Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Jeff Wensing 0:14
This is Public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the public school educators OEA represents all across the state, across our state, in communities, big and small, rich and poor, rural and urban alike, our public schools are the hearts of our communities, but in a lot of rural communities, especially, they are also the major economic engine for the whole area. Those rural schools, though, face a lot of challenges, and students in many rural schools are coming into the classrooms with needs that go far beyond academic support. Unfortunately, meeting those needs can be increasingly difficult without critical funding from the state, and when our state lawmakers passed the latest state budget, they underfunded Ohio's public schools by $2.75 billion over the next two years, they fiddled with the formula for the fair school funding plan that they started phasing in 2021 so they could give $2 billion to private school voucher programs that serve exceptionally few students in rural communities, by the way, and then give whatever spare change they had left to our public schools. We sat down with the president of the Ironton Education Association in southern Ohio to learn more about what all that means for his rural community and what lawmakers on both sides of the aisle need to know.

Daniel Murphy 2:00
Hello, my name is Daniel Murphy. I am a local president of Ironton Education Association down here in Ironton, Ohio. I teach middle school PE six through eight at Ironton city schools.

Katie Olmsted 2:15
For people who are unfamiliar with the Ironton community, myself included. What does it look like there? Tell me a little bit about it.

Daniel Murphy 2:22
We're located next to the Ohio River in the tri state area in southern Ohio. We were, we always say, where the bottom point, where Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio meet. It's a very royal district. I'm down here in southern Ohio, and the surrounding districts around us, we rely on. The education system is usually the most has most hiring capacity in our districts. It's usually the top one or next to the top three and most of the districts in southern Ohio. So that's, that's, that's the hard working community, which we rely on a lot of the education field and systems for employment.

Katie Olmsted 3:20
Yeah, really an economic engine in that community, right?

Daniel Murphy 3:24
Yes, ma'am, it is one of the economic services for the community, meaning that we provide all the services, usually through the school building. A lot of the services that the students need and stuff like that. They usually come to us during the school day. We have some working with some mental health services that come through the school systems. They come to the school because they know that's where the students are going to be predominantly so that they can get mental health services and help, and also just the food service programs that are provided through the school, because we live in a poverty stricken area where a lot of families do not have the basic necessities or needs to provide for their family, so we provide those meals here, and I know that we are all on a I know my district is all free and reduced lunch, so nobody has to pay due to us being in that high poverty area.

Katie Olmsted 4:33
Being in a high poverty area, I have to assume that it's it's kind of hard to pass the local property tax levies and all the things that are needed to support those programs financially. How reliant are you on the state to pay its fair share to provide those necessary things?

Daniel Murphy 4:54
We're very, very, very reliant one of the school districts who's local down, who's next door to us, they've been struggling for the last few years to try to pass a levy to help out their community, and we're seeing those potential things being echoed towards our community without the fair school shares plan being implemented fully, we're not asking for unnecessary money. We're just asking for the fair amount to be paid. And when we hear that the levies are not being passed in local districts around us, they start hearing rumblings of rifts. They start hearing rumbles of consolidation, which, if you take those jobs out of the community, than what's left for the students we're going to be if you start talking about roofs and consolidations and stuff like that, you're adding longer bus rides. You're long adding a lot of unnecessary halt to the education system, which can be easily fixed with just passing the budget fairly.

Katie Olmsted 6:03
And bus rides are already long for rural school districts. That's one of the things that the fair school funding plan, one of the many things it took into account about the actual cost of educating a child is that rural districts put a lot more miles on those busses because of those extra long routes. Is that true in your district as well?

Daniel Murphy 6:23
Yes, ma'am, we are looking at how to phase in the busses, which is a huge chunk of the budget when we're talking about that. And we cannot provide bussing for our students that would make more strain on the families, more strains on the jobs, because then they would have to start, you know, mean, we don't want to talk about those things, but our busses require different transmissions, different systems than a normal school bus that may be in a urban district, given that we have hills and all these different other things that we have to deal with. So those are vital, vital funds that can be used in our districts. And not only that part, but when we talk about the fair school fair funding, we're talking about budgets, and we're talking about budgets that they have to look at, and they have to start thinking about how they how do they fund this? Or how do they fund that? I know in southern Ohio, we're facing a bussing crisis, potentially right now, with a lot of those older bus drivers retiring. And so how do we get those people who will come and drive those busses for us? How do we get those aids? How do we get those people? How do we get subs? And that requires money, because people can go make that same money at Walmart or at Wendy's or at McDonald's and stuff like that, so we have to entice them with more money. And how do we take that? Do we take that out of teachers pockets? And then we're making the teacher struggle for how, how they feed their families? And then they get priced out of education, because then they're saying, well, I'll go right work over here, at this industry, or for this company over here, which I can make two to three fold. Then we're faced with the classes in the teaching field went. When we're faced with a crisis in the teaching field, in the middle district, that's harder to recruit teachers, because we can get those teachers who were saying, hey, allow these teachers go away for school or go to local districts for school stuff and such like that. But then when it's time for them to come back, they're in an urban district, and they're like, well, hey, listen, I can make three folds over here at somewhere like Columbus or Cincinnati, versus coming back home, where my job may be rifted in two to three years, and that's very hard. That's that these are life changing decisions that people are now making about the price of getting priced out of education, um, if you have a masters, most districts in our rural areas are struggling to compensate that part because people are going to get more education and stuff like that to try to get higher pay. So how do we pay them? Well, you have to pay them their worth to make them stay, and the worth is up there. So they tend to say, hey, listen, we gotta leave this district because we can't be paid what we're worth.

Katie Olmsted 9:24
And I know that's a challenge in a lot of places across the state, but especially in rural schools, because there are all sorts of other challenges facing rural schools as well, not just that one financial piece. Can you talk to me about what you face as an educator and as a local leader that you want the people in the state house to understand about what rural schools need?

Daniel Murphy 9:47
Well, on top of that, there's so many things that we face. We're facing like I said, these rural areas now, we are dealing with a. A population of poverty. So when we're dealing with poverty, we come with all types of things and and issues like IEPs, special education, the needs for the for the legislator to understand that the education system is not cannot be ran like a business. It has to be ran with the people that we're servicing in mind. I think this thing needs to be fully, fully dove into by the legislators of going and visiting the districts, going and visiting rural districts, and actually sitting down and having conversation with with the people in those rural districts about what the different challenges they're facing is because once you actually go into the classroom, because education is the only field that burst other fields, but we're not treated the same. We're treated like we have to run like a business, but it just doesn't work, and that model has proven that it has failed us time and time again, but yet we still keep trying to do it. So if they would just come have conversations, come sit in there, come sit with the actual teachers. Go in those classrooms, go in our special education classrooms, go into the pre K and the K Special Needs rooms, go into the behavior units. Spend a whole day not just saying, Hey, we're going to we're just going to go and stop by and just glance. No, actually, take your roll up your sleeves, go sign, go do the paperwork, spend a whole day as a sub in a classroom. And we're not just talking about the nice classrooms. We're talking about the struggling classrooms, where you have to deal with behaviors, and you have to deal with oppositional defiance disorders, and you have to deal with kids with who's been hungry all night or who didn't get to sleep all night, and now they're trying to sleep in your classroom, but you're trying to educate them. Deal with those things. It's all fine and dandy when we come through for a photo op, but what happens after the photo op is over?

Katie Olmsted 12:20
What do you want lawmakers to help you with once they see what what your life is like in Ironton, what do you want them to do with that information?

Daniel Murphy 12:33
Go back and actually educate the other lawmakers who are refuser, who are hardliners, and then convince them to come and spend the day with because that's what it's about. It's about getting them inside the classrooms to make them see and feel because once you see and feel what we're dealing with in these buildings and in the education system, you're out of touch, so then you're just passing stuff blindly, not actually making the connection of how you're affecting people. And to not do that is a travesty to everybody, to everybody in the hole, and then we start to see what things happen, like we did. We gave a whole bunch of money to voucher schools, and in my district, we don't have that many voucher schools. We don't have that many. We have like two. So if there's only two, why are we giving all this money to them, when this money can be evenly and fairly given to the public schools. I think in my county, we have at least five to six public schools. So that's, and the public schools, we're talking about the buildings too. And most of our districts in the rural areas have at least three buildings. So that's, that's a lot of building, that's a lot of maintenance, that's a lot of upkeep, and that all goes back to how that environment for the learning takes place. These people can't sit in cold classrooms. They can't sit in extra hot classrooms. So these things have to be up kept. And this is all goes back to the fair schools budgets, and if that's done the right way, it takes into account all of these things.

Katie Olmsted 14:26
And at the end of the day, that is that's exactly why public education is a political issue, because it's our lawmakers who decide whether to pass the fair school funding plan the way they promised to two budget cycles ago. It's a non partisan issue, but it is a political issue, and hearing from members across the state, they don't they don't love that that's part of this, and they don't really understand necessarily why it's an important piece of what their local association and the state association do? What? What do you tell your members? I assume this is a conversation you have with your members kind of often.

Daniel Murphy 15:11
Yes, I do have this conversation with my members often. We talk about because most of them say, well, you give your money to this person. You give your money to mostly Democrats, and I tried to simply explain to them that we don't, and that's where I go off of and I OEA does a great job what the report cards, and I instruct my members, and I show them how to get to the report cards and where we keep the tally of how they vote on issues that concern us. And I tell them that we're don't go off of politics. We go off of their voting record. We go off of how they do for unions, how they act for education, how they act for when we bring an issue that we're saying, hey, listen, this is going to be a concern, and it may not be a concern to you, but it's going to be a concern to our membership, and we keep a track, a record of their voting, and I live in a red county, so getting that information out to them, and making them understand fully, and taking that time out of my day. Out of my personal day to sit down with them and have those conversations with them about how it's not just a blue and a red. It's about how they vote and how they treat us as a group, as a whole, the education system as a whole, and the issues that matter to us. It's not about red or blue. It's about how they do for us and how they treat us.

Katie Olmsted 16:47
And you should be treated better by the state legislature who who should understand the rural issues a lot better than they do. Daniel, thank you so much for helping us understand in this conversation.

Daniel Murphy 17:03
Well, thank you for having me this morning. And I just hope that the legislation actually takes the time out to to listen to our advocacy, listen to our president, listen to the different ones who lobby and who go and who stand out there and pick it and do all of the the work necessary to bring these issues to them, and I can only hope and pray that they listen, because if they don't listen, we will have to take necessary steps, as the education field has done many times before. And we will have to seek to vote them out and put others in place that will actually listen, because this is not about red or blue. This is about listening to what matters to the people. Red or blue goes out the door when we talk about education, and that's what we need them to understand. Red and blue goes out the door. This is about the lives of our children and the children in the state of Ohio, and how we affect them in the most positive way.

Katie Olmsted 18:10
Daniel, thank you.

Katie Olmsted 18:11
Now, Daniel mentioned union support for political candidates, and I want to make sure everyone is really clear on what that looks like and what that actually means. Dues dollars are never used to make donations to political candidates. Those campaign contributions only come from a separate pack which is funded entirely by voluntary donations from OEA members and their families. Dues dollars do support advocacy work at the State House, though, like the work of my colleagues in the OEA Government Relations Department, who work tirelessly to help legislators understand public education issues and to do what they can to ensure policies being handed down out of the State House are good for Ohio's public schools, educators and students. We need pro public education, pro labor leaders, party labels and loyalty have nothing to do with it, and don't forget, you can see where your lawmakers stand on public education issues by checking out their voting records on public education bills. We have the link to the legislative scorecard in the show notes for this episode on the next episode of public education matters, we're staying on the rural schools topic digging into why diversity, equity and inclusion matter for rural students. Join us for that conversation and others as the season of the podcast continues, because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai