Public Education Matters

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

Jeff Wensing 0:15
This is Public Education Matters brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Public Education Matters, the last episode of public education matters for this season of the podcast. Don't worry, we will be right back here with a new season right after the summer break, and we will definitely have a lot to talk about then, but we also still have a lot to talk about right now, and we have a lot of work to do to make sure Ohio can deliver on the promise of the great public schools all of our students deserve. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 public school educators OEA represents across the state. Leading all of those educators, of course, is OEA President Jeff Wensing, a high school math teacher from Parma who began his work as OEA's top officer last summer. Regular listeners to this podcast remember the first episode of this season where we checked in with Jeff about the big priorities as everyone was heading back to class in the fall. Now, as we wrap up what has been a very busy school year for him and for all of us, we wanted to sit back down with Jeff again to hear his thoughts. Take a listen to our conversation from a few weeks ago as he reflects on what he's been learning from OEA members and on the work that is ahead for all of us as we take on the big challenges facing public education in our state together.

Katie Olmsted 1:59
Jeff Wensing, OEA president, I am sitting down with you right before the spring RA, right before the end of the school year, right as we're coming up to your one year anniversary as president. No big deal. How's it all been going?

Jeff Wensing 2:15
Well. It's been going really well. I'm excited to be in this role. I'm honored to have been elected by the members to be the president of the Ohio Education Association, the largest labor union in Ohio. But with everything, there's a learning curve, and certainly I've experienced that, but I'm looking forward to year number two. But as always, the best experiences I have in this job are when I have the opportunity to visit schools, be with members, talk to students, that part's awesome.

Katie Olmsted 2:45
And you've been doing that a lot, especially these last couple of months, heading out all across the state on a listening tour. Talk to me a little bit about where you've been and what you've been hearing.

Jeff Wensing 2:57
Well, one thing that I've learned, as I've mentioned, there is a learning curve. When you try to have a spring listening tour, there are a lot of things going on in the spring. Maybe a spring break takes place. Also, there is a lot of testing that's going on in the spring. So having learned that I'm going to continue these listening tours into next year and throughout my presidency, because I think it's very important that I listen to our members, as I will mention in my RA speech, what I found out is that our local affiliates aren't franchises, right? They're not all exactly the same. Just pick any of your chain franchises. They belong to the Ohio Education Association, but they have their unique successes, their unique challenges, and it's our job to listen to our locals and to give them the support that they need.

Katie Olmsted 3:47
What are they asking for? What? What have you been hearing from members about what OEA could do to help them?

Jeff Wensing 3:54
Yeah, another great question, Katie. Well, our members have been talking about a lot of things. You know, a common theme is funding.

Katie Olmsted 4:03
Yeah, that's a big thing right now.

Jeff Wensing 4:04
Absolutely. So our members want to do the best they can to support kids, and they they sometimes feel it's hard to do with the funding that they have. I talked to the superintendent in Delaware, and Delaware is being hit by a couple of things. Delaware is losing money through the application of the fair school funding plan. Probably doesn't seem that fair to them at this point, right? The General Assembly has gone back on their promise to fully fund the fair school funding plan. So our schools are underfunded by nearly $3 billion over these next couple of years, and they're being hit with changes to the 20 mil floor. So Delaware is a district. They are growing. They're near Central Ohio. It's a district that kids are coming to school, and the schools are kind of bursting at the seams, but they're losing money. So as you know, when resources are tight, there are consequences. So some things have to be cut back. Some things just aren't able to be provided.

Katie Olmsted 5:02
I actually joined you on part of your tour of the Delaware City Schools, and there were a couple of standouts from even those moments I was there, those classrooms are crowded and those educators are doing amazing with what they have.

Jeff Wensing 5:18
Yeah, absolutely. I talked to a second grade. Second grade teacher went into her room, I think you were there.

Katie Olmsted 5:25
I was, yep.

Jeff Wensing 5:26
And I thought, well, look, great, right? Education was happening. She was delivering instruction to a small group. She had another group of students working on some other projects. Then after the students left, we had an opportunity to talk to her, and I expressed how great I thought everything was going like, Hey, this is amazing. And you could see the stress in her face. She was stressed out because she thought she wasn't doing the best she could for her students. In a class of 24 she had 12 students on RIMPs, it's a reading improvement and monitoring plan that she has to fill out based on tier one, tier two, tier three intervention. So they had 12 students on RIMPs, she had another four on IEPs. She had another student who was an English learner, and the only support that she had was during pull out session. They had 20 minutes an intervention specialist pulled out some of the students and worked with them 20 minutes a day, and she felt that she needed to do better for her students, and she wasn't doing good enough. And you can see it was really upsetting to her, no matter how great I said she was doing. That was her reality, and that was, you know, that's the point of a listening tour, is to go and listen to what members are experiencing.

Katie Olmsted 6:38
And that was one of the things about what she was facing is all of the supports are important to students, but she doesn't have the support to give them those supports the way they need. Just given the reality of that situation there. Is that sort of what you're hearing at different places as well?

Jeff Wensing 6:55
It is, I mean, like I mentioned, I've had some conversations with some building administrators, superintendents, and for the most part, in the districts that I'm I'm visiting, people get it. I don't care if you're an educator that's in the classroom or in in the cafeteria or on a bus or person leading the building, they want to do what's best for kids. And not only does it frustrate classroom educators, it frustrates administrators that they're not able to deliver the best conditions, the best learning conditions, for not only the students, but for the educators as well.

Katie Olmsted 7:28
What can we do about that, though? I mean, we can sit here and be like things are hard and they are hard, but we don't have to sit down and take it. What do we do?

Jeff Wensing 7:39
Well, there's a couple of things, couple of things, couple of themes that not only am I talking about, but people are also talking about in these districts. Number one is we have campaign 2026 coming up. Upon reflection, you know, every time an election cycle comes up and you say, oh, election 2026 this is going to be the most important election of our lives, you know, something like that. But when you look back at it, maybe the 2016 election was the most important election of our life with the way things have been going over the last dozen years or so, so we have a chance to recorrect so the way things that are the way things are happening. Here comes November, we have endorsed candidates. The Ohio Education Association supports and endorses candidates regardless of political party, regardless of D or R or independent. We support candidates that support public education. We're going to lean into campaign 2026 we're going to lean in with our union values, and we're going to educate our educators, and they're going to educate our their friends, and they're going to educate their family and their neighbors. And we just have to make sure everyone understands what's at stake and what's at stake for public education.

Katie Olmsted 7:40
What is at stake?

Jeff Wensing 7:40
A lot. I mean, you look at just the two candidates for governor, Dr. Amy Acton versus Vivek Ramaswamy, like one candidate that being Dr. Acton supports public education, believes in public education, and has said public education has saved her life, versus

Katie Olmsted 7:40
And has committed to fully funding public education.

Jeff Wensing 7:40
That'd be nice, right?

Katie Olmsted 7:40
That's what she has said, yeah.

Jeff Wensing 8:21
If we were to have a partner in the governor's mansion, and we could go down to Capitol Square and talk to the governor, which I can't do now, after repeated requests, the governor won't meet with me, but to have a person in the governor's office that supports public education would be huge. Conversely, the candidate Ramaswamy has said, you know, he wants to go to merit pay. He wants to close a number of public universities because he thinks we have too many. So he does not support public education for gosh sakes. He thinks that educators are babysitters, right? He said, maybe school should go to four o'clock or five o'clock, because you as a working mom or dad need child care. Well news for Mr. Ramaswamy, we're not child care. We educate students. That's our job.

Katie Olmsted 10:15
Some other news for Mr. Ramaswamy, he thinks that the Third Grade Guarantee is going to save us all from poverty. Some things he said he doesn't seem to realize that we still have the Third Grade Guarantee here in Ohio, it just doesn't have that mandatory retention component that was harmful for students. What else do you think he doesn't understand about our public schools? What is the real story that we need to be telling every voter before they head to the polls?

Jeff Wensing 10:43
They need to go to their local public schools and see what amazing things are happening there. Like I've been doing, I walk out of these schools to every single school, to a day There isn't a day that I won't, don't walk out of there and I say, Wow, that was great. I am just so impressed by the work that our educators are doing. We are public education. We are public school educators. We educate kids if they want to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, if they want to go into the trades, we educate them for that, if they want to, you know, go to be, try to be a professional athlete, or we coach them up, like try to get them to college, but we do so much more than that. You know, I sat in, I sat in an art room in one of my visits, and I wanted to talk to the art teacher. She was on her duty free lunch, but she had five kids in there working on their art projects. Now, as the president of the union, I should say, Hey, you should be taking your duty free lunch to have lunch, eat lunch and recharge. But no, I mean, she was giving up her time, to give up that space and to, you know, monitor those students as they worked on their art projects. And I talked to those students, they wanted to be in there, to be in a safe space, to be in a space where they could be themselves, where they could interact with each other, where they could basically find their way. And I asked some of these students in there some questions, right? And they were they opened up to me. They felt safe enough to open up and answer my questions. I asked them, are you ready to become educators? And one of them said, No way, man, I don't like people, which was kind of funny, and his buddy who was sitting next to him, and they were working on, I don't seem like some watercolor drawing or something like that. And his buddy said, Yeah, I want to be a high school athletic director, I want to be a teacher, and they're actually going to go to college together and be roommates. So it was exciting to hear that at least one of those students wanted to be an educator. Others wanted to go into video game design, and another wanted to be an artist. So it was just cool to sit there and and talk with those students and that they felt good enough to open up to me.

Katie Olmsted 13:07
And it really just shines a spotlight on the power of public education in opening doors for students to do what they want to do, and in the power of dedicated educators who are committed to their students success, and we are all better at that together.

Jeff Wensing 13:25
Yeah. So that's why campaign 2026, is so important. We need more public pro public education legislators now at the State House, a governor, Amy Acton, needs the support of the General Assembly, so we also have statewide candidates on the ballot that we're going to support for Secretary of State and Attorney General and Treasurer and Auditor. So we have a lot of opportunity in November to do really, really positive things for public education by selecting the right candidates.

Katie Olmsted 14:00
And that's to say nothing of what's happening at the federal level, and how important it is to have a pro public education candidate representing Ohio in the US Senate, especially against the backdrop of everything happening with dismantling the US Department of Education, removing protections for students, the big beautiful bill over the summer, taking away a lot of the opportunities to feed kids. What I mean, it's been a challenging year, but should we have hope for the year ahead?

Jeff Wensing 14:30
I think there's always hope, right where there are challenges, there are opportunities, we have an opportunity to send Senator Sherrod Brown back to the United States Senate. Not only has Senator Brown been a champion of public education for decades, he's been the champion of labor, he's been the champion of middle class, and he's always fighting for workers. I think that's going to happen. I think we're going to get a governor Amy Acton. I think we're going to get a US Senator Sherrod Brown, and. Hopefully that puts us on the path to restoring some sanity. And if you want to talk about insanity, the other thing that you might want to talk about is this craziness of a faction trying to eliminate all property taxes in Ohio.

Katie Olmsted 15:17
Okay, so this is a big thing that I do want to talk about again, I'm talking to you in early May. This will be dropping at the end of May, giving a couple months before potentially signatures are turned in to get something on the ballot in the fall to eliminate all property taxes without any plan to backfill that funding. What would that mean for our public schools?

Jeff Wensing 15:41
Well, not just focusing on public schools, but just focusing on an Ohio that we all want to live in, it wouldn't be good. I want to live in Ohio with great public schools. I also want to live in an Ohio that has great community services like the police and fire departments that are functional and are ready to help me out if my house catches on fire, I want to be able to have an ambulance to show up to my house if I fall and break my arm, but it will have far reaching effects to communities, and I have a story for that as well. Like I was in Perrysburg, one of my schools that I visited, I talked to an educator. She's a teacher. Her husband is a police officer, and they're young. They have a young family, and she is extremely fearful of the elimination of all property taxes in Ohio, which, by the way, would be the first state in all 50 states to do something like this.

Katie Olmsted 16:42
Nobody else did it because it's insane to do it like at all and like they're trying to do it.

Jeff Wensing 16:47
Agreed. I agree. We couldn't agree more. But again, this educator is fearful for her family. She's fearful for her community. If both of them were to lose their jobs. I mean, we're looking at far reaching economic impact. The economic impact I'm talking about is putting people out of work. The economic impact I'm talking about is how it will affect retirements. You look at retirements for teachers, retirements for police and fire right now with the State Teacher Retirement System, the number of actives is barely above one to one as it compares to retirees. It's like 1.1 active for every one retiree. If that number were to go any lower, I don't know what that would do to state teacher retirement accounts and what that would do to the economy of Ohio.

Katie Olmsted 17:44
And you know, we do hear from people who are saying, well, it's seniors who are getting taxed out of their homes. Some of those seniors, presumably, are people in the pension system who, you know, wouldn't be able to make ends meet without their pensions anyway. There is a problem with property taxes being too high for some people to be able to pay, and there are ways we can address that through the legislature, because the legislature is what got us in this mess in the first place. This is a decades long problem that has come to a head right now because of our legislature's failure to fully and fairly fund our public schools. They've changed the tax code to make it so residential property taxpayers pay more of the burden of the local tax share that tax, that local tax share, has gotten bigger and bigger as the state has failed to pay its fair share. Do you think people really understand why we're here and what we could actually do about it?

Jeff Wensing 18:39
No, they don't. I think the vast number of Ohioans just know that their property tax bill is too high, which it is, and they're not sure where to put the blame. They just know that they don't want to pay high taxes anymore. I think there are ways around it that are sensible. They just haven't been implemented by the General Assembly. You want to talk about circuit breakers. We could talk about circuit breakers. You talk about homestead exemptions. You could talk about that too,

Katie Olmsted 19:09
with the state filling the doing its part to fill that lack of funding when those things are put into place. Michigan did that. I know we have something going on right now where counties can double the tax exemption, but there's no state backfill for when the counties say, okay, twice as much of a tax break without any funding to back it.

Jeff Wensing 19:28
Yes, I think the bottom line is, when it comes to property taxes, there is an overwhelming acknowledgement that the property tax problem needs fixed. There isn't agreement on where the fix should come from. It seems like there are members of the General Assembly, and I could name them, but I don't want to give them the satisfaction that want to fix this problem on the backs of public schools and on the backs of communities. And I believe that communities and public. Schools are the heartbeat of Ohio, and once you start messing with that, I don't know what kind of Ohio we're going to have, and I don't know how we're going to be able to continue to have our great communities. And if people are going to stay there, they're not going to flock somewhere else.

Katie Olmsted 20:15
Community is all about standing together and being stronger together, and that's really what unions are all about. We've been spreading the word over the last couple months, and will continue to do so, especially in the face of attacks on teachers' unions and some campaign promises to dismantle teachers unions by a certain gubernatorial candidate. Strong unions make strong public schools. How?

Jeff Wensing 20:43
Well we are a collective bargaining state. That's what we rely on to make sure that we have really good, strong community public schools. When the local teacher association bargains a contract, they're bargaining for their working conditions, which are the students learning conditions? If we didn't have collective bargaining, if local teacher associations didn't bargain contracts that their students deserve, we would be in a right to work state and and my colleagues, they work in some of those states down south. My niece moved from Florida back to Ohio because she was teaching science, high school science, and the local school board in Florida had to had told her that she had to remove pages from the science book. She was told that she couldn't have students do group work anymore. So I think part of the great public school system in Ohio is that each each school system, each district, you know, they have local control, and you elect a board of education that weighs in on what they believe and the community believes is best and how to educate those students in that community. So I think collective bargaining goes a long way with that, because you're bargaining with the local school board.

Katie Olmsted 22:13
And because the union gives you a meaningful voice in the conversations with the school board, with administrators, with how we can solve problems in our schools. It gives you that unified voice and that right to be at the table for that conversation as a former local president, as a current statewide president. Have you seen how that has played out for our students?

Jeff Wensing 22:39
I have. You know, I was on a lot of bargaining teams as local president, as a local treasurer, as well as the treasurer in Parma before I became the local president in Parma. And there can be tough bargains, and the reason there are tough bargains is because of funding. Right? Yes, educators want to do well when it comes to bargaining contracts right where everybody's concerned about being able to make a living wage and able to have good health care. They're concerned about that, but they're just as concerned as having the support and the resources to really do a good job with their students. So yeah, bargaining is important. It's important not only for the students in school, but it's important to the community as well.

Katie Olmsted 23:28
A big thing for for what you just brought up there, is that funding, and that comes down to the State House and the State finally paying its fair share and making sure that our public schools have what they need for our students to succeed. So as we are heading into the RA, as you are telling people that we are stronger together, what's the big takeaway that you need them to understand from what you're saying?

Jeff Wensing 23:55
Well, you probably know you've worked here, OEA, the Ohio Education Association. Sometimes people think it stands for the Ohio Everything Association. So if you're doing everything, you can't really focus in in and hone in on something that really needs to be done well. So right now, campaign 2026 needs to have our laser focus, we need to elect pro public education candidates up and down the ballot. This is our chance 2026 if you've seen in America, people want sanity restored, people that are middle of the road candidates, as they come more to the middle, they don't go to the far right or the far left, the candidates that are winning across the United States in special elections are candidates that are more moderate, that are going to restore sanity. So in our state, we have this opportunity in 2026 and we are going to ask our members to join us every. Single Member. We can't get this done unless we're all working side by side. I like the phrase that if you want to come and put your shovel in the dirt and dig in the dirt with us, that's what we're after, right? We all need to be digging in the dirt together for election 2026 working for our candidates that support public education.

Katie Olmsted 25:23
Because public education matters.

Jeff Wensing 25:25
Oh, you've heard that, yes, public education matters.

Katie Olmsted 25:30
Well, Jeff, thank you so much for sitting down with us because public education matters and helping us see our path forward.

Jeff Wensing 25:38
Thank you very much, Katie, I've enjoyed being here. Maybe I'll come back again.

Katie Olmsted 25:45
That does it for this episode and for season six of Public Education Matters. We'll see you right back here in a few short months when we come back for season seven at the start of the new school year. In the meantime, I want to hear from you. Please email me at educationmatters@oea.org, to let me know what you think of the podcast, what you want us to do differently in the next season, and what would make this the most valuable to you. And please let me know if you want to share your thoughts on a future episode. We are always looking for members to come on as guests to share their stories and their expertise on the many issues shaping our public education landscape. It has been an honor for me to lift up educators voices over these last six seasons and to hopefully help tell the real story of Ohio's public schools. I can't wait for you to join us again as we continue that work when we return with new episodes in the fall, because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai