Week in Review – 02/22/2019

Week in Review > Week in Review – 02/22/2019

Posted by BASA on February 23rd, 2019

EDUCATION

Parties in the ongoing litigation surrounding the Educational Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT)discussed three major issues at a status conference Friday, with Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Holbrook saying he would make a decision on two of the issues in the coming days. Those two matters were whether the ECOT board should be able to ask interim master Myron Terlecky to indemnify individual former employees of ECOT and whether a group of seven public school districts should be able to pursue claims against Third Wave Communications, Midwest Communications & Media, and Grant Street Consultants.

Applications are now being accepted for the Ohio Department of Education’s (ODE) EdChoice Scholarship Program. The deadline to apply is Tuesday, April 30.

Superintendent Paolo DeMaria gave his forecast of upcoming legislative deliberations Tuesday to the State Board of Education, as part of a new standing agenda topic for the board’s meetings. Board President Laura Kohler said when she was developing a new committee structure she’d heard strong interest from colleagues about reconstituting a legislative committee of the board, so she decided to effectively create a committee of the whole by making legislative updates a routine feature of the monthly meetings.

The State Board of Education is gearing up for deliberations on numerous revisions to state report cards for traditional district schools, career-technical planning districts, and dropout prevention and recovery schools. The board’s Accountability and Assessment Committee started talks Tuesday on upcoming work to revisit rules on the composition and calculation of report card measures.

Rep. Louis Blessing (R-Cincinnati), chairman of the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee, told Hannah News at the committee’s first meeting Tuesday evening that he expects movement on bills to revamp school district report cards and early childhood education. He said districts are still upset about the state report card rating system, and he said a bill similar to 132-HB591 (Duffey) could be introduced early on in the session.

Reps. Bob Cupp (R-Lima) and John Patterson (D-Jefferson) said Tuesday their long-awaited report on a new school funding model is near completion but needs a bit more work before its public debut. The two spoke after co-chairing their first meeting as leaders of the House Finance Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee, under the new bipartisan subcommittee structure instituted by Speaker Larry Householder (R-Glenford). “It’s no surprise that some of these things take a little longer to fine tune in the final form than one anticipates,” Cupp said.

ELECTIONS 2020

Secretary of State Frank LaRose Monday announced his office was beginning a process to send voter registration forms to addresses that did not respond to “last chance” postcards sent by their local county board of elections. LaRose’s office said it had issued a request to county boards to provide the voter ID numbers of voters who did not respond to the postcards sent by former Secretary of State and now Lt. Gov. Jon Husted before he left office that warned voters who had not voted in several elections that their registration was in danger of being canceled. The voter ID numbers will be used by the secretary of state’s office to send voter registration cards to each of the addresses provided, Larose’s office said.