Advocacy Update – 9.14.23 – The Statehouse is Back, SBOE meeting, and Report Cards Released

House P and S:
The House Primary and Secondary committee met this Tuesday to discuss a variety of bills.  Most notably, HB235 (SBOE Elections) had its first hearing.  This bill would reduce the SBOE from 19 to an elected 15 members based on current congressional districts.  Currently, the board consists of 11 nonpartisan elected individuals plus an additional eight members appointed by the governor.  The SBOE elections would be moved to the partisan ballot instead of the current nonpartisan ballot.  HB235 would also require the board to hold one public meeting each month.


Both HB8 (Parental Notification Requirements AKA Parents’ Bill of Rights) and HB117 (Eliminate Third Grade Reading Retention) were referred to the Senate Education Committee.  No Senate Ed meetings have been scheduled yet.  

State Board of Education:
The State Board of Ed will meet both 9/18 and 9/19.  You can watch those meetings at www.ohiochannel.org

Report Cards:
While we wait for Governor Dewine to announce the director of the newly created Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, ODE(W) has released school report cards: https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Data/Report-Card-Resources

Districts and schools are rated on a 1-5 star rating with the overall rating based off of five components: achievement, progress, gap closing, early literacy, and graduation.  

Please note, there are three upcoming webinars (Links are located at the bottom left of webpage) that will provide more overview of report cards in the state of Ohio.

We will spend some time analyzing the gifted indicator results/gap closing component, but encourage everyone to take a look at their school(s) and district(s).