Ohio's school bus scam

It's one of the biggest disgraces about living in Ohio.

The average Ohio Republican legislator ponders a row of school buses.

The first time I ever pressed then-Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, who has an expired box of condoms where his brain is supposed to be, about his involvement in the ECOT swindle, I heated his half-remaining brain cell to the point he asked, “Why do you care?”

It’s the last line of logical defense for a lot of Republicans.

In this case, Husted couldn’t wrap his CTE-ridden brain around why a random guy off the street would care about thousands of other people’s children being kicked into the street in the middle of the school year after its scam artist operators shuttered the operation as soon as the whistle got blown.

Not that Husted gives a damn, but I care about schools because I have to live in a society—and not as a Lieutenant Governor, either.

But a lot of that pride can be traced to my mother, a longtime former member of the Marion City School Board. She had this whacky idea that the state should provide a quality education to every student, no matter their socioeconomic class, identity or disability.

And one thing I remember her harping on, even 20 years ago, was the absurdity of Ohio law, first signed by former governor George Voinovich, one of the most corrupt figures in Ohio political history, that required public school districts to supply transportation to private and charter school students.

The thinking was that parents of private and charter school students paid taxes to public school districts, which were used for transportation, so why shouldn’t they be able to reap that benefit, too?

That’s not how taxes work in any other arena other than when the Republicans want to put the screws to public schools in Ohio.

But even disregarding that hypothetical point, in reality, the burden of transporting private and charter school students (and the fines that accrue if they don’t) has screwed over public school students, whose parents also pay taxes into the local transportation network.

From Stephen Starr of The Guardian:

For about 2,000 students attending high school in Dayton, Ohio, there won’t be a bus in sight when they walk out the door for the beginning of the school year this week.

Ruben Castillo, an 11th grade student at Meadowdale Career Technology Center, is one of them.

Ohio law means that public school districts such as Dayton’s are responsible for transporting students who attend private and charter schools. When they fail to do so, they risk fines of millions of dollars.

A shortage of drivers and buses combined with the threat of fines, means that public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.

“I’m going to have to use Uber, and it’s going to cost me $25-$30 a day to get to and from school,” says Castillo. “In wintertime, when demand is higher, it’s probably going to be more.” At 180 school days over the course of a year, that’s thousands of dollars he is set to fork out from his own pocket.

Unlike the voucher scam, which hurts urban and rural schools equally, the transportation scam and its associated fines seemingly hit urban schools the most, since they’re the poorest districts that have to “compete” against constellations of private and charter schools.

It’s an issue, coincidentally, that the Columbus City School Board tackled Wednesday night during a special session.

I’ve edited the 15-minute discussion into a 4.5-minute clip, complete with subtitles and transitions.

It features Columbus City School Treasurer Ryan Cook and Transportation Director Rodney Stufflebean explaining how the district spends $31 million a year on transportation fines and efforts to mitigate those fines:

Somehow even more maddening, there’s no deadline on when charter and private schools can file these complaints, which appears to lend itself to these crooks waiting until the last moment to slap districts with complaints that they can’t possibly fix.

What makes this 4.5-minute clip brutal is that it lays bare the depravity of the scam that Ohio Republicans are pulling on school districts.

Not only do they underfund districts in the first place and then rob them with voucher money, but they’ve also figured out a diabolical way to siphon millions of dollars from their transportation budget, which is already one of the most significant outlays for districts.

The icing on the cake is that Mr. Cook, the treasurer of one of the largest districts in the state, can’t even get an answer from Republican bureaucrats at the Department of Education about where, exactly, that “fine” money goes.

Columbus City Schools is a district with real problems. And yet you have qualified professionals spending an untold amount of man-hours per year trying to fight a system where a $1.9 million fine at the end of the year is considered “doing pretty good.”

At least we can take solace in the fact that Voinovich is in Hell. And Statehouse Republicans better get their souls right, because they’ll be joining them in due time over antics like this.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland…

From left to right: Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin and City Council members Joe Jones, Richard Starr, and Anthony Hairston

I like Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin. He’s a calculating brawler who doesn’t back down from anybody. And those are admirable skills in an arena as brutal as Cleveland politics.

However, with the Council set to shrink due to city charter regulations and the inevitable incumbent-on-incumbent clashes that his redistricting effort has drawn, I fear that he has backed some busters with the powerful campaign tool known as the Council Leadership Fund.