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Ohio school districts are paying the price for flawed healthcare policy

Letters To The Editor

A school district’s budget has to cover a lot before the first student walks through the door. Teachers and support staff need to be hired, buses need fuel, and buildings need heat. When those costs rise, school boards have to make difficult choices about how to meet students’ needs with the dollars available. Health care can be one of the biggest variables in that equation. Districts need to provide dependable coverage for their employees, but an unexpected increase in costs can upend months of careful planning and leave less money available for classrooms. For a school board, ...

Election officials are keeping Ohio results safe from fraud

Editorial

Despite repeated attempts by others to instill fear that Ohio’s elections are riddled with fraud, interference and illegal ballots cast, the public official best equipped to accurately assess the situation, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, has said, “voter fraud is rare in Ohio.” An analysis of data from the Ohio Crime Statistics Dashboard by the Ohio Capital Journal bears that out. Since taking office in 2019, LaRose has referred for investigation 1,200 voting/election-related cases. According to the crime statistics dashboard, only 16 resulted in felony convictions — ...

Harassment and assault of sports officials cannot be tolerated

Editorial

Refereeing isn’t supposed to be dangerous. But those who (often volunteer to) do so are increasingly facing dangers to their mental health and well-being AND their physical health while they are trying to do their jobs for our kids. During a Steubenville-New Philadelphia boys soccer game this week, an official was injured so badly he had to be hospitalized. Video evidence shows a Steubenville player who may have been reacting to a red card being given to a teammate charging at the official, knocking him to the ground. According to published reports, the referee suffered a collapsed ...

Devil Anse and me

Local Columns

Having recently read a book about the Hatfields and McCoys, in my new capacity as an expert on this most famous of American family feuds I was invited to speak to a weekly breakfast meeting of the Weirton Rotary Club. The Rotarians were stunned (well, mildly curious) when I happened to ...

Ohio lawmakers owe it to taxpayers to address EdChoice

Editorial

Lawmakers who never bothered to complete the phase-in of Ohio’s Fair School Funding Plan, or update data that could have helped more equitably fund the state’s public schools, are now also operating with the knowledge that their beloved EdChoice voucher program has been deemed unconstitutional by an appellate court. (Interim state Attorney General Andy Wilson has already said he plans to appeal that ruling to the 6-1 Republican majority Ohio Supreme Court.) If their consciences weren’t already being prodded by the knowledge that they abandoned fair school funding, and that an ...

Ohio has some work ahead to avoid looking foolish in book bans

Editorial

School book ban trends come and go, but there are always groups of people who want to keep their children from having access to reading material that might expose them to new ideas or, worse, ask questions. The problem is particularly bad in Ohio, which ranks third among the states in PEN America’s study of school book bans for the 2025-26 school year. The free-expression advocacy group counted 117 instances of school book bans in the Buckeye State during that period. Only Texas and Florida were worse. Across the country, 11,982 books — 7,370 unique titles — were banned in public ...