(upbeat music) - My fellow Ohioans victory is in sight.

- [Mike] Governor Mike DeWine in a rare evening statewide address sets a benchmark for lifting coronavirus restrictions in Ohio and says, "Now is not the time to ease up.'

The Cleveland Teachers Union votes, not to return to the classroom Monday saying, "It's not yet safe to do so."

And Ohio considers once again, legislation to protect people in the LGBTQ+ community against discrimination.

Ideas is next.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Brought to you by Westfield, offering insurance to protect what's yours.

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(soft music) - Hello, and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Mike MacIntyre, governor DeWine said Thursday that COVID-19 numbers continue to drop.

And if they go down to 50 cases per 100,000 residents he'll lift all of the state's pandemic health orders.

How do we get there?

He says, "By continuing to wear masks and by getting vaccinated."

While most school districts have students back in class at least some of the time, Cleveland doesn't.

And it doesn't appear that'll happen anytime soon.

The Cleveland Teachers Union voted not to return to classrooms as scheduled March 8th.

The Ohio Fairness Act, a law that would offer protections to LGBTQ+ Ohioans, has been introduced in every General Assembly since 2011.

This year it has more bipartisan support than ever.

And it has support in both the House and the Senate.

So what are its chances?

And John Carroll University makes national news, when its board votes to eliminate tenure protections for professors in the face of financial hardship.

With me to talk about these stories and more, Ideas, stream health reporter Anna Huntsman, Statehouse News Bureau Chief, Karen Kasler and debuting on the round table this week, Ken Schneck editor of the Buckeye Flame, a statewide media outlet focusing on the LGBTQ+ community.

He also is a professor of education at Baldwin Wallace University.

Let's get ready to round table.

March 2020 changed everyone's lives.

And here we are still in the battle, a year later.

Governor DeWine says, that if Ohio can get its COVID-19 numbers down to 50 per 100,000 for two consecutive weeks, he will lift the health orders entirely.

So Anna, the governor laid this out for Ohioans yesterday tantalizingly close to that goal, but how close.

We've talked about how the numbers were near 800 in December.

I mentioned the numbers that they were just in early February.

Now we have a number that's something around over 170 per 100,000.

What will it take to get to 50?

- You know I think that it'll continue to take the measures that we have talked about.

And like you mentioned earlier, the vaccine and the mask, those are the two tools in our toolbox that governor DeWine mentioned last night as, we need to keep on with those in this fight against COVID-19.

And he did mention that the numbers are looking better.

And we've reported on this for a while now.

We are seeing the cases going down little by little.

And when you look at, from what they were in December I think it was upwards of 700 per 100,000.

Obviously 50 is a long way from that, but we are making strides and we have in the past couple of months.

So I think we just need to keep looking at those numbers.

It'll be interesting to watching the death counts, because those are gonna be slower now, due to the state's new reporting system trying to make those more accurate.

So we don't really know yet how the deaths have been impacted by this.

But I think governor DeWine said that the end is in sight.

We just kinda have to keep pushing forward for a little bit and wearing those masks, they do work.

They've cut down the flu cases, for sure.

We've not seen many cases in schools where kids are wearing masks.

So, I think it will be interesting, time will tell and that and also it has to be two weeks of this sustained this 50 cases per 100,000.

So, I guess time will tell is my answer I have for you, Mike.

- Karen, the governor mentioned this yesterday even before he spoke, though, the latest version of the color coded public health map showed for the first time in months.

It wasn't all red and orange.

There was a little bit of yellow in there.

- Yeah, and when you start talking about the specific numbers that he was referring to, the calculation appears to be around 5,950 cases over a two-week period, averaging out to a little over 425 cases a day.

The last time we were at that level was quite a while ago, it was June 17th.

So we have a ways to go, to get back to that point.

That was fairly early, as you recall, there was a lot of effort to try to flatten the curve.

That was a phrase that we heard quite a lot, at the very beginning and the curve did flat.

And I mean, former Ohio Health Director, Dr. Amy Acton had said that, there was going to be a point at which we were gonna have potentially tens of thousands of COVID cases every day.

And we got to that point.

And so now the idea is to, as Anna was just saying, wear masks, social distance, hand-washing and try to lower those numbers, get them back down.

They're certainly trending in the right direction, but the question is, how much further can they drop?

I mean, by my calculations yesterday there were 1,270 new COVID cases.

And if you look at the state's website, only one county right now is hitting that 50 cases per 10,000 residents and that's Holmes County.

So that's a rural area, a lot of the bigger counties of course, are having much bigger numbers.

I mean I'm looking at the list right now, and it's hard to find this list on the COVID website, which is a little bit frustrating, but I mean, the leading county right now is Washington County in Southern Ohio, 260 cases per 10,000 residents.

So, there's some areas that really have a lot of work to do to get back down into that level where we were last June.

And that was right before things really started to come up and we started to have that summer spike.

Then it leveled off again, and then it came back up.

- Karen here, I was talking about the optimism of the idea that we now have some yellow on the map, not red and orange.

And here you go, bumming everybody out again.

(laughing) - Well, I mean, I think, part of the and this was only DeWine's third prime time address during this pandemic.

I think his goal was, not to make any major announcements other than to try to give people some hope.

And I think that when you start looking at the numbers they are coming down.

And now the vaccine now open to people over 60 and certainly people over 55 is the next category and more of these medical conditions and more professions that will be eligible.

I mean, all of these things are good things, but I think DeWine is very cautious in say and wanting to say that other states are lifting mass mandates like Texas and Mississippi.

And that's not the way Ohio is gonna do it until the numbers really back up the reason to do that.

He's getting pressure from state lawmakers, people running for office to scrap the mask mandate, but he believes I think that the science does not warrant that yet.

- Ken we had an evening address as Karen said, a rare one only the third one, one of them was really just to chide schools, but it was the second one that was sort of addressing all Ohioans on this issue.

It was short and sweet 15 minutes and it was meant to give us a little bit of hope.

Did we need that?

- Look, we'll take hope anywhere we can get it.

I'm disappointed that Karen is not more inspired by Holmes County and Millersburg.

So goes Millersburg, so goes Ohio.

I had to look up where Holmes County was.

So now I know, but yeah, I think when we're looking at Texas and Mississippi, right?

You said in your intro, Mike, that Ohio is not there yet.

Texas and Mississippi are not there yet health wise either.

They really have just embraced this go big or go home attitude.

They're not scaling back, they're not dropping to 80% capacity.

They are just going straight to 100% capacity.

And so, these are the conflicts that I'm worried about.

I think there was a little bit of hope with governor DeWine.

I honestly, the optics of not having Dr. Acton in there, we're not lost on many of us, 'cause she was such a big part of the hope that, has been delivered over the past year so.

Sure, we'll go with some hope and let's find out what's going on in Holmes County.

- [Mike] Anna.

- And I think Karen and I are also just trying to be realistic here too.

And something else to point out we keep talking about counties like Holmes County.

Well some counties have their own mask mandates, and so my question is, if we get to this point whenever that may be of this 50 cases per 100,000 residents and the state lifts its mask mandate and other health orders will counties that have more people, that have more cases or maybe a little more conservative on their health orders, will they implement their own restrictions?

And will you have to... We'll go back to the summer when it was just depending on what county you were in whether you had to wear a mask or whether the spread was really high.

I can remember being like, "Well in this county, it's not too bad."

But you know what I mean, things like that.

So I think that's a question I have going forward, is are is Cuyahoga County gonna be on board with this?

Is Summit County is going to be on board with this?

Or is this gonna be a whole statewide thing?

- Another interesting question we talk about there is some optimism but obviously still a lot of reasons for concern.

And we've laid some of that out.

One of them that the governor laid out yesterday, the virus is changing and variants are scary.

They could push back this progress.

What about those variants Anna and the concern about them?

- Right, and that's another reason, again to be realistic, because there is a concern about the mutated strains of the virus that are more contagious, do spread faster.

And if they continue to mutate, there's concern that the vaccines, which are our greatest tool right now in fighting the pandemic will not work as well.

So that's another thing that the governor said he was considering when he didn't lift all the orders last night and basically gave the threshold for it.

But we're not there yet because of those variants.

Now we do think that the current vaccines do work well against them.

But again, as Karen was saying, it could take a while to get to this threshold.

And who knows what the variants will be like, then.

- Got an email, from JP says, "Having vaccines available does not translate into having appointments."

Essentially is still that frustration over getting scheduled, getting slotted even if you're in one of the groups that should be served by that.

And by the way, the groups are now a little bit broader.

We can talk about that too, but that concerns still exists Anna, the idea that people who qualify for and want vaccines aren't necessarily able to just walk into their doctor's office and get it.

- And I would have to imagine it's even harder now that the groups are broader.

I would have to imagine there's probably some people who are 80 and above who maybe still haven't been able to get their vaccine just depending on when they logged on the system, if they were able to log on.

And now, obviously those slots are opened up to others who might be more savvy online.

They might have more people able to help them out.

And even though we have increased our vaccine dosage each week because now we have the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that was authorized for emergency use.

So, I think it was over 400,000 doses, the state got this week, but then again, you're dividing that up among our 80 plus counties that we have in Ohio.

So each county's only getting, a certain amount.

And so obviously it's a very scarce resource.

And so that listener that wrote in is absolutely correct.

Just because the vaccines are available does not mean there available for everyone.

And so, again, another reason I think that the governor said he's not lifting those orders just yet.

- Equity is an important issue.

And we've talked about this often in terms of who's getting the vaccine and what vaccine they're getting.

Here's an interesting point.

Ohio is using this tiered system based on age.

Starting at age 80, and then 75, and it's gone down now at 60 and older.

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, "That's not a good approach.

It puts people of color at a disadvantage because they have a lower life expectancy and many who do have serious COVID symptoms and die of COVID-19 are people who are younger.

And so really the age group thing discriminates against them."

Thoughts about that, Ken?

- Yeah, I think that people don't wanna hear that vaccinations are a social justice issue, but vaccinations are 100% a social justice issue.

And so governor DeWine said that his quote was, "Age is going to continue to be our dominant indicator."

And you have groups like the Centers for Disease Control saying, "But that's just not the only factor here.

We have to talk about comorbidities.

We have to talk about communities that whether or not they have distrust in the medical system, that they are experiencing comorbidities that put them at greater risk should they contract COVID."

And so age is just not the only factor.

And there are other things that we have to talk about when we're talking about vaccines.

But then people get into, but now we're talking about liberty and not science.

No, we actually are talking about science and we're talking about health and demographics.

- One other COVID related topic I definitely wanted to get to was the idea that last night, the Cleveland Teachers Union voted to not return to the classroom.

That was going to be the plan for Monday.

In fact, the original deadline, the governor set for all school systems was March 1st to have some form of in-person learning hybrid.

Cleveland said it was going to miss that deadline but it would hit March 8th.

And now the teachers have gotten together, and they said, "We had a plan and it was a little bit more slow rolling than this.

This was an arbitrary deadline, and we're just not going to do it."

And so they're not coming in on the eighth.

Ken, what issues did the Cleveland Teachers Union site in voting to keep members remote?

- So many, I mean, there are so many issues on the table right now.

First of all, let's just establish the baseline.

There is not a teacher out there that doesn't want to be safely back in the classroom with everyone there doing in-person delivery in a safe and effective way.

That is the baseline, that said there are so many criteria that have not been met yet.

They were supposed to have done a full safety check of all the schools.

And only 1/3 of those checks have been completed at this point.

And even with the 1/3 that happened done there are concerns about some of the results that school computers have not been fitted with microphones or speakers.

They're real technological issues.

So many of these teachers have been using their own personal devices and right this second, their devices are not fitted to be used with the district secure wifi network.

So there's a technological issue there.

And then one of the biggest issues is and you use the word arbitrary, and that's the key piece.

How could teachers possibly go back to the classroom before March 19th?

On March 19th, that's the deadline for parents to opt out of hybrid learning.

You cannot possibly develop a plan for classroom management, if you don't even know who's going to be in the classroom and who's going to be online.

So yeah, it's unsurprising that the union voted in this way because there's no reason that we can't push this date back a little bit further so that we can create the most effective classroom experience possible, that's also safe.

- Karen most school districts have in-person learning now though, and so how will this sit with the governor who set the March 1st deadline?

- Well as I understand it only seven school districts are not back in some form of on in-person or hybrid learning.

So that's very, very few.

And DeWine, you mentioned it earlier.

He had had a Friday afternoon press conference where he chided school district saying, "Hey you promised to bring kids back either in person or in a hybrid setting, so that you could get your school employees vaccinated.

You need to uphold that promise."

Now I remember in talking to the group that represent school superintendents early on they had said that, "Hey, this was a flexible deadline."

That March 1st was a guideline, that was a goal.

It was a goalpost, but it wasn't going to be a hard and fast deadline.

You had to be back but certainly DeWine has taken it pretty seriously.

So this is is not going to go over well I don't think.

And I think that there's going to be a lot of pressure on the teacher's union and on the superintendent or the CEO to try to come up with a resolution to this.

Because certainly there's a big concern about testing, about what's happening to the kids who are not getting the opportunity to be in class.

And to get that learning going forward.

Yesterday the House passed a bill that would allow for a waiver of federal testing requirements so that there can be certain changes made to try to deal with testing because the state still plans to go ahead with testing.

And so it's really important, I think for state officials that kids are back in the classes, as soon as possible.

(upbeat music) - There have been many efforts to curtail the governor's power to issue public health orders, and some want orders lifted right now, not after some threshold is met.

Among them, Larry Householder, the former House speaker, still a House member currently under federal indictment in the H.B.6 bribery scandal.

Or Karen, I don't know, one might just say the audacity with Householder.

- He's not the only one.

I mean, he is joining a group that, I mean the Senate is passed a bill or is looking at a bill on this.

I'm trying to remember where Senate bill 22 is?

And the House has its own bill.

I mean, the pushback from Republican state lawmakers, against their fellow Republican Mike DeWine has been really interesting to watch, because at the very beginning of this pandemic, there was a lot of we're all in this together, that sort of thing.

And then there was an effort by businesses to talk about how they felt left out by some of these orders, because Target and the grocery stores and Amazon were still providing people with stuff.

And yet the Mom and Pop shops couldn't do that.

And so this has been an effort to try to pull back as state lawmakers say, play a role in some of these health orders.

And the current, the Senate bill would allow the House and Senate to vote on the governor's health orders.

Which when you think about it, the House and Senate, it takes a while for things to get done.

I mean, we've talked about that on this show.

And how it it's taken years to even get to the point where say a School Funding bill could pass, and it finally did, but then it didn't pass in the Senate because there wasn't enough time.

So to put state lawmakers in this role, I think has a lot of people very concerned because it would potentially slow down the process of trying to stop some sort of transmission of a virus, which is what the whole goal of these orders was.

The goal of these orders was to keep people apart till there was an idea of how this thing was being spread and then find a way to try to mitigate that spread.

And yesterday I was just, before this started I was watching a replay of the House hearing yesterday.

And it's amazing how some of the people who were showing up are spreading just tremendously untrue conspiracy theories, about what these health orders were intended to do.

They were simply intended to mitigate the spread of the virus.

They weren't intended to do anything else.

And yet there's this conspiracy theory idea that somehow they were meant to be something else that DeWine has gone way beyond his authority.

- [Mike] Ken?

- Yeah, I think I have to go back to your word Mike it's it's audacity and parts of that hearing yesterday, where Householder saying, "We can't let these unelected officials make these decisions."

Well, let's put aside, which is really difficult for many of us to put aside Householder as an elected official and what he now stands for and what he brings with him.

But let's just look at Cuyahoga County.

If we're looking at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health.

Yeah, I'm gonna take an individual, who's a board certified pulmonary critical care specialist over Householder.

I'm gonna take a medical director for five local nursing homes over Householder.

I understand that they weren't elected, but these experts in the field and they're experts for a reason, and that's why they're given this responsibility.

(upbeat music) - The Ohio Fairness Act seeks to offer anti-discrimination protection specifically to the LGBTQ+ community.

It's been presented in every General Assembly since 2011.

This year it's got more bipartisan support than ever before.

What are the chances though, given the fact that this has been introduced, as I mentioned every General Assembly since 2011 - Right, so this is the legislative equivalent of just rolling that Sisyphus boulder up the hill.

I mean, it is a rainbow painted boulder, but this has been going on for much.

It's the 10th consecutive Assembly where it's been introduced, but it's been proposed for far longer than that.

So they had the press conference yesterday, Senator Antonio, Senator Rulli, Representatives Hillyer Representatives Kildee so, right there, you have two Democrats and two Republicans but I was kind of fascinated by Senator Rulli who started off by saying, "So what's different about this year."

And then I wasn't totally sure he answered that question except to say what you said that it seems like there is more support for this one.

We have the Fairness Act, We have the Equality Act, excuse me, that passed in the House of Representatives on the national level.

So the hope is that there just are more wheels greased, but I think some of the problem because the opposition has not gone away, some of the problems here is that this equality would apply to employment, to housing and to public accommodations.

And if you listen to the press conference yesterday, representative Hillier who has done incredible work to support this bill but he focused his comments solely on employment.

And we know that some of the issues that are gonna come up with this bill truly are going to be with public accommodations, truly are going to be in some of those areas of so where does this bill conflict with religious exemptions.

Where there are religious exemptions in this bill.

So I think the short answer is, we're not sure why it would go through this year except to say that there seems to be more support both within the house.

This is bicameral legislation.

It is bipartisan legislation, but also that nationally the support is just more there now than it was last year.

- And it comes at a time when the Gallup poll was recently released, shows more people identify as LGBT including younger people.

So we're looking at the demographics of this situation shifting as well.

- Yeah, demography is perhaps one of the most unsexy topics around and yet it is just absolutely key for having these conversations.

And we have to keep in mind that while the Gallup poll is really encouraging by and large, across demography across surveys.

Surveys just don't always collect this information on sexual orientation and gender identity.

So the numbers could be considerably higher.

You look at something like the census.

The census only takes into account sexual orientation if you are in a relationship.

So, because I am single, I don't get to be gay on the census.

So the Gallup poll is extraordinarily encouraging and those numbers have certainly increased significantly since 2017, but the numbers can be even higher than that.

And we will see that as we start collecting this information more and more.

(upbeat music) - John Carroll University says it will have more flexibility to deal with financial hardship.

Now that it is voted to eliminate protections for tenured faculty.

Who now can be fired for financial reasons.

It's made national news and drawn the ire of faculty members.

Ken you're professor of education and on the faculty at Baldwin Wallace.

Tenure is usually sacrosanct, isn't it?

- I really enjoy my tenure.

I think it's a great part of my life that I enjoy greatly.

You just mentioned, 'cause I think for context here, what happened with the art history program is really important.

It's not just that they eliminated the art history program last summer in 2020, but by eliminating the art history program they fired two tenured faculty members which created quite the uproar.

And faculty members stepped forward and said, "Okay, so they are now using this phrase 'Academic prioritization' as a way to get around tenure."

And so now we see a new justification financial exigency, but yes tenure is absolutely supposed to be sacrosanct.

And that's what we as faculty are investing into the university and what the university is investing back into us.

So unsurprisingly, there is cause for a ton of concern and this story has gone quite national already.

This is much talked about it as someone who studies leadership in higher education.

This is much talked about across the country.

This is not an Northeast Ohio story right now.

- That's going to wrap today's show.

We'll be back next week.

As the news never stops.

Coming up Monday, on The Sound of Ideas, An anthropologist from Cleveland is part of a pandemic journal project where people record their thoughts and feelings.

This as we're hitting the one year anniversary of the first COVID-19 case in Ohio.

We want you to weigh in, send your thoughts to soi@wcpn.org.

I'm Mike MacIntyre.

Thanks for watching and stay safe.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Brought to you by Westfield, offering insurance to protect what's yours.

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