Fix Ohio Schools

05/08/2026

Fair Warning - This is an opinion post.... so if you're not interested that🤷‍♂️

Everyone knows the state has been gerrymandered to protect the seats of the republicans in order to protect the supermajority they hold in the general assembly. They have definitely been successful at playing the long game. The long game is what those of us who support public education are going to have start doing. We have to play CHESS, and quit playing Checkers.

Think about the narrative that has been created about our public schools over the last 2 decades. Students are failing because teachers aren't doing their job. If teachers aren't doing their job then they shouldn't earn the money they make. They have too many high paid administrators and their costs are exploding. Lastly, they have powerful teacher unions who collectively bargain for raises while they fail our children. Ask most people and they still think teachers get a 10 week paid summer vacation. They complain about something they don't even understand, but hey, that's the world we live in today.

Let's now get straight to the point of this post. I believe the dismantling of public education and the promotion of private education has been a strategy for over 30 years (The Long Game) going back to the Voinovich administration. The reason school funding hasn't been fixed isn't because it couldn't be fixed, but because they simply didn't want to fix it.

Think through this with me. By siphoning money from public education and using those dollars to feed the private and charter school systems the republicans can fulfill their prophecy which is..... public schools are failing. They've reinforced this long term strategy by adding to HB 96 the enrollment guidelines where the state can force foreclosure on public schools and then force them to sell the public's assets to private corporations in the private and charter school market space. 60% is the enrollment number. If your building falls below 60% capacity or 60% of its peak enrollment, that can trigger the forced sale of public school buildings. There's only one reason I can think that it would be important enough to add that caveat to the biennium budget.

So in the end what's all this truly about? In one word ..... POWER!

If I were task any of you this question - Who traditionally supports democratic candidates for office? Union or non union members? How would you answer? If I asked you "Who traditionally supports democratic candidates financially? Union organizations and independent union members, or non union members?

I don't think you have to go any further or dig any deeper than that. The answer is in front of all of us. Tell me this.... If public schools shut down where do all those students go? Private and Charter Schools right? Are there enough private school buildings currently for all of the public school kids to go to private schools? (Remember forced foreclosure). Are there enough teachers in the private and charter school system to teach all the kids if they go to private schools? Wouldn't public school teacher have to move into the private school space to educate the influx of the kids moving to private schools? Of course they will..... where else are the teachers going to come from? So the last question is this. If the same teachers are teaching the same kids under a new organizational type... who they say are failing the kids already.... whats going to change?

NOTHING... and they know this, with the exception of one thing.... NO TEACHER UNIONS IN PRIVATE SCHOOLS.

The way the republicans eliminate the dollars that flow through to democrat candidates is by eliminating one of the single biggest donors to those democratic candidates. SB5 didn't work!! Remember that?

I'm not a conspiracy minded person, but I'm telling you that I know these people and I know the way they think. They are trying to make sure that their majorities and super majorities are maintained and one of the ways to do that is to eliminate the unions that support their challengers.

If you want to save public education as you know it and make real reform in the way they educate kids and how they are funded, we have to have a long game solution as well. We've been the proverbial frog in the boiling water and didn't realize we've been dying a slow death for decades. It's going to take real organized efforts in very specific house and senate districts to accomplish this. The days of sitting back and accepting our fate and hoping someone else steps up to do something about it are over..... if you want to see some real change in the way things are done in Columbus.

I'll leave you with those thoughts for a Friday, after a really tough day at the polls on Tuesday. I hope you all have a great and restful weekend and find your inner strength to keep fighting the good fight.

Jeff Gore
Mayor, Huber Heights Ohio
Public High School Teacher

05/05/2026

Today is primary day in Ohio, so go vote. Every race matters.

But here's what I need you to hear. When the votes are counted tonight, the school funding crisis will still be here tomorrow morning. Nothing changes on May 6th. The state's share of K-12 funding is still sitting at 32%, and 595 districts are projecting deficits by FY2029. The next biennium budget is more than a year away, so don't hold your breath waiting on Columbus to fix this.

You know what happens in the meantime. Your school board puts another property tax levy on the ballot, or an income tax, and you vote yes because you love your kids and your community. Then five years later they're back asking again. That's not a plan, that's a treadmill.

There is another way. A 1% statewide school sales tax, one penny on every dollar, generates $2.38 billion a year. The current combined deficit across all 328 struggling districts is $790 million, which means it covers the gap three times over. It costs the median Ohio household about $20 a month, and it doesn't touch your property taxes or your income taxes. Visitors, and businesses all share the cost instead of it landing entirely on property owners.

The legislature already passed the Fair School Funding Plan with an 84-13 bipartisan vote. They know the formula, they just won't fund it, and that won't change on its own. It changes when you pick up the phone and call your state representative and state senator. It changes when you write them letters, show up at town halls, and keep showing up until they act.

Fix Ohio Schools didn't start to win one election. We started this to change how Ohio funds its schools, and the primary ending today doesn't mean the work stops. If we go quiet now, we end up right back here next cycle with another levy on the ballot and the same broken system.

Call your legislators, write them, share this page, and talk to your neighbors. This is how it gets fixed.

Jeff Gore
Mayor, City of Huber Heights
High School Business Teacher
fixohioschools.org

05/04/2026

Tomorrow is the primary, but I want to tell you what I'll be thinking about when I walk into the booth.

I'll be thinking about the teachers I've watched leave the profession. Good ones. Teachers who loved the work, who were great with kids, who burned out because they kept being asked to do more with less, year after year, until there was nothing left to give. Some of them are friends, and they are missed. The kids miss them too, even if they don't know how to say so.

I'll be thinking about the kids sitting in my classroom right now. The ones who come in with their whole lives written on their faces. The ones who never raise their hand but are always watching. The ones who tell you everything in five seconds at the end of class because they don't know how to say it any other way. They didn't choose any of this mess the "adults" have create, but they keep showing up.

I'll be thinking about the parents I've met over the past five weeks. The ones who messaged me late in the evening worried about their district. The ones who showed up to school board meetings for the first time in their lives because something finally pushed them past the breaking point. The ones who told me they didn't even know how bad it had gotten until somebody finally laid it out. I'll be thinking about all of them.

I'll be thinking about the Franklin board president I told you about. He stood up in front of his community and showed them how their report card fell after the cuts. I sat in that room and I watched a man who clearly loves his community look his neighbors in the eye and tell them the truth. That takes guts. Most public officials don't have it anymore.

I'll be thinking about my own students and the world they're stepping into. The state they'll be voting in soon. The schools their own kids will go to someday, if we don't get this right.

Most of all, I'll be thinking about how every single piece of this came down to choices that other people made on our behalf. Choices about money. Choices about priorities. Choices about whose kids matter and whose don't. None of those choices were inevitable. None of them were the only option. They were just the choices the people in power decided to make, and then quietly hoped the rest of us wouldn't notice.

I noticed.

A lot of you noticed too. That's why we're here.
Tomorrow is the primary. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for. I'm not going to tell you which party to support. I'm going to tell you what I've been telling you for the last few weeks. Show up. Bring somebody with you. Look at the names on your ballot and ask yourself whether they've been making decisions you can live with, or whether it's time for somebody else to try.
That's all this ever was. People showing up. People paying attention. People deciding that their kids and their neighbors and their schools were worth fighting for.

I'll see you Tuesday.
Jeff Gore, Mayor of Huber Heights. High School business teacher

04/30/2026

Thursday Morning food for thought!

Every time someone makes the case for funding public education, the first response is the same. "How much more money is it going to take to improve outcomes?" I get the logic, and it's a fair question if you're thinking like a businessperson. I teach high school business, so I respect the instinct.

There's another side to that question however that nobody seems willing to ask.
What outcomes should we expect if funding keeps decreasing, because that's what's happening, and it's not just the state cuts and the vouchers. The overall cost of running a school goes up every year. Employees, facilities, maintenance, transportation, food service, technology, software licenses. The same cost pressures every business and non-profit faces.
The difference is, when costs go up at a private business, they raise prices. Public schools can't charge tuition, so their only option is to go back to the same taxpayers who already fund them. The same taxpayers who are watching their own grocery bills double. It's the system we have, and I know most of you don't like it. I'm not crazy about it either, but it's the only system schools have to work with.

So back to the question.
If every dollar buys less than it used to, and there are fewer dollars to begin with, what outcome would logically make sense? You don't have to be an economist to answer that. The math points in one direction, and that's exactly what we're watching happen.

Huber Heights City Schools made roughly $14 million in cuts back in 2013-14. As someone who has lived in this community and worked in its classrooms, I can tell you the district has never been the same. Programs that were taken away never came back. Class sizes never recovered. Today the district sits at 2.5 stars on the state report card. Busing to the high school was the first thing cut and chronic absenteeism is now reaching 40% at the high school. What would we expect to happen? Kids can't learn if they aren't at school but students and parents are having to make the choice to take public transportation across town and leave 1.5 hours before they need to because of a public transit bus schedule...or stay home for the day. Some students are taking an Uber to school.

Franklin City Schools is an even cleaner example, and I saw it firsthand. I sat in their town hall meeting for the levy on the May 5 ballot. Their school board president stood up and showed the community that the district's report card went from 4 stars to 2.5 stars after their recent cuts. Same district. Same kids. Same community. The only thing that changed was the funding and yes, I know the star rating system has its problems. State report cards are an imperfect way to measure a kid. But it's the measurement they chose. By their own scoreboard, the math doesn't work.

Call it correlation. Call it causation. Argue that one doesn't prove the other. Fine.
But whatever happened to "if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck."
You can't keep cutting the inputs and act surprised when the outputs follow.

Jeff Gore
Mayor of Huber Heights. High school business teacher.

04/29/2026

School Funding in the margins!
We haven't talked about this enough on a state or local level.

Republicans don't just hold the legislature. They hold a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers. That means whichever way the next governor leans, the legislature can override them on every vote that matters. School funding. Property taxes. Vouchers. Ma*****na revenue. Everything.

That's not democracy. That's one-party rule.
Dr. Amy Acton is running for governor as a Democrat. If she wins in November, she walks into an office where her veto pen is meaningless. Every veto she signs gets overridden 65 to 34 in the House and 24 to 9 in the Senate.

If this supermajority isn't broken... and she wins, her victory means nothing.

Same goes for a Republican governor who wants to compromise. The architects of HB 96 don't need a signature. They have the votes to override.

Let's look at the numbers.
The supermajority is held together by 5 House seats and 4 Senate seats. That's it. Nine Republicans across an entire 132-seat legislature.
Six House seats. Five Senate seats. That's all it takes to break the supermajority and put real veto power back in the governor's office. To restore checks and balances. To put the state budget back on a negotiating table.... to put school funding and the FSFP back on the negotiating table.

That's not flipping the legislature. That math is achievable.
May 5th is the primary. November 3 is the general. The candidates who could shrink that margin get chosen next Tuesday.

If you've been told the legislature is hopeless and your vote doesn't matter, somebody lied to you.

Six seats. That's the difference between a governor who governs and one who only gets to watch.

Jeff Gore
Mayor of Huber Heights. High School business teacher.

04/28/2026

Some out loud thinking this morning as I prepare for my students today........

I want to say something I don't hear many public education advocates willing to say.
The people who push back on school funding aren't all wrong.
Many of them are analytical. They look at it like a business problem. We put money in, what do we get out? When they see test scores that haven't moved much, they ask a fair question. Why am I paying more for the same result?

Some of them go further. They say a lot of what's holding kids back isn't the school. It's what happens before the kid ever gets to school. I've seen comments right here that say parents aren't engaged. Homes are without books, kids aren't sleeping, kids didn't eat the night before and, didn't have anyone ask them about their day. Sometimes that's followed up by another fair question. Why is that my problem to fix with my taxes?

I get it. I understand that frustration. I share some of it.
But here's where that logic breaks.

If the problem is what's happening at home, then cutting school funding makes the problem worse, not better. Bigger class sizes mean less attention for the kid who needs it most. Cutting counselors means no one notices when something's wrong. Cutting programs means the kid with no stability at home loses the one place that gave them stability. Cutting extracurriculars means the kid whose parents aren't around loses the coach or director who was. The school is often the only thing standing between a struggling kid and a bad outcome. I refuse to believe the answer is to take that away?

Then there's the whole measurement problem. We grade schools on test scores, but test scores don't measure whether a kid learned how to think. They don't measure whether a teacher kept a kid in school who would have dropped out. They don't measure whether a counselor caught a problem before it became a tragedy; which we have seen play out way too many times. We're judging the system by one thing....a test score, and ignoring everything else that makes up the total student.

So the question becomes, where do we meet in the middle?
I think it starts here. Stop pretending this is a math problem with a clean answer. Stop pretending kids are products and schools are factories. Stop pretending test scores are the whole story, and stop pretending that defunding the one institution that touches every kid will somehow produce better kids.

If we want better outcomes, we need honest measurement, sustained investment, and a public that understands schools can't fix what families won't and families can't fix what schools won't. We need each other.
That's the conversation. The rest is just politics.

Jeff Gore
Mayor of Huber Heights. High School business teacher

fixohioschools.org

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04/24/2026

I need to get something off my chest.
I'm tired of hearing our kids compared to products coming off an assembly line.
Inputs. Outputs. ROI. "The outputs don't justify what we're spending." I see this framing everywhere right now, and every time I do, I think the same thing. These people have never stood in front of thirty kids.

There isn't a product in the world manufactured with the variables a child carries into a classroom. Did they eat this morning? Did they sleep? What happened at home last night? Are they scared? Are they grieving? Are they loved? Are they safe?

No factory deals with that. Not one.
People who think this way see in black and white. That's why the frame feels clean to them. Inputs in, outputs out, simple math. But kids don't live in black and white. They live in the gray. They learn in the gray.

Add to that, schools are being asked to do more with less every single year, and deliver a better product anyway. I teach high school business. Name one industry that cuts its resources and improves its quality. It doesn't exist. It can't.
We're not building cars. We're not building airplanes. We're not building warships.

We're building brains.

There is no perfect brain. There aren't even two brains that think alike, let alone thirty sitting in the same room.

Until we stop measuring children like machines built by machines with guaranteed outcomes, the public's expectations will never be met. Not because our kids failed. Not because our teachers failed. Because the comparison was broken from the start.

Jeff Gore
Mayor of Huber Heights. High school business teacher.

04/23/2026

27 school districts. 12 counties. ONE region of Ohio.

All on the May 5 ballot. All asking voters for more money. The same election cycle.

That's not 27 separate crises. That's the result of one decision in Columbus: abandoning Ohio's promise to fund public schools.
The state's share of K-12 funding has collapsed from 47% to 32%. Meanwhile, over $1 billion a year now flows to private school vouchers.

The money doesn't vanish. It just gets pushed down to your property tax via a levy campaign in your district.

Barberton City Schools is one of the 27. The state placed them in fiscal oversight last month. They're cutting 87 staff positions and nearly half of them teachers and they're still projected to run out of cash by June 2027 even if the levy passes.

Again, this is just Northeast Ohio. What does the rest of the state look like?
Almost every legislator who voted for this budget is on a ballot somewhere in 2026. Know who they are. Know where they stand. And show up May 5.

04/22/2026

Ohio taxpayers are now spending over $1 BILLION a year on private school vouchers.
Let that number sink in for a second. One billion dollars. Every year. Out of the state budget.

Here's what most people don't know about where that money is going and You need to be having these conversations with your neighbors!

95% of the new vouchers issued in FY2024 went to families whose kids were already in private school. They weren't leaving public schools. They were already gone. The state (YOU) just started picking up their tuition.

That's not school choice. That's a tuition subsidy for families who already made their choice — paid for by every Ohio taxpayer, including the ones whose own public schools are falling apart.
And before someone says "the money should follow the student" — it's not following anyone. Those students were already in private school. The money moved. They didn't.

But even if it were, when a student leaves a public school, the building doesn't get smaller. The bus still runs. The teacher still shows up. The district loses the funding but keeps the costs, and the the private school receiving that billion dollars has zero obligation to report how it's spent or whether students are learning anything.

If public money follows the student, public accountability should follow the money. It doesn't.

Here's what that billion dollars breaks down to: about $20 a month from every Ohio household. For private schools. That nobody voted on.

You know what else costs about $20 a month per household? A 1% increase in the state sales tax — enough to fund every public school district in the state. All 595 that are projecting deficits. All 990,000 kids.

Same cost. One funds 150,000 students who were already in private school. The other funds 990,000 kids in public schools that are cutting teachers, gutting programs, and heading for state takeover.
The legislature chose vouchers. They didn't ask you. But you get to choose the legislature.

May 5 is 13 days away. Legislative primaries are on that ballot. The people who made this decision — and the people who could reverse it — are chosen by whoever shows up.
Last primary, 80% of Ohio voters stayed home.
The people who wanted a billion dollars in public money sent to private schools? They showed up.

Did you?

04/21/2026

I keep coming back to one question I can't shake.

The Fair School Funding Plan passed 84-13 in 2021. Bipartisan. Both parties looked at the data, looked at the formula, and said yes — this is how you fund schools constitutionally. Six-year phase-in. First real fix since the Supreme Court told the legislature to get it right in 1997.

Four years in, they killed it.

Not because it wasn't working. Not because the data showed it was failing. They killed it before the data could come in. They killed it before any results could be measured. They killed it before anyone could point to a chart and say "look what happened when we actually funded these districts."

Why would you do that?

If you believed public schools were broken beyond repair — if you really believed the answer was private schools and vouchers — wouldn't you want the proof? Wouldn't you let the FSFP play out, watch it fail, and then say "see, we told you. Money doesn't fix the problem"?

Unless you were afraid it wouldn't fail.
Unless you were afraid that leveling the playing field might actually work — and then you'd have to explain why you spent the last decade pushing a billion dollars a year into a voucher program that the Fordham Institute — a school choice organization — found produces "unambiguously" worse results in reading and math.

The achievement gap between Ohio's poorest and wealthiest districts grew 16% over the last six years. The poorest kids fell three times further than the wealthiest. That didn't happen because the FSFP failed. It happened because they wouldn't let it finish.

They didn't run out of money. They found a billion for vouchers. They found $600 million for a stadium. They found $1.68 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 20%.

They just pulled the plug on the one plan that might have proven public schools work when you actually fund them.
And I think that's exactly what they were afraid of.

— Jeff Gore