Ohio Education News and Notes

Activist and social critic Marc Lamont Hill will be the keynote speaker at Kent State’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration today.

The associate professor of English education and anthropology at Columbia University will speak at 2:10 p.m. at the Student Center ballroom on the Kent campus.

The theme for the 10th annual event is “Empowering the Individual, Strengthening the Community” and is free and open to the public.

The day’s events also will include a cultural celebration from 1 to 1:45 p.m. in the Student Center Kiva. Hill will sign his 2009 book, Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity, at 4 p.m. on the ballroom balcony. The book is available for purchase at the KSU bookstore.

Hill was a political commentator for Fox News from 2007 to 2009 and has been a regular commentator on MSNBC, CNN and Court TV.

Hill is a founding board member of My5th, a nonprofit that aims to teach underprivileged youth about their legal rights and responsibilities. In 2001, he began to use hip-hop culture to start a literacy project with the goal of increasing student commitment to education.

For details about the KSU celebration, call 330-672-8563.

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Ohio Auditor Dave Yost placed Medina County’s Cloverleaf school district in fiscal emergency Tuesday because the district cannot overcome a nearly $600,000 deficit this June. The following year, the deficit will balloon to $2.6 million.

The declaration means the district can borrow money from the state, but must submit all financial decisions — including whether to put a levy on the ballot — to a state commission for approval.

Within the next 15 days, a five-member commission will be formed to oversee Cloverleaf’s finances. The commission will have 120 days from its first meeting to devise a budget for the state superintendent to approve.

The Cloverleaf Board of Education saw the writing on the wall in November following the defeat of a 6.5-mill operating levy. The board asked the state Nov. 29 to place the district in fiscal emergency.

“Having cut $4 million from our budget in the last three years, I could not offer an acceptable plan to avoid a deficit at the end of this year,’’ Superintendent Daryl Kubilus Jr. said.

Teachers last year agreed to freezes in base pay and to forgo scheduled raises for experience and advanced academic degrees. They also agreed to pay 15 percent of their health insurance premium, Kubilus said. Nonteaching staff have made similar concessions.

Negotiations are up again this year, but any contract that increases personnel costs will need state oversight commission approval.

Cloverleaf, with an enrollment of about 3,000 students, is rated Excellent on the state report card.

“My board has taken the stance that we’ve cut a great deal,” Kubilus said. “When you start compromising your educational values, I think that’s where they draw that line in the sand. We’re at that point right now, and that’s part of the reason we’re in fiscal emergency.”

He said he is researching the state’s minimum standards for staffing and course offerings.

“From the state’s perspective, you don’t have to have athletics. There is an example of a minimum, no extracurricular activities,” Kubilus said.

But cutting that sort of thing could result in an exodus of students and the state aid that comes with them.

“If students are leaving your school district because you don’t have any athletics, well then you’re losing a great deal of money on students who are leaving,” Kubilus said. “I’ve seen first-hand students coming to us because of pay-to-participate fees being too high in their school districts. These are good kids, well-intentioned families that are coming here to avoid some of those fees, and I’m glad to take them. But I don’t want to see the opposite happen.”

Cloverleaf’s school board will not get final say in those decisions while the district remains in fiscal emergency.

The five-member board that will be in charge of the money will include representatives for the state school superintendent and the director of the Office of Budget and Management. The commission also will have a business person appointed by the governor, a parent with a child in the district appointed by the state superintendent and a business person appointed by the Medina County auditor.

To emerge from fiscal emergency, Cloverleaf will have to repay any loans to the state and be able to forecast five years without a deficit.

That could take a while.

After voters rejected levies several times, the state declared fiscal emergency for Springfield in 2007. That allowed the district to borrow nearly $2 million to balance its books. Last November, after nearly five years of state control of its financial decisions, the district was cleared for release from fiscal emergency.

John Higgins can be reached at 330-996-3792 or jhiggins@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the education blog at http://education.ohio.com/.

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• An article Tuesday about plans for a combined Firestone High School/Litchfield Middle School should have said the new school will serve students in grades 6-12. A reporter received incorrect information.

• The band Human Nature will play a benefit concert for the Heaven Can Wait pet rescue group Feb. 9. An incorrect date was published Tuesday. An editor erred.

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Medina County Auditor Mike Kovack is accepting applications for appointment to the commission that will oversee operations of the Cloverleaf schools.

Those eligible for appointment must be individuals with knowledge and experience in financial matters whose residency or principal place of business is within the school district.

Resumes or letters of inquiry can be emailed to auditor@medinacounty
auditor.org, faxed to 330-725-9136 or mailed to Medina County Auditor, 144 N. Broadway, Medina, 44256.

For more information, go to the Fiscal Emergency Q & A page, under the “News” link at www.cloverleaflocal.org.

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School and city officials on Monday approved the initial plans for a new Firestone High School, estimated to cost nearly $74 million.

The state will pay $32 million, with Akron paying its basic share (41 percent) plus nearly $19 million in extras the state won’t help fund, including a performance-quality auditorium and renovations of the existing gym and swimming pool.

“Seventy-three million is a big number,” said Akron Public Service Director Rick Merolla, who serves on the city-school committee overseeing the nearly $800 million school construction program.

The combined Buchtel High/Perkins Middle School, which opens in the fall, was budgeted for about $52.5 million.

Like Buchtel, Firestone High School will be combined with its middle school, Litchfield. The overall Firestone building will be 338,082 square feet, which is about a third larger than Buchtel, said Paul Flesher, the district’s executive director of facility planning and capital improvement.

Firestone expects to enroll 1,750 students in grades 6 through 12 compared with 1,150 at Buchtel.

Flesher said the estimated cost per square foot — $218 for Firestone — is somewhat higher than that for Buchtel (about $200), but he attributed the difference to general market conditions for the two projects.

The state is paying for 59 percent of the basic costs and a voter-approved city income tax increase will cover the rest. The schools double as community centers for public use after hours.

However, extras the state doesn’t consider essential — such as an auditorium — must be paid for entirely by locally raised dollars.

Firestone’s auditorium is expected to cost nearly $2 million to accommodate one of the high school’s premiere offerings: the visual and performing arts program. It will include a deeper and higher stage than usual to make room for behind-the-curtains rigging systems for lights, curtains and scenery. The auditorium also will have enhanced lighting and sound equipment.

“It will be a performing arts auditorium,” Flesher said.

Plans call for $2 million in renovations to the swimming pool building and $1.2 million in renovations to the adjacent gym, which will be preserved.

Litchfield students will move into the Perkins Middle School building next fall. Litchfield will then be torn down and replaced with the new facility while Firestone High School students remain in their building. When construction is finished sometime in 2015, Litchfield and Firestone students would move into the new building, which will have separate entrances and classrooms for the two schools.

The old Firestone High School would then be destroyed to make room for fields and other open space.

John Higgins can be reached at 330-996-3792 or jhiggins@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the education blog at http://education.ohio.com/.

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This just in from the Ohio Auditor:

Columbus – The Cloverleaf Local School District is in a state of fiscal emergency, declared today by Auditor of State Dave Yost.  The action came at the request of the school district, which will now be placed under the supervision of a state commission.

 “The Cloverleaf Local School District has some difficult decisions to make in the coming weeks and months,” Auditor Yost said.  “My office is ready to work with school officials and the commission to bring financial stability back to this struggling district.”

 The Ohio Department of Education placed the district in fiscal caution on December 31, 2003 based on anticipated deficits for fiscal years ending June 30, 2004 and 2005.  The district was placed in fiscal watch by the Auditor of State’s office on March 30, 2004 due to the district’s failure to submit a written proposal for eliminating the anticipated deficits.

 Each year that a school district is in fiscal watch, the Ohio Department of Education requires the district to submit an updated financial plan for approval.  For each fiscal year 2005 through 2011, the Ohio Department of Education has accepted the District’s submission.  On November 29, 2011, the Cloverleaf Local School District school board passed a resolution stating the district was unable to adopt a plan to eliminate the projected current year deficit for fiscal year 2012 and requested that the Auditor of State’s office declare the district in fiscal emergency.

 A Financial Planning and Supervision Committee will now be created to assume all or part of the powers of the board of education.  Three members of this commission must be appointed within 15 days of this declaration of fiscal emergency.  A financial plan must be developed by the commission within 120 days of the first meeting of the commission to address the district’s financial crisis.

 The Auditor of State’s office takes an advisory role to the commission and may provide accounting training and assistance.  A performance audit of the district was conducted in 2004.  Recently, the Ohio Department of Education requested a follow-up review, which the Auditor of State’s office will conduct.

A 6.5-mill emergency operating levy was brought to the district’s voters in November 2011, but failed to pass.

 A full copy of this fiscal emergency declaration can be found online at www.auditor.state.oh.us.

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North Hill parent Gina Lang shopped for schools for her three children Sunday at an informational fair at the Akron-Summit County Public Library that brought area school districts, charter schools and private schools under one roof.

She and her husband, Tony, were looking for an alternative to Akron Public Schools for their three children, who attend or will attend Harris elementary school and eventually, Jennings Middle School.

“I don’t dislike Harris, but we would prefer religious schooling,” she said. “We just can’t afford it.”

The fair also saved her time from visiting a school, taking a tour and only then realizing she couldn’t afford the tuition.

“It’s easier to go walk to a table and know that tuition is something we couldn’t afford rather than calling and meeting with them,” she said. The fair gave them a chance to learn about schools that hadn’t turned up in an Internet search, such as Mayfair Christian School in Green.

“The Mayfair Christian School? I didn’t know that was so close,” she said.

School Choice Ohio, an advocate for voucher programs, sponsored the fair to kick off national (and Ohio) School Choice Week.

In the last few years, library events have focused on telling parents about the state’s EdChoice scholarships, which allow children at schools with poor academic performance to attend private schools with a publicly funded tuition voucher.

Annette Bush, a regional outreach coordinator for School Choice Ohio, wanted to expand the fair’s appeal.

“I had this dream and it seemed it worked out pretty well,” Bush said. “I wanted parents to look around and shop, just like at a shopping center.”

Akron school officials didn’t shy away from the opportunity to showcase their wares alongside charters and private schools.

“The Akron Public Schools has 50 tables and I have 16 other schools,” Bush said. “I just didn’t know that we were going to take over the whole library, but we did.”

Akron Superintendent David James reminded parents that they have choices within the Akron district, from specialty schools in science and the arts to vocational training or the chance to earn college credits while still in high school.

“Public schools are part of that whole school choice movement,” James said during a presentation in the auditorium.

Schools gave away pencils, pens, water bottles, tote bags, refrigerator magnets, candy and other enticements along with pamphlets, newsletters and sign-up sheets for tours.

Pastor John Wilson, administrator of Chapel Hill Christian School, said it was a rare venue to promote the school and he was so busy answering questions, he couldn’t leave his table. Usually when he sets up his information table, it’s at events that are not exclusively about education.

“Today, everybody here is coming to talk about school,” he said.

Parent Dionne Moore-Dennis appreciated seeing all the schools under one roof, too. Her daughter is a second-grader in the Barberton school district, but she’s shopping around for a school that emphasizes study of diverse cultures and languages.

“This is a good opportunity,” she said. “That way, you see what is actually out there with the different public schools on top of the private schools.”

John Higgins can be reached at 330-996-3792 or jhiggins@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the education blog at http://education.ohio.com/.

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