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As Issue 1 heads to the polls in November, the process of redistricting will once again be decided by the voters. Redistricting doesn’t just decide the makeup of districts for state and congressional senators and representatives, but also the way in which those lawmakers are responsive to their constituency, and in turn, what policies and issues get the spotlight in Ohio.
For educators and their advocates, this means the difference between Ohio lawmakers focusing on culture wars and private school vouchers, or lawmakers focusing on the distribution of resources that could help public schools avoid coming back to voters again and again with local levies to pay the bills.
“Having a more equitable representation of different political perspectives sets the entire process up to be more equitable as a whole,” said Dr. Christina Collins, executive director of Honesty for Ohio Education.
The candidates, the ballot measures, and the tools you need to cast your vote.
Knowledge of redistricting and Issue 1
With less than a month before the November general election, education advocates are doing what they can to educate the public about the proposed constitutional amendment that would create a citizens commission to draw Statehouse and U.S. Congressional districts in a process that amendment creators say would be completely open for public review, from the time the commission is chosen until the maps are adopted.
In a 3-2 split, partisans on the Ohio Ballot Board approved a summary for Issue 1 that alleges the amendment will require the commission to gerrymander Ohio’s districts even though the proposed amendment explicitly bans gerrymandering. With opposition arguments taking the messaging and running with it, Collins said the challenge is getting voters the simple facts, which she says will be enough to convince voters.
“I think there is an intentional effort going on right now to seriously confuse people, and that effort seems to assume that Ohioans are stupid,” Collins said.
A poll of more than 1,000 likely Ohio voters conducted by the Democracy and Public Policy Research Network in Bowling Green State University’s department of Political Science showed 60% of those polled would vote in favor of Issue 1.
The survey also showed 51% only know “a little” when asked how much they’d heard or read about Issue 1, and 28% said they knew “nothing at all” about it.
“Voters tend to pay the most attention to the top of the ticket during presidential election years,” political science professor Melissa Miller said as part of the survey report. “In this respect, it’s not surprising that nearly three in 10 Ohio voters have not heard anything about Issue 1.”
But Miller said the fact that 60% of voters polled plan to vote in favor of Issue 1’s redistricting reform “suggest we’re headed for a similar result” as occurred in 2015 and 2018, when redistricting reform was also on the ballot.
It was “very important” to 53% of voters polled that Ohio’s maps are not drawn by elected officials.
The current process which Issue 1 seeks to change, uses the Ohio Redistricting Commission, made up entirely of elected officials, to determine the Statehouse legislative maps. The Ohio legislature is given first shot at composing the U.S. Congressional district maps, but if no agreement is made — as happened in the last redistricting cycle — the process also moves to the redistricting commission.
Issue 1 seeks to remove the politicians from the redistricting process in favor of a 15-member citizens commission made up of five Republicans, five Democrats, and five independents.
What it means for education
Changing the redistricting process would create more competitive districts, meaning those representing those districts would be more inclined to listen to their constituents, Collins said, even the ones with whom they might not agree.
Christina Collins, executive director of Honesty for Ohio Education. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal)
A lack of competitive districts brings “extreme” policies like previously considered Ohio bills attempting to regulate curriculums to avoid what legislators called “critical race theory” from getting into schools, the anti-LGBTQ law (currently under court challenge) that would keep transgender students from playing sports in the teams that align with their gender identity, and active bills that would threaten funding and dictate the kind of materials allowed in school libraries.
“(Competitive districts) could stop all of this culture war stuff that Ohioans don’t care about,” Collins said. “It’s my hope that (changing the redistricting process) would help refocus the legislature away from this hate-filled and harmful legislation that does no good.”
Not only could the policy priorities change with the legislature, but the streams of money that go to public and private schools could also see changes with a change in the way districts are drawn.
“It’s not so much what would move as what would come off the table if we had a more fair legislature,” said Melissa Cropper, head of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “I think conversations would change about how history is taught, accountability for schools, standardized testing and state report cards, even charter school accountability.”
Under a different process decided through a citizen-led redistricting commission, Cropper sees a pathway to get back to paying for the public schools in a way that the Ohio Constitution dictates, rather than with taxpayers helping pay for private schools and awaiting full funding of the Fair School Funding Plan.
“They’ve been trying to push universal vouchers for a decade at least, and we’ve always been able to push them off until the supermajority,” Cropper told the Capital Journal.
With a process to bring about more competitive districts, legislators and members of Congress may be “more likely to be middle of the road on the issues, and more willing to compromise on an issue,” Cropper said.
“In Ohio, you’re still going to have a lot of red districts, but Republicans are going to be a little more concerned about Democratic voters because the district is more competitive. They’re going to be more receptive to the voters in their area.”
Collins anticipates the next year will include a renewed fight over education funding, with a new budget bill to be passed. The Republican supermajority’s support of private school voucher expansion, made nearly universal last year, has been made clear, and that further threatens the outcomes for public schools, according to Collins.
“We’ve got a lot of levies up for approval (in November) in Ohio,” Collins said. “We need to make sure (voters) understand that whoever is elected to the legislature determines how often the schools are going to have to come back and ask for more help.”
State Board of Education
When she was a member of the Ohio State Board of Education, Collins saw what redistricting does to the makeup of that board as well. In every redistricting year, the districts represented by state board members are also established. State school board districts are required to match up with three contiguous senate districts.
In 2022, changes to board member districts were approved by Gov. Mike DeWine before the state senate map used to establish those districts was struck down as unduly partisan by the Ohio Supreme Court.
Several board members criticized the changes to districts, and Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, said at the time that the board district decisions “signaled an intent in terms of who they seem to be trying to protect on the board and who they seem to be drawing into competitive districts.”
Eleven of the state board members are elected, with the other nine appointed by the governor.
But despite the fact that the map used to establish the districts was then revised four times, the board of education map wasn’t changed, with DeWine’s staff citing a deadline in state law that had expired before the revisions were made.
At the behest of the current Republican supermajority, the most recent state operating budget bill gutted the roles of the board of education, including oversight of curriculum, with most roles going to the newly created Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. The board is now solely in charge of teacher licensure and school district territory disputes.
Before that happened, the state board considered, then reconsidered an anti-racism resolution, faced protests over the resolution from critics of so-called “critical race theory,” and conservative members of the board supported a “resolution to support parents, schools and districts in rejecting harmful, coercive and burdensome gender identity policies.”
The board was considering these resolutions while the legislature considered “divisive subjects” bills related to race history in curriculums, and as discussion began on legislation to regulate transgender health care, which became a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in Ohio, passed this year over the veto of Gov. DeWine.
Of note, the chairs of both the Ohio House and Senate Education committees sit as non-voting, ex-officio members of the State Board of Education.
Consequences
Advocates for the trans community protest outside the Senate Chamber when they heard that lawmakers had passed HB 68 that bans gender-affirming care for transgender youth and bars transgender kids from participating on sports teams, December 13, 2023, at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original article.)
The resolutions the state board considered, along with the legislation that entered the General Assembly, all saw hours of opposition testimony from Ohioans hoping to dissuade the board and their legislators from focusing on “culture war” issues. Despite hundreds of people attending committee meetings on the anti-gender affirming care bill, the measure moved through the legislature and was passed alongside language that banned transgender youth from participating in sports aligned with their gender identity.
“This is how gerrymandering impacts us,” Collins said. “Even when we have hundreds of people testify against a particular bill, in some cases the legislature has still voted for it. It’s kind of dumbfounding to see that happen and know (legislators) are so out of touch with Ohio, they are so distant from what the people of Ohio want, that they just do what they want.”
Moving forward, the results of Issue 1 will decide whether or not accountability is inserted into a process that has largely been at the discretion of elected officials, Cropper said.
In the past process, the politician members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission adopted Statehouse and Congressional maps that did not pass constitutional muster, but faced no consequences. Legislators in heavily partisan districts across the state also face no consequences under the current redistricting process, Cropper said, leading to the “extreme” policies and lack of reception for constituents from different political parties and ideologies.
“The question is will any of those politicians have to answer to that,” Cropper said.
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