Ohio school officials ask to keep power local in sale of school buildings in opposition to new bill

A new Ohio bill that would make changes to how and to whom school districts can use or sell school facilities received some criticism in a Senate committee this week, and major education unions asked for changes to the overall bill.

Ohio Senate Bill 311 changes several things related to school districts in Ohio, from cracking down on so-called “cheating resources” – services or organizations who advertise services “with the intention of assisting a learner to cheat” on exams or assignments – to truancy enforcement and educator licensure regulations.

One particular provision of the bill received attention in the Senate Education Committee this week, as the the superintendent of Canton City Schools asked the committee to leave control of the disposal of school district property in the hands of local districts, rather than creating further state mandates around it.

The bill revises current state law on the disposition of school district property, specifying that a school district must sell an “unused school facility” at “the appraised fair market value as an educational facility,” and adds chartered private schools to the list of schools a district must offer its unused facilities before moving outside the district for sale.

It also uses an enrollment line 60% or lower to trigger closure and force the sale of school district buildings, something Canton Superintendent Jeff Talbert said creates an “artificial threshold” that does not reflect “the reality of how buildings are actually being used.”

Talbert also said the provision “rejects the stated preferences of local residents and voters that have been asked to decide on the use of and support for school facilities.”

“Any building impacted by voter-approved permanent improvement levies and bond issues should be exempt,” Talbert said.

The superintendent said he was also speaking as co-chair of the Ohio 8 Coalition, a group of superintendent and teacher union presidents from Canton, Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Lorain, Toledo, and Youngstown.

The history of school districts and the changes made throughout the years also plays a factor in deciding what buildings should stay or go, and how they should be used, according to Talbert. Committee member state Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, agreed that shifts over time can bring back the need for school buildings, and the local school boards and communities should have the final say.

“It’s the local officials that have to make the case to taxpayers as to why this building’s open, why this building is closed,” Smith said.

Bill sponsor and Senate Education Committee chair Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, said the provision exists because of complaints “basically coming from community schools who have said that the buildings have been sitting vacant,” and that requests by those community schools to purchase unused property have gone unanswered.

“The concern is that they’re being under-utilized or not being utilized, where they could be utilized for, like, a community school or something else,” Brenner said.

In Canton, Talbert said there was a movement to put students in grade-level-specific classrooms in the past, which the district did. But then, a more recent movement led to a bond issue supported by voters to bring back “neighborhood schools.”

“If buildings weren’t around … that were under-utilized during that time, we wouldn’t have been able to make that shift,” Talbert said. “We’re just asking for that control to remain, for the board to have that opportunity.”

Losing the say in how they are able to deal with property could also mean receiving less for the sale of a building if school boards don’t have discretion to choose who they sell to, and community development plans could even be impacted.

“If this law was in place during the original planning for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Village, we would have been forced to sell an elementary school building that sat in the middle of this very large economic development project,” according to Talbert.

A joint statement from the Alliance for High Quality Education, the Ohio Association of School Business Officials, the Ohio School Boards Association, and the Buckeye Association of School Administrators requested changes to the legislation that would allow school districts to “maintain buildings for district operations,” and preserve district property for “anticipated growth or long-term facility planning needs.”