Law on school ‘takeovers’ is constitutional

The Ohio Supreme Court upheld a law that changed how the state intervenes in repeatedly poor-performing school districts, ruling Wednesday that it’s constitutional because it doesn’t usurp local school boards’ authority and met requirements for legislative consideration when the changes were pushed through in one day in 2015.

The law shifted operational control of such districts from locally elected boards to unelected CEOs hired by state-appointed academic distress commissions, starting with Youngstown.

The Youngstown school board and school employees’ unions argued that the law on so-called state “takeovers” unconstitutionally stripped school boards’ power. But the court said the relevant constitutional provision about how school boards are set up doesn’t require that those boards get any specific power.

The school board and unions also contended the Republican-led Legislature violated a procedural “Three Reading Rule” and skirted more thorough debate about significant changes made to the measure, House Bill 70, shortly before it was passed.

The court sided with the state, finding that the rule was met because the bill wasn’t “vitally altered” after earlier legislative hearings and was always about the same thing: creating methods to improve poorperforming schools.

“It is not our role to police how the amended language came into existence,” Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor wrote in the opinion.