Teachers’ contract must be one of a kind

We knew Columbus City Schools and its teachers union had suddenly struck a new contract deal last week, but the district and union did everything they could to keep the terms secret.

The school board called a special meeting on Tuesday and met in executive session to discuss “negotiations or bargaining sessions with public employees.” It emerged with no announcements and took no vote. Then, on Thursday evening, we heard that teachers were gathering in a mass meeting. By Friday, union members confirmed that the teachers had approved the tentative agreement.

So we asked the district for it. Under Ohio law, draft agreements are public records once they’ve left the bargaining table for wider consideration — in this case, 4,000 teachers. But by Monday morning, we still had no copy of the agreement.

So Reporter Bill Bush told the district it was breaking the law. That’s when the district came up with one we’ve rarely heard before: “We do not have it,” spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant said the legal department had informed her. The district gave its copy to the union.

Really? There’s an agreement between the district and the teachers — an agreement the school board is preparing to vote on and that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars — and only the teachers have a copy? That didn’t make much sense.

Bush told Bryant that Dispatch.com would publish a story saying the district had no copy of the new contract, but that he would also report what a source said the new contract contained, anyway.

Less than an hour later, the district had recovered it and sent it over. It was dated Thursday, May 28, and titled “Tentative Two-Year Agreement” between the district and union, a title that suggests both sides might need a copy.

Five years into a plan promised to guide Ohio State University through the next 10, 20, 50, even 100 years, OSU is putting out the call for an update.

The university published a request last month for professional planning services to work with OSU’s Office of Planning and Real Estate. With a budget of $1 million, the update is just shy of a quarter of the $4.5 million that Ohio State spent to develop the original One University Framework Plan.

The original plan says it “establishes one comprehensive and flexible vision for the campus.” The update will deal with enrollment and faculty growth and a parking privatization plan, among other issues that were not anticipated in the original plan.

Dan Hedman, an OSU spokesman, said it’s good practice to refresh long-term plans periodically and that Ohio State looks to experts to supplement its own planning efforts.

He also said the update wasn’t prompted by the change in presidents last June, when Dr. Michael V. Drake replaced E. Gordon Gee.

As for the cost? Hedman said that’s just the cost of doing business. year’s state report card until well into next school year — likely January — because officials need time to create the cut scores for the new Common Core-aligned tests.

One of the components we’ve been curious to hear about is the overall district grade, which hasn’t been available since the new report card was unveiled two years ago. Initially it was going to be released this year, but lawmakers decided to delay it to 2016.

Still, state officials have been working on a method to assign an overall letter grade and recently agreed on the following proposal:

Twenty percent each for two factors: test scores and making academic progress; and 15 percent each for four factors: how schools do in early reading, graduation rates, closing the achievement gaps among groups of students and preparing students for college and careers.

The state Board of Education is expected to hear the proposal at its meeting this month.

Charlie Boss

Dispatch Reporters Bill Bush and Zack Lemon contributed to this report.