Second obsure amendment may benefit ECOT

Another week, another budget, another question about whether an amendment was inserted to help out ECOT’s state funding situation.

Last week, it was a mystery amendment slipped into the two-year state budget bill that impacted the ability of charter sponsors to continue to run some e-schools even if their ratings drop.

No one in the House wanted to claim credit, and the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission took the blame. The House has asked the Senate to remove the amendment, and officials of the online school say it wouldn’t help them anyway.

This week, an amendment added to the separate Bureau of Workers’ Compensation budget would limit agency rule-making authority, a key issue as ECOT sues the state over the Department of Education’s effort to reclaim $60 million from the school for inflated enrollment figures.

Unlike last week, a lawmaker is claiming responsibility for this amendment. But Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, said it’s not about helping the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, the state’s largest charter school.

The amendment would prohibit a state agency from making rules or taking actions that have a “substantive or procedural retrospective effect” unless lawmakers give them express authority to do so.

“We really don’t like agencies sidestepping the rules process by calling stuff procedural,” said Seitz, noting the amendment is consistent with the House GOP’s Buckeye Pathway agenda.

Seitz said he wanted to insert the amendment into the two-year state budget bill before it passed last week, but when members raised concerns that it would help ECOT, it didn’t get in. It reappeared in the workers’ comp budget, Seitz said, after he had more time to explain it to members.

The proposal raised red flags because the heart of ECOT’s legal argument is that the Department of Education changed its process for calculating student enrollment in the middle of a school year, requiring student log-in duration data for the first time. The school has called it an illegal rule change that was improperly applied retroactively to the start of last school year.

The Department of Education has disagreed, and thus far, a state hearing officer and a Franklin County judge have ruled in the department’s favor.

If it passes — a House vote on the workers’ comp budget is likely next week, sending it to the Senate — it will only apply to rules and procedures going forward, Seitz said.

“This will have no impact, as a legal matter, on the ECOT case, which is already being litigated.”

The only impact it might have, Seitz said, is that ECOT officials could point to the new law “as an indication that the General Assembly really frowns on agencies doing things (in a) retrospective manner.”