Public Education Matters

State Sen. Kent Smith 0:00
Taxpayers need to know, especially if you're going to spend over a billion dollars on something, whether or not the return on investment is worth it.

Various student voices 0:17
Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters.

Jeff Wensing 0:24
This is Public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:34
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Public Education Matters. I'm your host, Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the 115,000 public school educators OEA represents around the state. Educators know what happens in our state house makes a huge difference for what happens in our classrooms every day. And as a reminder, OEA members can find a link in the show notes for this episode for a full list of the pro public education, pro labor candidates your fellow OEA members have recommended to send to the state house and in other races in November's general election. But also as a reminder, we have current Ohio lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are working to tackle some of the big issues facing our public schools in this current general assembly, which will return from recess later this fall, issues like access to school meals-something the guests on this episode of the podcast are working on in a bipartisan way with a bill they've co-sponsored in the Senate in this GA-and issues like voucher accountability, especially when we're diverting more than a billion dollars in public taxpayer money every year away from our public schools to fund those vouchers for private school tuition, while our public schools were underfunded by 2.75 billion dollars in this biennium. Senate Bill 443, also known as the "Take the Dough, We Gotta Know" Act, would create some badly needed accountability and transparency requirements for many private schools to bring them more in line with what we require of our public schools, and it is a shining example of how bipartisan, or really nonpartisan, public education issues really are. It's co-sponsored by State Senator Kent Smith, a Democrat who represents the 21st Senate District in Cuyahoga County, and by State Senator Lewis W. Blessing, a Republican senator who represents the Eighth Senate district, which covers an area around Cincinnati. He goes by Bill. We sat down with both of them a couple weeks ago to learn more about their common sense voucher accountability bill and their thoughts on some of the other big education topics shaping our public education landscape right now, like property taxes, fair school funding, and so much more. And yes, it is another one of our longer episodes, but it is worth your time. Take a listen.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 3:00
This is Senator Bill Blessing. I will start, and thank you for having me discuss Senate Bill 443. This is something that, you know, admittedly I'm a little new to, despite you know being the vice chair of Senate Education. My colleague Senator Kent Smith is you know been more involved in this over the years, but he also had, you know, background as a school board member for a number of years. But it's it's very simple. We've we've had a significant spending increase in EdChoice vouchers over the past, we'll we'll just say decade. But it does go back into the '90s in terms of you know the idea of using vouchers. But you know the fundamental principle is is very simple with the bill, in that public schools have a number of state reporting transparency data requirements that private schools don't have. Now, private school folks would say, well, you know that's the whole idea of a private school. The issue is is that it gets a lot more nuanced when you're taking significant amounts of public dollars, and there are a number of schools that really heavily rely on EdChoice vouchers. And frankly, we just think it is very simple to say, hey, if if you are going to be taking so many state dollars, you should have the same reporting, transparency, testing, report card requirements that public schools have. It really is trying to just create an apples to apples situation. It's not going beyond what public schools have to do, so it's not like this is some sort of punishment. It's simply saying if you take the money, you have to be held to the same standards as public schools, and I think folks will find that this is something that I think most. Voters across the political spectrum see absolutely as something that makes sense. I mean, there are a number of conservatives that will say, "Yes, we need to have transparency for public spending". That's been a bedrock of my party. I'm a Republican, and this follows through with it. And it's not like you know, if you only have one EdChoice student in your school that you're hit with this. Really, the bulk of the requirements to really put it in line with the public schools occurs once you've gone beyond having 10% or more of your students as EdChoice. So there's the there's some built-in forgiveness in this, and you know again, I think this is an eminently reasonable bill that, from what I've heard, you know a lot of people locally, again across the political spectrum, think this totally makes sense and support it.

Katie Olmsted 5:51
So, Senator Smith, can you set the stage for us? Get everybody up to speed about what are the requirements on public schools right now that we're hoping that private schools get in line with.

State Sen. Kent Smith 6:02
Sure, Katie. Thanks very much for having me again. I'm a former school board member. My parents were public school teachers. My grandparents on my father's side were public school teachers. So I'm actually the third generation in my family to get a paycheck. Not currently, obviously, but a paycheck from the Euclid City School District, public school districts, and again, part of that is me serving on the House Education Committee when I was a state rep, and serving on Senate Education Committee. Now that I'm in the Senate alongside Senator Blessing, public schools have financial transparency, have meaningful audits, have consequences, and but also recognition if those audits are are you know good or bad. But yeah, they also you know have public meetings and discuss whether or not to put levies or other things like that on the ballot. The public is is always welcome at our meetings, and public input is always welcome. And the problem with the voucher expansion is, I mean, so there's our state budget is about $45 billion a year. We have a two-year budget cycle. The one that we just the year that we just concluded was a little bit under 45 billion. The one that we're currently in, our our fiscal year starts july 1. The one that we just started is a little bit more than 45 billion. But I say that to say, you know, we spend an awful lot of money on an awful lot of things, but there's very few things that get a billion dollars,

Katie Olmsted 7:42
Right. 145th of the budget.

State Sen. Kent Smith 7:44
Right. And but one of those now, with the expansion of the EdChoice voucher system, is private education, you know, school vouchers, and you know if taxpayers can't trace the money or the student outcomes, then why should funding expand? And you know, so Senate Bill 443 tries to get at that point of, and literally again, you know, the title of the bill, you know, if you take the dough, we got to know, is the idea of you know, look, I think Senator Blessing and I would agree that we want to try to maximize positive student outcomes for all the kids in Ohio. But how do we know that that's happening if the same accountability is not, you know, hand in hand with the now $1 billion check that we're giving these educational bodies,

Katie Olmsted 8:44
And we talk about that apples to apples comparison. The I'm talking to you in early September. This episode is set to drop the week of September 15th, which is the legal deadline for when Ohio's public school report cards are also going to be released, so they'll probably be released right before this episode comes out. And we know that private schools are not included in that, and we know that even when private schools have report cards of their own, that to the extent that they do, it doesn't include the same high-stakes standardized testing that is so much of the math in the public school report cards. They don't even have to take the same standardized tests at private schools. They they get to pick which assessments. Does Senate Bill 443 address that?

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 9:33
State Senator Bill Blessing, yeah, it does address that. And I I guess I should probably clarify with the 10% threshold. It's not like the chartered non-public schools below the 10% threshold are not going to be subjected to higher transparency and testing measures. That is going to be required on them. The report cards, however, are really for the if you're taking. More than 10% of your students as EdChoice voucher students, so yes, they will have a report card designed and modeled by ODEW to really reflect the same sorts of metrics that the public schools have to report, and you know again that's that's entirely by design. You know, I. I think this. I don't think this will be an undue burden. But you know, if I if I if I may speculate a little bit on what it's going to show, I think it's going to demonstrate what many of us in the education world, you know, you, Katie, and Senator Smith understand that results are highly, highly, highly correlated with poverty, and you know it's. I say that because I think people miss that when you look at a public school and it gets, let's say, two out of five stars or something like that overall. I think people implicitly think, well, that's reflective of the school. That it's just not they have bad teachers, they have bad administration, and that's invariably not the case. It's usually because the student body is is coming from a very, you know, low socioeconomic demographic. They they have you know just all of the poverty issues that you know sort of reflect themselves in the school's report card, and it's it's to me you know we're just we're just going to be showing that in many respects with this report card. It's like I already know how it's going to play out, but that actually hopefully sheds light on what we need to do going forward, which is frankly being better partners with the school districts, the teachers, and whatnot. Because again, you know, there's good ways to teach. I think they're being done, but you know, some of the stuff around the poverty issues. We could get into transportation would would do a would do a great job at improving test scores, even though it's not very much indirect. Same thing with preschool breakfast and lunch. I mean, these are proven proven methods to reduce chronic absenteeism. Which you know, again, that's not a test score metric, but when that goes down, you can be assured that the test scores are going to go up. So you know, again, I I find it amazing that this this in some respects people find you know this to be a somewhat controversial bill because it's not. This is like one of the most moderate pragmatic bills I've seen, and so much ink is spilled about that. It just-I don't know. I find it, I find it baffling. I apologize for getting off track. I tend to do that sometimes.

Katie Olmsted 12:49
Well, me too, and I appreciate the track that we got off on because I think that's really important to talk about. And and one of the things this bill would do is just give us the data. Right now, a lot of people have a lot of guesses, myself included. I have an emotional feeling about many things that make me go, "Well, it can't possibly be this way, but I don't have the numbers to back that up. We have a lot of anecdotal stuff. There was a really good Cincinnati Enquirer thing several years ago, looking at the the the performance for student outcomes from the same zip code as the public school, and it was it was very eye opening. But we we don't have that data every year. We don't have updated data. We don't have a way to make those apples to apples comparisons. So families that are going well, a private school has to be the better choice, don't have the information they need to see whether that actually makes a difference on the student outcomes as much as what our our report cards say about poverty in any given area. I think it's a really important conversation to have. I also, you know, a lot of ink has been spilled, as you said. State House News Bureau did a story when this first came out when you introduced the bill, and they quoted House Speaker Matt Huffman saying that the government should not get involved with how these schools are run, they said he was insinuating that bad actors can weed themselves out. Quote: "The families are taking their children here; they're not being forced to do it". What's your response to to something like that from House Speaker Huffman?

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 14:20
Oh, State Senator Bill Blessing again. I'll take that. I mean, I, you know, both Kent and I have a good relationship with Matt Huffman, and we we deeply respect him. You know, I I would admittedly disagree with that. You know, it's it's one thing, and I guess the broader theme is is that you you look at the Ohio State House, and there's a lot of folks that I would call libertarians. You hear the phrase "the markets will work this out, you know, from many many corners. And in some respects, that you know that is the case if we're talking about like consumer electronics. If you have a terrible price. You're going to go out of business. Nobody, nobody disputes that. Things get a little more dicey when you start talking about public goods like education, like you know, healthcare, housing, you know, absolute public goods that people need to survive. And education, you know, if we were to totally privatize this, for example, I think we'd run into a whole whole laundry list of problems, and I think the biggest of those would be, you know, a severe, you know, systemic inequality that we'd see where, you know, you the wealthiest would go to, you know, X Y Z school, and then the next tier, and the next tier, and the next tier, and then the lowest tier would just be forgotten. Incidentally, and this also gets into collective bargaining, and I, you know, struggle with this this idea that if you know we privatize it, you know, I know there's, I know I'm talking on a podcast with the teachers unions, but but the issue is that oh well you know it's going to be a lot teach a lot cheaper. The teachers unions make things more expensive, but nobody has really looked at like what I would consider a very valid comparison for this. You know we could get into the concept of of monopsony in the sense that you guys are selling your labor, and there's really only a couple of buyers in terms of the school districts and private schools and whatnot, and so there's a there's an imbalance. You should look up the term monopsony. You'll be like, wow, that's absolutely what's going on. It's modeled if it's economically modeled after a mining town, like the economics of a mining town, you have a single employer; they can pay as little as they want because they're the only game in town. And teachers, in many respects, have to face that. Now, what would a mostly privatized labor market like that look like? Look no further than childcare, and for the education establishment, you know, in particular, we already have teacher shortages in Ohio, which again I think is reflective of a funding issue. We can get into that later. But when you look at childcare and things that like Kentucky has done with free childcare for childcare workers, it's really difficult for somebody who must have a degree to then go ahead and work for $15 an hour, for example, in a relatively high socioeconomic area where the cost of living is much higher. There's there's no it should be of no surprise that we have a massive shortage of childcare workers, so much so that the business community keeps saying we need to invest more in this. But how is that any different from you know public education and you know teachers? If if their wages are being driven down, you know you have to go through a significant amount of of education to get into that position to begin with, and I think you see a number of them just saying, "Look, this, you know, we're gonna we're gonna operate like a business ourselves, and that's probably gonna mean not being a teacher. We're gonna you know go somewhere else. That's sad, but that's kind of where it's going. And you know, I don't know. I I just think, even though the speaker, getting back to it, you know, doesn't particularly like this. I think a number of members on my side of the aisle are asking for some transparency. I mean, you probably saw the press conference we all had. Representative Pizzulli was there. Representative Gayle Manning and Representative Odioso have a transparency bill. I think, you know, and that's also reflective of of not just you know where Gail and Mike come from, which is kind of closer to where I'm from. I mean, Mike's one of my representatives, but rural Ohio in particular, school districts are their largest employer, alongside maybe the hospitals and county government, city government, and whatnot. You know the dynamic is different because they don't have private schools the way that we do, and I think they would say, "All right, you know, look, if we're going to have vouchers, all right". I think it was the OEA president Scott DiMauro even even said, "Look, if you're going to fully fund the schools as per the original design of the fair school funding formula, great, have vouchers". nd I think that that ethos is also present in rural Ohio, where they're they have the same mindset, but they're also like, look, you got to take care of us, but we also need to make sure that since we don't have these options, that the money is spent well. Otherwise, the only thing that we can conclude is that money is being pulled away from our district to private schools that don't exist down here. And yeah, so again, I I apologize for going off on a tangent. Here we go again.

Katie Olmsted 19:58
Well, that that does bring up the point though that they do have the public schools are the option and they're a good option, and the people who elect those school boards and pay their their property taxes into those schools have all the access to the transparency about how their money is being spent. Senator Smith, I I know this is something that you have cared about very deeply for a while, and Senator Blessing, you said you are are newer to this particular issue, but it's so it's an illustration of it's not a partisan issue. It's not it's not about R or D or or which caucus you're in. It's about good stewardship of taxpayer dollars and supporting public education. Senator Smith, can you talk to me a little bit about how you're able to work in a bipartisan way in sometimes what is sometimes not a particularly good bipartisan environment in our state house?

State Sen. Kent Smith 20:59
Well, so thanks for that, Katie. What's interesting is that there's probably more bipartisanship that occurs in Columbus than the residents of Ohio would think, and it's because the bipartisan stuff does not always get the same amount of news coverage in the respect that it is, and we have a very, very good State House press corps. They've, I, I would say they've really improved their quality coming out of COVID because that also coincided with the first energy scandal. I think the State House press corps realized that if they dug a little deeper, they could probably all win Pulitzers, but that being said, the State House press corps sort of has a duty when there is division in the legislature to explain it to the voters. You know, Democrats are saying this, Republicans are saying this, and frankly, I'd like to go back to a Cleveland.com article that was written, I think, January 31, 2023. But I'll get to that in a second. But I mean, the bipartisan stuff therefore doesn't get as much, you know, kind of intellectual inspection by the State House press corps unless you have a really compelling press conference like Senator Blessing and I had about Senate Bill 443.

Katie Olmsted 22:23
It's got a good name too very compelling.

State Sen. Kent Smith 22:25
A pissy title, but it's critically important that we get this right. And too often, state house politics and probably DC politics also are the interests of today versus the interests of tomorrow. But the problem is today has all the lobbyists, and again, I'm not trying to disparage anybody. But the interests of today are very compelling interests because that's the folks that are in power that the economy revolves around, et cetera, et cetera. Kids are 25% of Ohio's population, but they're 100% of the future, and we need to invest in them because our future economy in Ohio depends on the skills and adaptability of a workforce that's facing that will face more and more global economic change than it currently is. And you know when when Mike DeWine announced the change in voucher eligibility in his 2023 State of the State address. What's interesting is, so as he was talking about it, I started doing some math as I was sitting there listening, and then I grabbed a Cleveland.com reporter, and I'm like, this is an astronomically large number, you know, in terms of what the fiscal impact was going to be, and again, he had just announced it, so I was only, you know, just kind of making some estimations in my head. But what's interesting is Matt Huffman. If you look back at the article, Matt Huffman and I came to the exact same conclusion, and one of us thought it could be devastating, and one of us thought it could be, you know, really good public policy. I basically said, look, if you're going to spend this much money on vouchers, you could destabilize the funding that is dedicated for public schools and the fair school funding plan. And again, to sort of quote Senator Blessing, who was quoting Scott DiMauro, you know, if you fund them both, I don't think anybody would really have an objection. But as you increase private school funding to above a billion dollars a year, it is not surprising that then these same legislative leaders say we cannot afford the 2.75 billion, which would have been over two years, that would have fully funded the fair school funding plan at current cost inputs. So you know, but we were able to find money for a sports team owner. We were able to spend another billion dollars on a tax cut for folks that predominantly, like 98% of the tax cut, only went to folks who made over $100,000 a year. So yeah, I mean the idea circling back to Senate Bill 443 was: look, you know, taxpayers need to know, especially if you're going to spend over a billion dollars on something, whether or not the return on investment is worth it. And you know, I think to a certain extent that's part of what Senator Blessing and I were trying to get at: is is this worth it? Because if so, you know, it can stand on its own legs, but if not, then we can come up with a number of other ways that that billion dollars should be invested.

Katie Olmsted 25:39
And that actually brings me to what else do we need to be doing in the state house right now? It's it's great to have a conversation where we're talking to people on both sides of the aisle about priorities that people agree on. What are some of the other bipartisan things you're working on?

State Sen. Kent Smith 25:55
So this state senator Kent Smith, I remember sitting through the most recent state of the state, and having Governor DeWine talk about the importance of getting kids to school, improving school attendance, and one of the other bipartisan bills that Senator Blessing and I have is to fully fund the state share to provide free breakfast and lunch for students regardless of income, we're just going to remove that entirely. And the research indicates that if you do that, you improve student outcomes, you improve student attendance. And so Senator Blessing and I are sitting in the audience, listening to Governor DeWine go on for a relatively long period of time because normally state of the state addresses are you know 90 seconds on this 90 seconds on this and he took some time on the importance of school improving school attendance and we traded text messages we were like our bill will do this.

Katie Olmsted 26:43
Right.

State Sen. Kent Smith 26:45
You know you don't have to invent a way to try to get kids there you feed them and they'll show up.

Katie Olmsted 27:02
Right. If you feed them, they will come.

State Sen. Kent Smith 27:04
Yeah, and it has a whole variety of other positive impacts. So, I mean, again, there's some ways that I think state government is sabotaging public education, and there's other times where we're just ignoring the very logical solution, and that's perhaps equally as frustrating, and maybe even mystifying. You know, there's a lot. I mean, I suppose the good news is there's a lot of ways that the next budget can be more helpful to public education than the current budget is.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 27:36
So this is, say, Senator Bill Blessing again. I think what you know, at least the message that I've been trying to to say locally, and I know Senator Smith has been saying this as well, is that because people, you know, there's a number of levies on the ballot in Hamilton County. I'm sure that's the case in Cuyahoga and Lake and Medina and you know Lorain County up there, as it is down here in Butler and Warren and Clermont, and you know people are like, wait a minute, we already pay so many taxes, and they they tend to just view the school districts as like being just flush with cash. And I keep telling them that's actually not true. Here's all the data for it. I wrote an article, a letter to the editor, outlining all that, along with the research that I got from LSC, but I've I've told them, you know, I get it. People are angry, but the best path forward right now for this is vote for your school levies. They are not flush with cash, and you know, I without going into too great of detail, the cash reserve argument is not indicative of of them having tons of money. I actually view that as is prudent fiscal stewardship. I've written enough about that anyway. But the point is, vote for the levy now. You avoid all of the service cuts that will be painful if they're not voted for. Then this coming budget cycle is when everything should be focused on that fair school funding formula to get it fully, fully implemented. You know, all the inputs correctly. It's supposed to be a two-year lag from the fiscal year. That's where we want it. That's where it should be, and once it's there, all of this pressure on local school districts goes away. I can't guarantee that everybody's just going to go out there and be like, "Oh well, we're going to do $1 for dollar cut on this, but I can guarantee you going into the future that school districts are not going to be going to the ballot. I am willing to bet on the record today that if we did the entirety of the fair school funding plan this coming budget cycle, it may not be right away because you know I'm sure folks are planning. It takes time to plan. You know school levy. Ballot initiatives and whatnot, but that will be 2027 when we finish that. I would be stunned if 2028 was not the the year that set a record for the fewest number of levies on the ballot. I mean, how do you do it when you have a massive influx of cash from the state, voters would, I think, rightfully ask, why do you need more money now when we just did this? I don't. I honestly don't think a lot of the school boards would. I think they.

Katie Olmsted 30:31
Well they wouldn't need to if if the state had paid its fair share and if their their funding was stable. Senator Smith had that crystal ball, didn't he? When he said this could really destabilize funding for our public schools and and that's what the voucher expansion did on the levy front people can see how their schools are spending their money there is that transparency they can open the books and take a look we can't see that for the private schools which gets us back to this accountability.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 30:59
So that's actually one point I wanted to make. This is State Senator Bill Blessing again, Katie, with respect to the voucher transparency. Like that's the lowest hanging fruit. But I think that people need to take a second look at the economics of the the voucher program itself. And the reason I say this is that the original voucher program was was meant for you know, very low-income students in very poorly performing districts, and it was limited in nature. But when you look at the economics of trying, and you can read all you want about this, there are plenty of people that say you know the voucher should be this flat amount across the board for every student. The problem with that is that works directly against the original ethos. So, I mean, you could just think about it for a moment. Let's say the voucher amount were, you know, $7,000. I know there's it's 6000 and change for, you know, the the grade schools, and then you know, 8000 and change for high schools. But we'll just say 7000 for the purposes of this discussion across the board, and you know you have a private school, unlike public schools, that does not have to take everybody. Who are they going to take first? Are they going to take the child from a wealthy family whose parents are likely also to donate to an SGO scholarship granting organization who are going to have funds to donate, participate in a way that a poor family would not, or are they going to take the poorest of the poor students who may be coming in with some challenges, but whose parents, you know, you know, may be very heavily Catholic. I'm Catholic myself. You know, I think they're going to take again the wealthiest students first, and you know it's going to work against the very students the original EdChoice program was meant to help. And part of the reason why the cost exploded is if you look at the distribution of income in Ohio, it's you know I would say it's like a bell curve. It's not quite. It's a log normal distribution, but when you have that voucher amount flat across the board, and it typically is used more by people to the right of that bell-ish curve, it becomes very expensive very quickly for people who have the means to do it on their own.

Katie Olmsted 33:26
And we're already doing it.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 33:28
Correct. If now, and that's one of the reasons why it exploded, because before it was at 250 percent of the federal poverty level, you get the full scholarship, and above it you get nothing. Which cliff effects aside, that was not very good policy. If we were serious about fixing this to make it stable and save some money, it would be redone to say that look, you get the full amount if you're-I don't know-I'm just speculating here. You know, a third of the way left to right on that bell curve, and then this gently declining curve all the way out, you still get to claim it's universal, but it's also saying, look, it's it would operate very similarly to the school funding formula, which we do today. The wealthiest school districts have to pay more locally. The poorest get more support from the state. That exact same concept should be applied to vouchers, and it would save the state a significant amount of money, and it would preserve the original idea behind the EdChoice voucher system. And I guess briefly, I won't go too far. This Senate Bill 443 is only for EdChoice scholarships, the Cleveland scholarship. It does not include autism or John Peterson's special needs. I think that's a very important point to make.

Katie Olmsted 34:47
Well, in in these last couple minutes that we have, what are your hopes of getting this across the finish line in this General Assembly or the next one? When it when is this going to get done because it needs to get done.

State Sen. Kent Smith 35:01
State Senator Kent Smith here. What's interesting, obviously, is that we're going to have a new governor, and we're going to have a new budget director, and you know we're going to have a new Senate president. I I think the Speaker of the House is going to remain, you know, the same, but you know my point is the DeWine administration is going to conclude, and you know I mean frankly there are some things that Governor DeWine did that I would like to make sure the next governor continues. The 5% scholarship for Ohio's kind of top graduating public school students getting you know substantial scholarship to state universities. The Dolly Parton Imagination Library, you know, critically important that we maintain that as a as a pre-K educational support, you know. But we're going to have a brand new governor, and so part of what I think Senator Blessing and I are trying to do, and we appreciate Katie, you being a part of this and OEA being a part of this, is we need to continue to argue for the merits of the bill. You know the notion that again, why should we be spending a billion dollars on anything if we don't know if it works or not? You know, is just kind of the very basic fundamentals of household budget budget management, and we need to we need to utilize those common sense tactics as we move towards the next budget. Whether or not this is going to get passed in lame duck may have a lot to do with the November election results. But I think Senator Blessing and I are playing the long game, and you know we're hoping that this bill, along with other educational bills, that he and I have be become the joint bipartisan sponsors on, you know, can get a perhaps a a better hearing in the next budget cycle moving forward.

Katie Olmsted 37:11
I will cross my fingers for the sooner the better on as you said very common sense measures, but I will also, along with everybody else, be keeping a very close eye on this because it is such an important way to just make sure our dollars are being spent in a way that works.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 37:28
If I may briefly on on that, you know, so this is State Senator Bill Blessing again. It's instructive to note that one, everybody talks about the governor's race, and it's almost as if the legislature is an afterthought in this, but it really is the legislature that makes these laws, and you know I think more focus needs to be on that. But two, you know, again being you know sort of new to the space, not entirely, but you know it didn't. I kind of just looking back in history because right now we're sort of at the precipice with you know AI moving forward. You know, you know trying to attract the best talent to this country, to this state. You know, where does that lead us? Do we end up with a great humbling in the same way that we did in the late '50s with I think it was Sputnik, and that led President Eisenhower and Congress to say we are going to spend a massive, massive amount of money on public education. And I I remember looking at this the other day and I'm like, wait a minute, federal dollars were 12% at the time. Now it dwindled over time, but they recognized after seeing that. Oh my God, we we we can't rest on our laurels, as Ken said. You know, the kids are 100% of our future. Congress and the presidency, in a bipartisan way, really put their money where their mouth is on that, and I'm just worried that now, over the course of you know the 60, 70, years that it's been since that time, you know, to quote you know Bane from from Batman, where he's like, "Peace, peace has made you weak. Victory has defeated you". You know, we've kind of been-I don't want to say on autopilot-but if China just comes out, for example, and you know really humbles us, whether it's AI, whether it's a space race, whether it's you name it, I have a feeling this is going to come back. And I would also say a lot of what's been done in the property tax space was again, you know, already attempted in the late '70s and the early '80s. I have a feeling that change is going to occur when, you know, again to quote Mark Twain, you know, he he said famously that you know America will do the right thing once it's done everything else wrong first, you know. This issue is not going away, and at some point, I think, you know, we have economists on our side. We've got folks in the public education space on our side. They're going to say, "Look, you know, you've tried all these things". This is what's going to work. Senate Bill 443 will work. Spending big money on the on the fair school funding formula will work. It'll lower property taxes. I am philosophically very confident that in time that will occur. I just hope that in time isn't ridiculously long.

Katie Olmsted 40:32
Well, I appreciate you taking a ridiculously long time to talk to me today. Our our listeners know that sometimes the conversation lasts as long as it needs to last, and I appreciate your time today, Senator Kent Smith. Senator Bill Blessing, thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

State Sen. Louis W. Blessing III 40:52
Thanks, thank you, OEA. Thank you. Take care.

Katie Olmsted 40:57
Our thanks again to Senators Smith and Blessing for sitting down with us for this episode, Senator Blessing is in the middle of a four-year term in the Ohio Senate. Senator Kent Smith is up for re-election this year. Again, OEA members can find a link to the list of the OEA member recommended candidates who will be on their ballots in the show notes for this episode. There's also a link in there to check out Senator Smith's Weekly, in case you missed it, State House edition videos for legislative updates and good discussions about the issues making their way through our legislature. We're going to continue having conversations on those public education issues here too, as new episodes continue to drop every Thursday this season. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast wherever you like to listen, so you don't miss a thing. Because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai