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YOUNGSTOWN — State Rep. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown, testified Wednesday before the Ohio House’s primary and secondary education committee on a bill she sponsored that would end state takeovers of school districts.

House Bill 387 also would bring an end to the state’s demands that Youngstown City Schools complete an academic improvement plan under threat of falling back under state control.

“Instead of supplementing the diminished resources that resulted from population and tax decline in the region, the actual root causes of the academic strain, lawmakers instead took power away from the school board and installed a CEO and academic distress commission,” McNally said. “HB 70 also removed any mechanism for taxpayer accountability in the management of the district.”

McNally added that under the state’s oversight, Youngstown saw significant drops in almost every category of academic performance.

“Youngstown City School District scored lower under the ADC and CEO model than they performed in the years prior to the state takeover,” she said.

The bill is jointly sponsored by Rep. Juanita Brent, D-Cleveland. If passed, HB 387 will dissolve all current academic distress commissions and repeal the law on the establishment of new commissions and academic improvement plans for districts under their oversight.

McNally’s news release Wednesday states the bill also restores all powers under the Ohio Revised Code to the boards of education of school districts under an academic distress commission and declares an emergency.

According to the release, since the takeover of YCSD and the 2015 passage of HB 70, East Cleveland and Lorain schools also were subjected to an academic distress commission, and 10 other districts were one state report card away from a state takeover when state lawmakers passed a moratorium on academic distress commissions.

While imposing the moratorium, lawmakers still allowed for YCSD, East Cleveland, and Lorain to create three-year academic improvement plans, approved by the state’s Department of Education. Lorain was recently released from any such obligations, leaving Youngstown and East Cleveland alone to face the burden.

“What was the goal of the ADC model? If it truly was to improve academics in Youngstown, we have the proof that it failed. And when your experiment fails, you’re supposed to clean up the mess, release your lab rats and go home. The ADC model is a complete failure, a failure that this body has acknowledged in its own part by stopping it from spreading to your communities,” said McNally during her testimony. “It doesn’t work, no other school should be victimized by it, and the schools in it should be released. We are overthinking about why the kids in Youngstown and East Cleveland should be forced to keep living like lab rats in an experiment that has been abandoned. Just let them go and be done with it already.”

HB 387 requires several readings in the Primary and Secondary Education Committee before it can come to a vote before members of the Ohio House of Representatives. All legislation introduced in a General Assembly must become law before the end of the General Assembly. Rep. McNally intends to re-introduce legislation ending state takeovers of public schools in the 136th General Assembly if not made law by the end of the year.

ON THE PICKET LINES

McNally and Brent announced the law on Sept. 1, 2023, in front of Youngstown Rayen Early College High School, where striking members of the Youngstown Education Association — the district’s teachers union — had gathered to picket in advance of continuing negotiations with the school board.

The union’s primary sticking point in the strike was neither wages nor benefits, but language in the contract that originated under HB 70, which gave the chief executive officer of the district absolute power over negotiations and personnel decisions. The union argued that the district had twisted that language to extend the same power to Superintendent Jeremy Batchelor. They refused to end the strike until that language was removed from the contract, and insisted that the board had legal authority to remove it through collective bargaining.

In the end, the union’s position prevailed.

The strike ended on Sept. 14, 2023, when the YEA secured a one-year contract, and the most recent contract negotiations went off without a hitch, and the union signed a new two-year deal in April after brief talks.