget lessons over a shorter summer vacation. Longer breaks during the year, often about three weeks long, give schools a chance to give struggling students targeted help catching up, rather than waiting until July for a summer school that feels like a punishment.

“I would love school leaders to consider summer as just another academic block of time,” he said.

Paul Von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas and prominent skeptic of year-round school, said he sees no difference in learning from just scheduling the same number of school days in different ways.

“Instead of having one long break where students forget a lot, you have a bunch of short breaks where students forget a little,” Von Hippel said. “The amount of forgetting adds up to be about the same.”

He added that though the pandemic prompted districts to consider year-round classes, he sees no evidence that they have caught on in a meaningful way. 

Teachers, parents and students of Cleveland’s six year-round schools, however, fought the district CEO and implored the district school board at two hearings to keep a schedule they say made their schools unique and offered students chances they wouldn’t have with a standard school year.

Students from one year-round school even protested the change outside district headquarters last month.

Xavier Avery, a junior at Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School who organized the protest, reminded the school board right before its vote April 29 that his school has received state awards and has better test scores than the district average. He also said that students spend part of school days in warmer months on boats and planes, both learning to operate them and studying Lake Erie as part of the school’s specialized focus.

“Our year-round calendar plays a huge role in this success,” he said. “It’s what makes our programs, internships and hands-on learning possible.”

Cleveland also cut other non-traditional schedules as part of its push to put all schools on the same schedule. Morgan and the school board also axed extended school years, which added extra days at 17 other schools, as well as extended days, running 30 minutes longer each day at six schools. Those cuts drew more fire from parents, who said that being able to choose schools that offer extra time keeps them in the district, rather than selling their homes and moving to suburban districts.

Year-round schools started gaining national attention in the 1970s, experts say, for two major reasons. In some cases, most notably fast-growing California where schools were too small to handle exploding enrollment, schools spread classes out over the whole year so they could stagger student schedules to accommodate all of them.

The other major draw, the one that appealed to Cleveland, was limiting “summer learning loss” or “summer slide,” where students forget much of what they learned during long vacations. 

A found mixed results, with Black, Hispanic and low-income students more likely to see gains and the staggered schedules in California more likely to show losses.

California stopped using that strategy after building new schools for all its students. 

The total also fell as cities like and dropped the approach several years ago after not seeing big academic gains. Post-pandemic data was not readily available.

Educators still see promise in the approach. and three school districts in Florida are now  

Other school districts in Dallas and Philadelphia are trying a related, though different, approach: simply adding voluntary days to the year to reduce summer slide and to help students who are behind catch up, whether from the pandemic or just needing more class time. Richmond, Virginia, has also added at a few struggling schools, though squashed attempts to do that for the whole district.

Cleveland’s experiment with year-round school started in 2009 at a specialized STEM school created as a magnet for the city’s top students. Former Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon soon after considered moving the entire district to year-round schedules. 

In launching a district turnaround plan in 2012, he jokingly dismissed the traditional school year as an “agrarian calendar we currently use so that all of my students are free to bring in the harvest every summer.”

Gordon said the district could close half the gap between his students and higher-performing suburban students by eliminating the accumulation of 12 years of summer slides before graduation. 

But attempts to use a year-round calendar at one large neighborhood high school failed after parents objected to students losing summer breaks and its effect on family vacations, summer jobs and school schedules of siblings on regular schedules.

A lack of air conditioning in some old schools and parent objections to a much-smaller change — starting the school year earlier in August than before — put plans to use the schedule at more schools on hold.

The year-round schedule ended up at no neighborhood schools and just six schools the district created with alternative class styles — a school based in a hospital or one focused on learning through digital art projects — that families could pick, but not be assigned to.

But what about the longer-term story in Steubenville? Although early academic success is incredibly important, it’s only part of what students need to achieve better outcomes down the road. As Chad Aldeman pointed out in a recent analysis of Steubenville’s strategy, “Despite its near-perfect early reading scores, strong middle and high school achievement and a 96% graduation rate, the district’s post-high school results are only slightly above statewide averages in terms of college-going and completion rates and the percentage of graduates who find ‘gainful employment.’ ”

Academic preparation is a critical nut that has not fully been cracked, which is why success stories like Steubenville are noteworthy. But academics are only one part of what students need to find success. 

First, it’s critical to help students figure out what they want to do next and see relevance in what they’re learning. This means schools must support career awareness and exploration well before high school and help students begin to imagine their future selves early — with the understanding that their vision is likely to change many times on their way to finding a fulfilling career. Students should have the chance to engage in meaningful experiences in , with age-appropriate ways to start to explore what they like, what they’re good at and which potential careers might suit them. Educators and counselors also need to help students build connections between what they’re learning in school and real-world careers so that they see in their education. 

Career exposure and exploration are important, but they are not sufficient. Students also need wraparound support to enable them to successfully move on to education and training opportunities after high school.

Last year, 15 national organizations came together to help identify the conditions that districts can create to provide effective supports for students’ success in their chosen postsecondary pathways. The they laid out can serve as a roadmap for helping more students find long-term success.

One area of particular need is advising. In nearly all high schools across the U.S., counselors are overloaded, making it challenging for every student to receive the personal guidance needed to navigate the next steps beyond high school. As a result, it’s important for districts to think more creatively about expanding the “who” when it comes to advising. This can include leveraging “near-peers” who can serve as trusted sources of guidance. A number of communities — ranging from rural Appalachia in Kentucky to New York City — are to dramatically expand the number of caring young adults who can connect with students and help them find their paths to success. They can provide advice on not only which classes to take, but which work-based learning experiences to pursue, which colleges to consider, how to secure financial aid and much more. 

Because the need for navigational support doesn’t end with high school graduation, there has been a recent trend among K-12 and to invest in persistence coaches to guide recent graduates through their first year of college. Taking on a degree of responsibility for their students’ success even after they have moved on is a critical step for these schools toward ensuring that those outcomes improve. 

Finally, districts and states need to measure longer-term student outcomes, transparently report them and use them to drive decisionmaking and improvements. With a greater focus on like college enrollment and persistence, degree attainment, employment rates and wages, districts can gain a better understanding of where students are and are not succeeding and how to help more of them to get on the right path. Ohio deserves credit for the powerful it has made available; without them we would only have half the story in Steubenville. Unfortunately, in far too many states, K-12 leaders operate in the dark when it comes to how their students after graduation.

Steubenville can teach the country a great deal about helping students find academic success against the odds. Which districts will emerge as the star pioneers in long-term student outcomes? 

Ohio Republicans are dominating the “culture wars” over schools and students, joining other states in passing a barrage of new laws involving race, ethnicity and gender with several more in the pipeline.

Both emboldened by President Donald Trump’s success in the 2024 elections and as a backlash against former President Joe Biden, bills pressing the Make America Great agenda in schools have accelerated and come in rapid fire.

In the past year, Ohio’s Republican supermajority has defended in court its 2023 bans of transgender athletes participating in school sports and including hormone treatments and blockers for minors. 

Since Trump’s November victory, the state has also passed or is still pursuing far right bills including a and a opposed by the LGBTQ community, while also opening the door for religious study by public school students and attacking “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)” efforts in both colleges and K-12 schools.

The bill affecting colleges, which also includes restrictions on teaching “controversial beliefs,” drew strong opposition but was

Ohio, the state with the sixth most students, is one of several passing similar bills — but the number and speed of them reflects the state’s shift to the right in recent years. Ohio was once one of the most reliable bellwether states in presidential elections, . But Ohio voted for Trump in 2020 and has now backed him in three state elections and the state is for what some consider extremism on education and other issues such as abortion. 

Troy McIntosh, executive director of education efforts for the Center for Christian Virtues, an Ohio nonprofit whose influence on legislators has grown in recent years, said Trump’s November win and the wave of bills are fueled by parent anger over how some social issues were framed and taught in online classes during the pandemic. It’s also a pushback against Biden giving transgender students more rights in ways some parents feel infringe on their own.

“Part of the message the electorate sent in that election is, ‘look, we need to fix this,’” McIntosh said. “This is not something we support – these progressive, radical in many ways, interpretations of law,  of culture, ethics. So, sure, the (Ohio) General Assembly is responding to what the electorate told them they wanted.”

Democrats, whose opposition to the Trump-aligned bills is regularly outvoted by the state’s Republican supermajority, said the bills distract from more pressing issues like school funding and improving learning, while also being destructive.

“Some of it is just the politics of fear,” said State Senator Kent Smith, a Democrat from the Cleveland area. “It’s a racist agenda, not the ‘out of many, we become one,’ which the country was founded on.”

Bills like those passing in Ohio have cropped up in several states.Texas and Florida have led the way, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, with other states like Indiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky each passing or proposing different combinations of bills, some directly focused on schools and others lumping schools in with all public services., for example, to pass some form of a parental bill of rights.

Many have centered on rights of transgender youth, which flared into national controversy when the Biden administration made gender identity, not just biological sex, a protected class under Title IX, a 1972 law against sexual discrimination in education. That led to debates over schools allowing transgender youth to use bathrooms they choose and over transgender students participating on sports teams, usually male students transitioning to female.

“We’ve seen really a host of state prohibitions, either through executive order or by legislation, related to gender,” said Jonathan Butcher, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Ohio is in the midst of it.”

Trump is leading the charge to undo Biden’s guidance, most notably with orders in January declaring that there are just two sexes — male and female — and that only biological sex, not gender identity, counts in federal law. But Butcher said states need to take action, particularly with no federal laws in place to carry Trump’s plan out.

“Executive orders are, of course, valuable and strong, but legislation is stronger,” he said. “You need provisions right in law in order for these things to not just take effect, but also remain in effect.”

Butcher said he isn’t as surprised as some at how much legislatures like Ohio’s have acted the last few years, saying it’s typical for changes and tempers to flare when emotional topics are debated, though he sympathizes with feelings of “whiplash” as the nation goes through it.

Ohio’s shift to the right didn’t start with these bills or Trump’s election. Vice President J.D. Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate for Ohio in 2022 and Republican Bernie Moreno just knocked off Democrat Sherrod Brown for Ohio’s other Senate seat in November. Republicans hold the majority in both state legislative houses, plus all major statewide offices including  auditor, attorney general and secretary of state. 

Republicans also prevailed in a statewide controversy over how state legislative districts are drawn that many say allows polarization of state politics to continue. Though the state supreme court ruled five times that Republicans had gerrymandered state House and Senate unfairly, Ohio voters sided with Republicans in November on a ballot issue that would have redrawn districts under a new process.

Critics charge that candidates don’t have to appeal to both sides, since districts are set up so races are really decided in Republican primaries.

“It (the legislature) has definitely moved towards a much more ideological conservative view,” said Christina Collins, a former state school board member who now heads the left-leaning Honesty for Ohio Education nonprofit.

“It is easier for them to keep up these attacks and to keep the rhetoric going and the vitriol and to keep stirring their base, which is what seems to be happening,” she said.

Ohio’s transgender bathroom ban, though proposed months earlier, passed after the November election. The state legislature followed that by passing a bill in December and creating a that requires schools to tell parents about “any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex.”

Schools must also inform parents before students can receive any mental health services, which would also include counseling over gender identity or sexual preference. While supporters praise the bill for letting parents, not schools, decide how to handle student sexuality issues, others blasted the bill as requiring schools to “out” students and expose them to violence.

Schools have until July to set policy for how to inform parents, but counselors are bracing for a “chilling effect” the bill would have on students seeking any type of help.

“Many students struggle with unsafe or unwelcoming homes, homes ravaged by poverty or stress, or even comfortable homes where students just sometimes feel the need to vent about family matters,” Douglas Cook testified in hearings on the bill on behalf of the Ohio School  Counselors Association. “School counselors’ offices are safe spaces for those students.”

“This will likely be incredibly jarring for students and result in their being scared that they will lose the privacy of having a safe listener available to them at school,” Cook added.

This year, after Trump started his own campaign in January against what he called “radical indoctrination” in schools, Ohio quickly passed a ban on DEI in training and hiring in state colleges. The law also regulates teaching of “controversial beliefs” including foreign policy, diversity, immigration, abortion and climate change.

Gov. Mike DeWine signed that ban Friday after heated debates with 1,500 pieces of written testimony submitted and in protest. Opponents labeled it the “HIgher Education Destruction Act” that amounts to state censorship of educators.

State Sen. Jerry Cirino, the bill’s author said it “will return our public universities and colleges to their rightful mission of education rather than indoctrination.”

In the latest move, bills blocking DEI in training and hiring, though not lessons, in K-12 schools are being heard in the Ohio House and Senate.

that would yank funding from schools that let students change their name or pronouns and another bill that would so schools can post them.

Support from voters for the new laws isn’t clear, though a found some backing. The poll found residents backed Trump’s order that there are just two sexes 61 percent to 32 percent. Support for anti-DEI policies was more narrow, 49 percent to 42 percent.

But what about kids living in poverty? Don’t schools need more money, and more staff, to be able to get good results?

Well, yes and no. Poverty is certainly correlated to reading scores, and the best evidence suggests money helps boost a range of student outcomes.

But that doesn’t mean the best school district in the country is the most well-resourced or the one with the fanciest buildings or most prestigious alumni. In fact, based on how much students learn — which, in my opinion, is how schools should be evaluated — there’s perhaps no better district in the country than Steubenville, Ohio.

Last fall, I worked with The 74’s Art & Technology Director Eamonn Fitzmaurice to find districts where students had high reading scores despite serving large concentrations of low-income students. We highlighted Steubenville, a high-poverty district in Ohio’s Rust Belt, as a true outlier. (In a follow-up piece, we showed that Steubenville was also exceptional at teaching kids math.)

But I wanted to revisit the case of Steubenville after it was spotlighted recently on Emily Hanford’s award-winning “” podcast. Are its results just a one-time fluke? And if not — if the results are real — what can other districts learn from Steubenville’s success?

First, it’s quickly apparent that Steubenville is not a flash in the pan. A 2012 story noted that its success traces back to the early 2000s.

It’s also incredibly consistent over time. I used the tool from the Education Data Center to look at its recent results. The graph below compares Steubenville’s third-grade reading proficiency rates (in blue) to the statewide average (in gray). As the graph shows, Steubenville consistently gets 95% to 99% of its third graders over the proficiency bar. In 2018, it had a bad year, and “only” 93% of third graders scored proficient. But the district did not suffer much of a drop-off in the wake of the pandemic, hitting 97% in spring 2022.

Steubenville’s results are also remarkably strong across student groups. Last year, for example, 100% of its Black students, 99% of its low-income students and 92% of its students with disabilities scored proficient in third grade reading.

How does Steubenville get such remarkable results? What can other districts learn from its success?

It’s not that the district has extra money or more staff. Steubenville $10,718 per student last year, which was about $1,500 less than the average Ohio district and well below many other districts in America. It also had slightly more students per teacher than other comparable districts.

Some things Steubenville does have are not easily replicable. As Robert Pondiscio pointed out in a recent column, the district can boast incredible continuity: It has been following the same reading program, called , for the last 25 years. Teacher turnover is low, and the same superintendent has been in place for a decade.

But Hanford a few things that Steubenville did differently that other schools can learn from. Steubenville, for example, offers subsidized preschool beginning at age 3. And in those early years, teachers regularly remind students to speak in complete sentences as language practice for later, when those kids will start learning to read and write.

The district also deploys staff differently than most do. Every elementary teacher, even the phys ed instructor, leads a reading class. And during that reading block — which all students have at the same time — children are grouped with peers performing at the same level, regardless of age.

Steubenville kids are also practicing constantly, either as part of the whole class or in small groups, where kids work on their fluency skills by reading aloud to each other. That stands in contrast to schools that prefer to give kids silent reading or “” time, which can be great for kids who already read well but or even harmful for children who aren’t ready for long blocks of independent free reading.

Now, it’s worth noting that Steubenville’s robust education results have not guaranteed kids a path to economic security. Despite its near-perfect early reading scores, strong middle and high school achievement and a 96% graduation rate, the district’s post-high school are only slightly above statewide averages in terms of college-going and completion rates and the percentage of graduates who find “gainful employment.”

But those early adulthood outcomes are at least partly tied to the economic climate in a given community, and it’s hard to find fault with anything that the school district itself directly controls. Most districts would envy Steubenville’s impressive results. 

I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Emily Hanford, who has done more to build demand for scientifically sound reading instruction than nearly anyone in the last decade — not just in journalism but in education at large. Her original “Sold a Story” series was a seismic shift, grabbing public attention and spurring state legislation mandating curriculum and instruction rooted in the science of reading. Now, she’s back with , as potent as ever. These tell the story of Steubenville, Ohio — a gritty steel town-turned-reading powerhouse thanks to a 25-year commitment to Success for All, a research-backed, whole-school reform model Nancy Madden and Bob Slavin began developing as reading researchers at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s. Like all of Hanford’s work, the new episodes are deeply reported, well-informed, engaging and must-hear podcasts. I binge-listened to them twice on a long drive this week. 

Here are my takeaways: 

Continuity Is King

In education, especially for schools serving disadvantaged kids, curriculum changes as often as losing baseball teams swap managers — new year, new playbook, same old slump. Not so in Steubenville, where sticking with Success for All for 25 years has been a game-changer. In fact, they haven’t changed the game in a quarter-century. Minimal churn — low teacher turnover, a decade-long superintendent and 48% of staff are local grads — breeds a stability other schools and districts can only envy. Hanford gets baffled looks when she asks Steubenville teachers if they’d ever heard of Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell or even balanced literacy. “Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was,” she reports, “because what they were doing was working. It’s been working. For 25 years.”

Success for All Is Really Good

SFA is a standout, backed by a mountain of research that Hanford highlights. It’s not just a reading curriculum, it’s a whole-school overhaul — curriculum and instruction, professional development, leadership training, etc. — that’s lifted Steubenville’s poorest kids to nationally recognized heights, pushing reading scores two grade levels above peers’. Hanford cites research that shows eighth graders staying ahead in reading, with fewer held back or in special ed, cutting costs over time. Interestingly, SFA also shaped Success Academy’s early days, as I chronicled in my book How the Other Half Learns. A New York hedge fund manager, John Petry, wrote a charter school application after he and his partner Joel Greenblatt persuaded and paid for a Queens, New York, public school to implement SFA to great effect. They hired Eva Moskowitz to lead it. About the same time, Steubenville was looking for a new reading program. “Most people familiar with the reading research seemed to agree at the time that there were probably only two reading programs that had been tested and proven with scientific research,” Hanford reports: Success for All and Direct Instruction. 

‘Scripted Curriculum’ Would Benefit from the Emily Hanford Effect

SFA and Direct Instruction both face a big — and, for some, insurmountable — hurdle: Both are scripted, and some teachers hate that. Teachers tend to valorize freedom over recipes, and that resistance keeps SFA and Direct Instruction niche, even with Steubenville’s success and DI’s decades of data. Could “Sold a Story” change that misperception? We’ll see. What has made Hanford’s work so impactful is that she demonstrates how teachers have been misled about what is and is not effective practice; her work casts teachers not as sinners, but as sinned against by schools of education, publishing companies and instructional gurus. The same is true about instructional design and “scripts.”  In “How to Be the Next Emily Hanford,” a piece I wrote for with my colleague Riley Fletcher last year, we encouraged education journalists to follow Hanford’s lead and cast their gaze on classroom practice — teaching and learning — rather than the policy and politics that tend to dominate education reporting. If these new episodes bolster SFA and DI’s reputations and discredit detractors, spotlighting evidence over perceptions of rigidity, it will be a big service.

Teacher Buy-In is Huge

SFA isn’t just a program — it’s a pact, insisting that teachers vote to adopt it before it takes root. Steubenville conducted a secret ballot in which 100% of the staff agreed to adopt it — proof that the buy-in was real. That’s no small thing. I’ve often rankled my fellow curriculum advocates by saying I’d rather my daughter’s teacher be a Kool-Aid-swilling acolyte of a curriculum and pedagogy I dislike than have my preferred curriculum imposed on her and implemented begrudgingly. In How the Other Half Learns, I expected to write about curriculum and instruction at Success Academy but surprised myself by writing more about school culture: The X factor that makes those schools soar is every adult in a kid’s life singing from the same hymnal. SFA gets that: Without teachers on board, even the best program flops. Steubenville’s success hinges on that buy-in, a lesson too many reform efforts — and too many top-down technocratic reformers — miss or elide. Winning hearts and minds matters. 

EdReports is a Mixed Blessing

EdReports looms large in Hanford’s latest episodes, a flawed gatekeeper in the science of reading push. In her Steubenville saga, it’s a shadow player — SFA’s evidence shines and Steubenville was implementing it long before EdReports emerged on the scene. But not long ago Ohio’s initial “approved” list of reading curriculum snubbed SFA because EdReports hadn’t reviewed it, while green-lighting programs with weaker bona fides. How is that possible? EdReports was created to aid and abet Common Core implementation, not as a science of reading arbiter, yet states like Ohio leaned on it to approve curricula. That led to picks that often flunked the evidence test. Hanford shows EdReports’ clout — 40 publishers tweaked products for its ratings, and nearly 2,000 districts followed suit — but also its flaws: It gave high marks to programs employing discredited techniques like “three-cueing,” while SFA, as a “whole-school” model, was beyond its scope. That disconnect nearly cost Steubenville its proven program. I’ve long put EdReports in the category of “things I choose to love.” If you believe, as I do, that high-quality instructional materials are critical to student success, EdReports helped pushed curriculum to the center of reform conversations. But Hanford’s reporting echoes a worry I’ve harbored: Standards alignment isn’t enough. Built for Common Core, EdReports encourages a view of reading that is neutral to agnostic on quality. A “standards-based” view of reading means you can teach Dickens or dreck. EdReports’ ratings don’t tell me if a program’s texts are worth the time. 

Another Mixed Blessing: State Lists of Approved Curriculum 

I’ve written favorably about state efforts to center curriculum in reform, like Louisiana’s push to “” by curating top-tier options. But Hanford shows critical pitfalls: Ohio banned three-cueing and built “science of reading” lists — bravo! — yet nearly axed SFA because EdReports didn’t review it. Steubenville dodged a bullet, but the misstep echoes : good intent, shaky execution. Lists can guide, but when they lean on flawed tools over hard evidence, they’re more clutter than clarity.

Steubenville proves schools can defy the odds with evidence, continuity and teacher buy-in — not just phonics. SFA and DI shine — I’ve been hyping DI and — yet state lists and EdReports risk sidelining them for flashier flops. Education is cursed with too much innovation, not enough execution. These episodes scream it louder. Hanford’s work remains a wake-up call, and these episodes raise the stakes: We’ve got the evidence, so why aren’t we using it? 

A dozen state leaders, all from Republican-led states, wrote to Linda McMahon, President Donald Trump’s education secretary nominee, last week asking her to push for greater state control over federal education funds and to avoid issuing guidance they say is “not anchored in law.”

In the Jan. 28 letter, shared exclusively with The 74, they also want McMahon, former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, to send large buckets of funding for schools, like Title I money for low-income students, as a block grant. But they stopped short of stating support for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education — President Donald Trump’s top education policy goal. 

“By prioritizing state leadership and flexibility, the Trump administration can unleash the full potential of America’s schools and students,” they wrote. “Please defer to state and local decision-making as much as possible.”

The letter outlines conservative chiefs’ priorities as Trump takes aggressive steps to reshape the federal role in education. He frequently to “send education back to the states” and is expected to issue an executive order before the end of the month that would call on Congress to close the department.

The memo offers specifics that have been lacking in many discussions over how the relationship between the federal government and the states might change. But some experts wonder if the freedom GOP leaders seek will leave high-need students without services currently provided under law. Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman, confirmed they’d received the letter, but said officials wouldn’t share it with McMahon until she’s confirmed. 

The 12 leaders who penned the letter, both elected and appointed, are from Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming. 

Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters was not among them, despite the fact that he has been the most vocal about and at one point, threatened to . 

The proposals should provide additional talking points for committee members during McMahon’s confirmation hearing Feb. 13. While it would require congressional approval, the chiefs want to see the of funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act — like Title I and Title III for English learners — consolidated into a single block grant for “maximum flexibility.” 

They want to design their own formulas for distributing the money to districts so they can address the needs of rural areas, for example, and state-specific learning initiatives. In the meantime, they want the new secretary to grant as many waivers as possible from the accountability requirements of the law so they can “present new ideas” for how to spend the money.

‘Dilute the protections’

Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a research and policy organization, said she wasn’t surprised that the chiefs didn’t advocate eliminating the education department outright. Many of their states on federal funds and spend less state money on schools. The department, she said, is doing those states “a great service.”

While some state leaders might view the federal requirements as “overly burdensome,” she said their push for more control could come at the expense of students who require extra help, like those in poverty, English learners and homeless students. 

“Once you start blending all of those titles together you start to really dilute the protections that are going to individual students,” she said. 

The letter doesn’t mention the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which under , would move to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“IDEA oversight is giving some people pause,” she said. “That piece of legislation is very specific to education.”

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, say they have “serious concerns” about any attempts to shutter the department. On Thursday, they to Acting Education Secretary Denise Carter asking for more transparency on how the department plans to continue running programs it oversees, like financial aid and afterschool programs.

“We will not stand by and allow the impact that dismantling the Department of Education would have on the nation’s students, parents, borrowers, educators and communities,” they wrote.

In their letter, the state chiefs pushed back on the department’s practice of using “dear colleague” letters to enforce its priorities, which they said have often been “treated as legally binding policy.” Guidance from the department, they said, should merely be a suggestion “so as not to force behavior change.”  

During the Obama administration, for example, Republicans fought guidance that said students should be able to use bathrooms that match their and another that said districts could risk civil rights investigations if Black and Hispanic students were . 

On Wednesday, the Education Department issued stating that it would no longer enforce the Biden administration’s Title IX rule, which extended protections to LGBTQ students, and that any investigations based on the 2024 rule would be “reevaluated.” 

Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he hopes Trump honors the chiefs’ request, but noted the “chaos” that has marked Trump’s first few weeks in office. Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding have been . And even some have questioned Elon Musk’s authority to gain access to government payment systems and disable an agency that provides foreign aid.

“The ‘pen and phone’ approach, to quote Obama, whipsaws state leaders across administrations and is lousy federal governance,” he said. “My worry is less about the secretary nominee and more about the ‘move fast and break things’ approach we’ve seen so far in many other dimensions of this young administration.”

The Cleveland Transformation Alliance, a panel created in 2012 to put warring charter schools and teachers union officials together with city, school district and philanthropic leaders, voted this week to disband at the end of March. 

The panel successfully promoted strong charter schools while warning parents away from those that were failing students. 

The alliance was a crucial part of the broader Cleveland Plan For Transforming Schools, which  let the struggling school district avoid state takeover and made it the first district in Ohio to share local property tax dollars with charter schools. 

In return – coming at a time when even national charter school advocates blasted Ohio as the “Wild, Wild West” of barely-regulated charter schools – the alliance was created to prevent  charter schools with bad reputations and no sustainable plans from opening in the city, while also promoting strong ones.

But the Alliance never had the teeth some expected when it launched and its one attempt to block a school from opening failed. The state also increased its own charter oversight in 2015, reducing the Alliance’s importance.

The panel met another of its major goals – rallying community support for the district. The Cleveland Plan and alliance helped the district pass its first operating tax increase in 16 years in 2012. The district has since passed multiple tax renewals and increases, with the latest coming last November.

With the district no longer in crisis, the panel’s role continued to shrink, and it lost support after a change of mayors in 2022 and school CEOs in 2023.

Mayor Justin Bibb said in a statement that the alliance had a “pivotal” role as the city “strengthened collaboration, improved school choice, and built a foundation for sustained educational progress.” 

Other members of the panel agreed that its time has passed.

“We have fulfilled our original purpose,” said Ann Mullin of the George Gund Foundation who was part of the 2012 negotiations to create the Cleveland Plan. “We can now identify other ways to best support our schools and families moving forward.” 

The mayor’s office and other alliance members say they are still committed to its main task the last few years — creating a school choice guide for families — and will soon pick another group to create it.

The plan was created after then—Gov. John Kasich, who later was the last Republican challenger of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential race, told the city to come up with a turnaround plan or face state takeover after repeated poor scores on state tests. State Sen. Nina Turner, who later became co—chair of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020, was a key player in the negotiations and co—sponsor of the state law enacting a plan that had bipartisan support..

Success of the Cleveland Plan included the district improving academically, though not to levels the plan had hoped to achieve. The district had the second-worst test scores out of more than 600 districts in Ohio when the plan passed in 2012. Today, it is the 11th worst.

The district has also shifted  its old focus on neighborhood schools to being a “portfolio” district of different school models, both district and charter, that families can choose from.

School district CEO Warren Morgan and school board President Sara Elaqad said the end of the Alliance does not mean the end of the Cleveland Plan.

“(Having) quality schools, at scale, in the system is the work of all of the community, and that’s what the (Alliance) was about, and it’s what we’re going to continue to be about,” Morgan said. “We’re still committed to the work of high quality choices.”

The district’s financial support of charter schools, controversial when it started in 2012, has continued and even doubled over time. In 2012, after the Ohio legislature approved the plan, the district started sharing more than $5 million a year with selected charters with strong academic results, that served almost entirely Cleveland kids and that agreed to share data and expansion plans with the district.

The district is now sharing more than $10 million with 11 partnering charters, most of them with the Breakthrough Schools, the state’s highest-rated charter school chain and which helped create the Cleveland Plan.

But the district has also not shared money with any new schools or authorized any new charters since before the pandemic.

The Alliance’s control over new charters was never as direct as former Mayor Frank Jackson had wanted. Though Jackson wanted the city to have some say in what schools could open, the state legislature balked and gave the Alliance power to review authorizers and recommend to the state whether that authorizer could open new schools in the city.

Though the Alliance recommended that a Cincinnati-based authorizer should be blocked, its recommendation missed a deadline because of communication issues with the Ohio Department of Education and the recommendation was not followed.

Another controversial part of the Cleveland Plan was eliminating seniority when it came to teacher layoffs and having the district be one of the first in Ohio to use student test scores to evaluate teachers and affect contracts and pay. Those evaluations were changed when test scores lost favor in Ohio and nationally as part of teacher evaluations.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a bill into law that will require school districts to create a mandatory religious instruction release time policy and require educators to out a students’ sexuality to their parents.

The law will take effect 90 days after DeWine signed the bill.

during the final day of the lame duck session in 2024 and LGBTQ advocates called on .

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State Reps. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, and Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, introduced . Supporters called the bill the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” while opponents called it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, due to its similar language to Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law that passed in 2022.

The bill requires public schools to let parents know about sexuality content materials ahead of time so they can request alternative instructions.

It also prohibits any sexuality content from being taught to students in kindergarten through third grade. H.B. 8 defines sexuality content as “oral or written instruction, presentation, image or description of sexual concepts or gender ideology.”

This bill is one of a few during the most recent General Assembly.

This new law strengthens Ohio’s existing law around religious release time by creating a mandate. Currently, Ohio allows school district boards of education to make a policy to let students go to a course in religious instruction during the school day, but this now becomes a requirement for Ohio school boards.

“Parents, not government bureaucrats, should be making healthcare and education decisions for their kids,” Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer said in a . “H.B. 8 protects children by safeguarding parents’ rights to make important decisions for their children.”

The United States Supreme Court upheld religious released time laws during the 1952 case, which allowed a school district to have students leave school for part of the day to receive religious instruction.

Religious release time instruction must meet three criteria: the courses must take place off school property, be privately funded, and students must have parental permission.

a Hilliard-based religious instruction program, already enrolls students in about 160 Ohio school districts and celebrated the governor’s signing.

“All Ohio families have the freedom to choose off-campus religious instruction during school hours for their students,” LifeWise said in a statement.

Two central Ohio school districts, Westerville and Worthington, rescinded their religious release time policy last year. Both districts formerly allowed  off-campus for Bible classes during school hours.

“We are especially grateful that any local programs that had been put on hold will be able to resume their growing programs and that communities will now have the clarity they need to provide families with the opportunity to choose Bible-based character education for their child,” LifeWise said in a statement.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

ATHENS, Ohio — Local school districts and colleges are scrambling to determine how they will implement recent state legislation that requires transgender people to use the bathroom of the sex they were assigned at birth. 

In late November, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed  into law. In addition to prescribing bathroom use for all persons using school restrooms, the statute also prohibits public and private educational institutions from constructing multi-person, multi-gender restrooms.  

Ohio’s law brings the number of  to an even dozen. 

Legislation targeting transgender people has  across the country in the past 10 years, limiting access to public restrooms and healthcare and participation in sports, among other measures. In 2024 alone, Ohio legislators  — out of 14 that were introduced.

Both of Athens County’s state legislators  for SB 104; Sen. Brian Chavez (R-Marietta) sponsored the bill. 

As Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville) is term-limited,  of Marietta will replace him next year. In an email, Ritter said, “I appreciate Representative Edwards voting to ensure the privacy of Ohio’s students.”

The law takes effect on Feb. 24, 2025; 90 days after DeWine signed the bill on the day before Thanksgiving. 

SB 104 puts school districts in a “tenuous” situation, Athens City School District Superintendent Tom Gibbs told the Independent. 

“Currently, there is some disagreement between the Federal Department of Education and guidance we have been provided and what is included in this new statute,” Gibbs said in an email. 

The district is consulting legal counsel about “to determine how best to move forward,” Gibbs wrote.

“District employees will be directed to continue to support and protect the rights of all students for the next 90 days while we await guidance from our legal counsel,” Gibbs said in an email. 

Federal Hocking Local Schools Superintendent Jason Spencer declined to comment, saying that he had not yet discussed the bill with the Federal-Hocking Board of Education. Alexander, Nelsonville-York and Trimble local school district superintendents did not respond to requests for comments.

Potential conflict with federal law

SB 104 presents Ohio educators with a Catch-22, Gibbs explained. Employees who don’t follow the new requirements can be reported for violating state law; if they do follow it, they risk violating federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title IX. 

 of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 

Title IX “ to transgender students in public schools and universities,” Gibbs said, citing the . Athens City Schools’ Title IX coordinator is Director of Curriculum & Development Sommer McCorkle.

SB 104 does not contain any language about enforcement or penalties for violations of its restrictions. Similar bills in other states include fines and jail time as sanctions for violations, The Buckeye Flame . 

Gibbs noted that the district has standing  “that specifically call for protecting student rights based on gender identity.” But SB 104 will force the district to “change or modify multiple policies to be in line with the state statute,” he said.

“And, District employees will be faced with the daily task of ascertaining when to follow Federal Title IX Guidance and when to follow the State Statutes related to transgender students,” Gibbs said. “It is difficult to say on one hand that we do not discriminate based on gender identity and then on the other to limit student’s participation in athletics or even where they can use the bathroom.”

The implied changes from SB 104 are “especially frustrating because we’ve had these policies and procedures in place for years without any complaint and before this even became the Federal guidance on the matter,” Gibbs said in an email.

“The complete lack of any nod towards the ‘local control’ that state legislators frequently espouse in regards to schools and municipalities apparently goes out the window in relation to how we address and protect the rights of transgender students,” Gibbs stated.

Gibbs also pointed to ongoing Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case Doe v. Bethel, in which parents and students are suing Bethel Local School District for allowing a transgender child to use the restroom that matches her gender, the Ohio Capital Journal . 

“I am hopeful that case will come to [a] conclusion soon, as it would provide some additional context to the legal landscape surrounding this issue,” Gibbs said in an email.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education declined to comment on SB 104, but did note that federal laws supersede state laws.

Higher education

In an email, an Ohio University spokesperson said that OU “is aware that Senate Bill 104 has been formally signed into law, and we are currently reviewing the final version of the bill and its potential impact on established University processes and procedures.”

The spokesperson added, “OHIO has long been committed to fostering an inclusive, respectful environment for all students, staff and visitors, and we will continue to work to ensure that our public restroom signage and accommodations continue to meet the needs of our University community and remain compliant with all applicable state and federal laws.”

Casey Plett, an assistant professor of English and film at OU, said the university has not yet provided her with any guidance regarding the new law. 

“Anecdotally, from what I can see … it is increasing stress levels,” Plett said of her students. “I would worry very much about students who might be in the closet, who … might keep their identities secret … or keep their gender secret because of this, which is just a shame, and something that most other students don’t have to do.” 

For Plett, the “” nature of anti-trans bathroom bills is not founded in reality.

“The opponents of trans youth, specifically, in public life — it’s always called an ‘experience of experimentation,’ and that is not true,” Plett said. “I think that it is bills like this that are the experimentation … It is making these kinds of draconian laws that — none of these laws existed four years ago. It is this kind of legislative activity that is the experiment, and I am very doubtful it was going to have good effects.”

Ohio University senior Rey De Spain, who is transgender, echoed Plett’s sentiments.

“I think it’s a massive overreach into the private lives of citizens and especially students,” they said.

De Spain said that in Athens, “I’ve never really encountered any problems using the public restrooms here.” However, since their freshman year, “I definitely think that transphobia has become a lot more visible.” 

In De Spain’s experience, “People are a lot more comfortable being openly transphobic … A lot of people feel more comfortable than I would like, verbally harassing others on the streets, especially when they’re drunk … I expect a little bit of that, but I do feel like this campus has become a lot less friendly already in the past couple years, when I compare it to my freshman year. I felt like it was an extremely safe place, and I was never really hassled.”

Overall, though, De Spain said they feel “very fortunate that I live in an area where people mostly mind their own business.”

De Spain believes that bathrooms already operate on a “good faith” system in which legal documents aren’t required to attend to bodily functions.

 “What all of us want in the bathroom is privacy, and a place to do our business and then wash our hands and leave,” De Spain said. “I think that a lot of the people pushing legislation like this don’t seem to understand how public restrooms function in the real world, and they think they’re protecting people, when really they’re putting people in danger.”

Hocking College Vice President of Student Affairs Hannah Guadda, who is the school’s  coordinator, said in an email the institution “is currently reviewing the legislation to ensure compliance while maintaining our commitment to a safe, inclusive environment for all students. As we assess the bill’s impact, we remain dedicated to supporting our diverse student body.”

Resources: LGBTQ+ youths in crisis may contact the Trevor Project at 866-4-U-Trevor for assistance; adults in crisis, contact the National Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is also available; in case of emergency, always call 911.

This was originally published on .

Now, he’s targeting preschools and younger children, this time with a carrot and no stick.

DeWine and the state Department of Children and Youth have been offering free, voluntary online classes in the science of reading to preschool teachers and administrators for nearly a year. 

Last month, DeWine and state officials set aside $5 million in federal grants to offer $750 bonuses to preschool teachers and administrators who complete at least 10 hours of the training by next summer.

“By providing Science of Reading training for those who teach and care for our young children, we will be empowering these educators to lay the groundwork for more of our kids to reach their full potential,” DeWine said in a press release announcing the grants.

Within a week, more than 500 teachers had already applied for the $750.

Early childhood experts say that though preschools don’t offer the same intensity of reading lessons that kindergarten and first grade teachers do, there are ways to subtly improve young children’s understanding of letters and their sounds with play, songs and games that fit their age.

Preschool is a “golden opportunity to capitalize on the unique energy, curiosity, and explosive growth in oral language that children experience during the preschool years,” University of California, Berkely Emerita professor Lily Wong Fillmore and New York University professor Susan Neumann wrote for The 74 earlier this year. 

“Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners,” they wrote.

How many states have made science of reading a focus for preschool isn’t clear, largely because states don’t require preschool and few pay for it. Only 35 percent of four year olds nationally attend preschool, according to the National Institutes for Early Childhood Research at Rutgers University.

But NIEER researcher Lori Connors-Tadros said requiring, or encouraging science of reading methods in preschools, like Ohio is doing, is “a growing trend.”

“Legislators are adding requirements if they have a state funded Pre-K program around training for preschool teachers, and in some states, they’re actually requiring some training for administrators,” she said.

DeWine and the Ohio legislature joined a national movement to the science of reading in 2023, ordering schools in to stop using other methods and to implement the curriculum by the 2024-25 school year.

They budgeted $64 million to help school districts using other approaches buy new teaching materials and required teachers from kindergarten and up to be trained in science of reading concepts.

The state then created a series of online lessons that take eight hours for some high school teachers and administrators and 22 hours for most elementary school teachers.

More than 85,000 K-12 teachers completed that training by the end of October, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The state also started offering two tracks of free online training for preschool staff — one for three and four-year-olds and one for younger infants and toddlers — through the Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, based in Atlanta last December.

Jane Pernicone, director of the First Baptist Church Children’s Center in Shaker Heights, Ohio, said she took some of the classes and planned to have teachers at her child center take them over the next few years.

With grants now available, Pernicone said she’s encouraging her eight lead teachers to take the classes right away to earn the bonus. The state limits grants to $3,000 per preschool, or four staff, so Pernicone said she’ll skip her bonus and share the total grants between the eight teachers.

Though her center was mostly using science of reading through its Creative Curriculum materials, Pernicone said the lessons are good reinforcement and reminders to focus on using varied vocabulary, constantly interact with children in conversations and to show them how each letter sounds and not just teach them what the letters are.

“It’s good awareness for staff to realize…’oh, I should focus on building vocabulary’…as opposed to just making sure children know their ABCs,” she said. “There’s a lot of good content, just kind of a reframing of good practices.”

The $5 million for the grants comes from the federal and the . DeWine’s office did not respond to questions about whether his new two-year state budget proposal due early next year would include any money for preschool reading training.

Republican lawmakers want to require Ohio school districts to make their Pledge of Allegiance policy publicly available.

State Reps. Gail Pavliga, R-Portage County, and Tracy Richardson, R-Marysville, introduced over the summer and testified in support of their bill Tuesday during the Ohio House Primary and Secondary Committee Meeting, calling it a transparency bill.

“Many of you grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school and may be surprised to discover that not all schools and classrooms in Ohio are currently learning or reciting the Pledge,” Richardson said. “Some parents too are unaware that their children are not being taught this important practice. Parents have a right to know.”

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The bill would not require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it would just require school districts to post the policy on their website.

“Very little would need to be done by each school district, the policy already exists, and most schools already have a website,” Pavliga said.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that at public schools if it goes against their religious beliefs. This case came after Jehovah’s Witnesses students were expelled from their West Virginia school for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. At the time, West Virginia Board of Education required public school students to salute the flag and Jehovah’s Witnesses do not say the Pledge of Allegiance because it conflicts with their Bible teachings around worshipping God.

Learning the Pledge of Allegiance teaches students to respect the flag, Richardson said.

“Reciting it builds unity and nationalism by affirming our commitment to our values,” she said. “At a time when many seem polarized, it is a meaningful tradition that brings all Americans together.”

As a former teacher, State Rep. Sean Patrick Brennan, D-Parma, said it broke his heart when students would not take part in the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I don’t think it was because of a religious exemption,” he said. “I think it was simply apathy.”

He asked Pavliga and Richardson how school districts and parents can motivate students to want to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I think that, as we bring more awareness to this issue, that I think that you will see more parents being more vocal with their children and with the school district,” Pavliga said. “And I think it will start and spark some discussions.”

State Reps. Jodi Whitted, D-Madeira, asked the bill’s sponsors if they have received questions from parents who were unable to find their school district’s policy on the Pledge.

“No, it was something that we had talked about, and just felt that the time was right to be able to have it out there,” Pavliga said. “And we’re kind of a bit shocked by the fact that the school system might have a policy in place, but they weren’t required to publish it.”

If the bill were to become law, a school district that already has their Pledge of Allegiance policy posted on their website would already be in compliance, Pavliga said.

The current General Assembly will finish at the end of the month, meaning any bills that don’t pass will die and would have to be re-introduced next General Assembly.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Two-thirds of Ohioans support a universal free school breakfast and lunch program for all public school children, according to a Republican research firm.

“This is extremely rare in a time where voters are really reluctant to support further spending, either at the state or federal level,” Alexi Donovan, vice president of Tarrance Group Polling, said Monday during the monthly meeting.

This month’s meeting heard testimony on the importance of universal school meals and Tarrance Group Polling surveyed 600 Ohio voters about this topic in May.

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“It is clear from the research and the data over the years, universal school meals help students thrive, physically, mentally, socially and educationally,” said John Stanford, director of Children’s Defense Fund–Ohio.

In Ohio, 1 in 6 children, or about 413,000 kids, live in a household that experiences hunger. Despite that, more than 1 in 3 children who live in a food insecure household do not qualify for school meals, according to a from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

“We believe that in a country as wealthy as we are, we should not have hungry children,” said Lisa Quigley, director of .

Exposing students to various fruits and vegetables through school meals helps them get a taste for “food that’s far more nutritious than what a lot of them are bringing to school,” she said.

“What we’re finding in the schools that are doing universal school meals, the food is getting better,” Quigley said.

National security

Children’s hunger is a national security issue, said Cynthia Rees, Ohio’s director for the Council for a Strong America.

The that found 77% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service without a waiver. The most prevalent disqualification rate was for being overweight at 11%, above drug and alcohol abuse (8%) and medical/physical health (7%).

“It is critical to recognize that overweight and obesity can often be manifestations of malnutrition, food insecurity or the lack of access to affordable healthy foods often result in consuming cheaper and more accessible food, which often lack nutritional value,” Rees said.

The food insecurity rate for Ohio children is 15%, with some counties having rates up to 24%, Rees said.

“Increasing children’s access to fresh and nutritious food now, including through free school meals for all students, could help America recover from the present challenges and bolster national security in the future,” she said. “The military has a long standing interest in the health and nutrition of our nation’s youth.”

Universal school meals would eliminate the stigma of categorizing students who receive free and reduced meals and those that don’t, Rees said.

“Instead, all students can just have a meal together,” she said. “When we make school meals accessible to all, we remove that stigma.”

Ohio legislation

Last year’s budget bill allowed any student who qualified for free or reduced school breakfast or lunch got those meals for free during the 2023-24 school year.

Currently in Ohio, children are eligible for free or reduced school meals if their household income is up to 185% of the federal poverty line, which is $57,720 for a family of four, according to the .

State Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, introduced a bill earlier this year that would require public schools to provide a meal to any student that asks.

would also ban a district from throwing away a meal after it was served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals.” The has only had sponsor testimony so far in the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

More than 150 people submitted opponent testimony against a bill that would require school districts to allow students to be released from school for religious instruction.

Opponents argued religious release time programs disrupt the school day, create a divide between students who participate and those that don’t, and interfere with religious freedom.

“My concern with religious release time programs during the school day is the rights of the children who do not participate in those programs,” said Rev. Vicki Zust, rector of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upper Arlington.

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Three opponents were able to give their testimony during last week’s Ohio House Primary and Secondary Education Committee meeting and committee chair Gayle Manning, R-North Ridgeville, had to remind those in attendance to be quiet during testimony.

“We are not applauding. … We remain silent,” Manning said.

The three opponents specifically spoke about experiences they have seen with , a Hilliard-based religious instruction program that enrolls . LifeWise, a non-denominational Christian program that teaches the Bible, is in .

“During proponent testimony in June, it became clear this bill is not about religious pluralism,” said Christina Collins, executive director of Honesty for Ohio Education. “It is about one, very well-funded program wanting to push its brand of Christian nationalist beliefs on a captive audience during the school day.”

Nearly 120 people submitted proponent testimony in June.

Ohio law currently permits school district boards of education to make a policy to let students go to a course in religious instruction, so these bills would strengthen the law by requiring a policy. A set of companion bills would require school districts to create a religious release time policy and change the wording of the existing law in the Ohio Revised Code from “may” to “shall.”

 was introduced earlier this year by state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, and Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, who is now a state senator. Sen. Michele Reynolds, R-Canal Winchester, introduced this summer.

“To be honest with you guys, I think this might be the easiest piece of legislation before you this General Assembly,” Cutrona said during a recent Senate Education Committee meeting. “Why? Because there’s only one word change in this bill, and so we’re just moving it from may to shall. … The intent of this bill is to leave the decision to participate in religious release time programs up to the parents, not the school boards.”

“Despite the fact that it’s only one word, it’s a huge word,” said State Sen. Catherine D. Ingram, D-Cincinnati.

The United States Supreme Court upheld released time laws during the 1952 case, which allowed a school district to have students leave school for part of the day to receive religious instruction.

“While LifeWise claims that the process of leaving and returning to school is smooth, anyone who has ever tried to organize first graders for a field trip knows it is far from seamless,” said Jaclyn Fraley, the mom of a first-grader in Westerville Schools.

Westerville City Schools Board of Education recently that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students off-campus for Bible classes during school hours.

“One parent in my group (Westerville Parents United) shared that her daughter was told in class that she and her mothers were “going to hell” because they belong to an LGBTQIA family,” Fraley said. “Another parent described how their child was told they didn’t ‘really believe in God’ because they are not Christian.”

Elementary school students who do not attend LifeWise in Defiance Schools in Northwest Ohio are sent to study hall and are called “LifeWise leftovers,” Fraley said.

Zust said parents in her congregation who choose not to allow their children to participate in the program are mocked and threatened.

“This creates a hostile environment for the children of my congregation as well as children of other denominations and faiths,” Zust said. “That is a violation of their First Amendment and educational rights.”

Opponents argued there are other ways students can learn about religion outside of school time.

“We didn’t have these programs,” Fraley said. “Our parents took us to church. Our parents took us to temple. Our parents took us to mosque. Our parents took us to the places where we went to learn those religious beliefs.”

State Rep. Jodi Whitted, D-Madeira, asked how these programs accommodate students with Individualized Education Programs, but Collins explained there can’t be an exchange of information with programs like LifeWise since IEPs remain within the district.

“We’re talking about students with special needs who are being sent off campus to people that are ill-equipped to work with them, with no built-in caveats for necessitating being able to meet those needs,” Collins said.

State Rep. Beryl Brown Piccolantonio, D-Gahanna, asked how districts accommodate students with fixed prayer times.

“They simply leave, do their prayers and come back,” Collins said. “It’s not a leaving the campus, coming back with stickers and candy kind of event.”

State Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, said his office has received nearly 200 emails against H.B. 445 and less than 20 in support of it.

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