(suspenseful music) - [Mike] Governor Mike DeWine signed a law this week that drastically reduces training for teachers or staff to carry a weapon in school.

Hot temperatures and violent storms test Ohio's power grid and leave thousands in the dark.

And there will be Juneteenth celebrations all weekend as we mark the nation's newest federal holiday.

Ideas is next.

(triumphant music) Hello, and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

Governor DeWine signed House Bill 99 this week.

It reduces the training needed for teachers and staff at schools to be armed.

On the day the bill was signed, a new state law went into effect that also drops permits and training requirements for carrying a concealed weapon.

High temperatures fueled storms this week that knocked out power to big parts of the state, including much of Columbus.

The lights and power are still out for thousands, especially in rural counties.

Akron City Council looks to make its opening prayer and invocation more inclusive after criticism that the prayers were Christian-centric and not representing the diversity of religious beliefs in Akron.

And federal state and many local workers will commemorate the newest national holiday this Monday, Juneteenth, a day that commemorates when all slaves were freed.

We'll talk about that and the rest of the week's news on the Reporters' Roundtable.

Joining me this week from Ideastream Public Media, Akron Canton Reporter Anna Huntsman, from Black Girl Media, Founder and Publisher Shana Black, and in Columbus, State House News Bureau News Editor Andy Chow.

Let's get ready to round table.

So Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 99 this week.

It lowers the training needed for school districts to arm teachers and staff from 700 hours to now a maximum of 24.

Supporters say it'll make schools safer and less of a target for mass shootings.

Opponents, by the way, say teachers' jobs is not to shoot intruders.

The bill gathered momentum following the murder of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last month.

Individuals districts, though, must decide whether their teachers will be able to carry guns.

And that bill was signed, by the way, on the same day that another gun law went into effect, the one that drops entirely the training requirement for carrying a concealed weapon.

Andy, the bill signed by DeWine sets up a new agency that will be tasked with creating the training to arm teachers and personnel.

And so the proponents of that are saying, "Hey, Ohio actually has a real training program.

We should actually be looked at as a model."

- That's right and it does create the Ohio School Safety and Crisis Center and it will be state curriculum standards that will be taught to teachers and taught to any of the school districts that decide that they do want to arm teachers.

And when it comes to the old law, that 700 hours, that was the same training that was used for new peace officer recruits, new law enforcement.

And so there were a lot of people who said, "Well, if Ohio does want to be able to provide the ability for teachers to be armed, then getting 700 hours of training is not feasible."

That's why they reduced it to 24 hours.

There's also a lot of confusion here because part of the bill requires any teacher who will be armed to also have a concealed carry license.

Like you said, Mike, the requirement for anybody to carry a concealed weapon to get training was done away with on the same day this bill was signed.

So do teachers need to get a concealed carry license if they want to be armed at school, along with the training?

There's a lot of question marks still floating in the air.

And exactly what will that training include is another big question.

I asked if there's going to be a thorough mental health assessment of the teachers who go through that training.

That was not an answer that the DeWine administration had off the top of their head.

So again, a lot of questions and there's a lot of concerns about reducing the amount of hours needed for teachers to carry guns in classrooms.

24 hours is much less than other things that are required of people, like getting a driver's license.

- Right, the 700, though, came in 2021.

It's not like that's been a long-time standard.

That was a Supreme Court ruling that made it 700, which seemed very excessive to folks who looked at that and said the kind of training for peace officers was beyond just gun training.

So whether 24 is the right number, 700 seemed to be the real, the bell here where people said, "That's just way too much."

- Well, and then the issue there is that the big argument from opponents who do not like reducing the amount of training is what you said earlier.

Is it a teacher's job to teach, or is it a teacher's job to be an armed security guard?

And so when it comes to that 700 hours, that was really a lot of opponents to this bill saying that it needs to be a school resource officer or somebody who used to be a school resource officer who then, for some, one reason or another became a teacher, or a former peace officer who becomes a teacher.

That's why they wanted the standard to be so high.

- Shana.

- I think this is just ridiculous on so many levels.

Teachers are getting just slammed with so many things.

Like people think that teachers are just home for the summer relaxing.

And they're like in professional development.

And to think about, just picturing former me in professional development about like now gun safety, or as an administrator have to tell a teacher, like, "You're not the one where allowing to have a weapon, but like Ms. So-and-so can have the weapon."

You know, we have a hard enough time telling someone they're moving from second to third grade and now to say, "No, we don't trust you with guns, teacher, but we trust that person."

I just think that we can't keep dumping on teachers and saying, "This is now your job.

This is now your job.

This is now your job."

And then expect them to keep, like, just staying and then do a great job educating kids, which is why they're there.

- Yeah, there's definitely a lot that obviously needs to be ironed out at this point.

And Shana, you brought up that really good point about who gets to have it, because I know the Governor was saying kind of to the people who were in opposition, he was saying, "Well, you know, we trust school districts to figure out who's best for that."

And so I guess, you know, my first thought was, "Oh, so maybe it won't be all teachers have to do it.

Maybe it's certain people."

But that is a really good point about the reactions that could come to that, of who gets to do it.

But then on the other hand, there are schools already making action to be like, "We're not doing this at all."

For example, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District school board voted to not have guns in their schools.

And I know Akron schools are opposed to it.

Well, the City of Akron is opposed to it as well.

So this is gonna be really interesting to see this kind of disparity of which schools will have guns in them and who gets the guns and all that.

- Right, Cleveland did vote.

So some are being very proactive and saying, "This is what we're gonna do."

You would think there will be some districts that are proactive, saying, "We're definitely going to do that," at the same time.

And there's some that were before, who had armed teachers.

It's not like we haven't had armed teachers in schools before.

In the meanwhile there are mayors that got together this week.

And we heard last week just from Justin Bibb specifically, and from the police chief, the acting police chief, Wayne Drummond.

And we talked about that last week, but further this week, Bibb and his democratic counterparts, other mayors in the state, say they're gonna form their own task force to look at gun violence, that that's something that's necessary.

And they're really calling upon the legislature to do more.

- Right and that press conference included Cleveland's mayor, as you mentioned, but it was also a couple police chiefs.

So it was Cleveland and Akron, and I believe Toledo was the other city that was on this call.

And as you mentioned, they are looking at gun violence.

And now, these are all democratic mayors and they all echoed the "we wanna look at this as a public health" perspective type of thing.

I know Akron has been also very forthcoming about the fact that they're very much against the schools having guns in them and things like that.

Akron City Council, a couple weeks ago, passed a resolution saying, "We don't want this.

We support teachers," but yeah.

So this is something that they're looking at, but they kind of have a different perspective maybe than what's at the state level.

And that's something I have also heard from both the mayors on this call and then the city councils are saying, "We need to start doing something at the local level because," in their words, "nothing's happening in the state and federal levels."

- Andy, Governor DeWine is running for reelection.

His opponent, Nan Whaley, the former Dayton mayor was quick to condemn him signing the bill into law for arming teachers.

Also, there's some criticism of dropping the requirements for concealed carry, the permit requirements.

But DeWine is really walking, it seems a tight rope here where he's saying, "I'm gonna get done what we can get done," and basically trying not to get, I would say, the base, too in opposition to him.

- Yeah, this is a pretty big shift from a few years ago where he made a lot of people angry over on the gun lobby side, by rolling out a package of gun regulations.

And now he's basically been turning his back on a lot of those provisions that he once touted and signing bills that people assumed he wouldn't sign, such as the stand-your-ground bill and now the permitless carry bill.

This teachers thing is sort of another issue, but it goes to the fact that a lot of people have been calling on state lawmakers and calling on Governor Mike DeWine to pass what they call common sense gun regulation.

And that's what Nan Whaley has been calling for.

Nan Whaley and Mike DeWine both shared the stage at a vigil following the 2019 mass shooting in Dayton.

And when Governor DeWine took the stage, many people might remember that the crowd started chanting, "Do something."

And then a few days later, that's when DeWine rolled out his gun regulation package.

But now he's saying that maybe even if he does want those regulations, he doesn't believe that the legislature here, which is, has a super majority of the Republicans controlling the legislature, he doesn't believe that the House and Senate would pass any of those reforms, so he's not pushing for them.

(dramatic music) - A wild weather week for Ohio left hundreds of thousands to deal with dangerously high temperatures without air conditioning or fans.

Violent storms knocked out power to tens of thousands and the power is still out in some rural areas.

In some areas of Columbus, the weather wasn't the direct cause of power loss.

American Electric Power purposely shut off electricity through Greater Columbus just as the heat ramped up.

The company said the purposeful outages were necessary to head off more widespread power outages that would've taken longer to restore.

The damage is one thing.

And being without power, obviously, a huge difficulty, but also let's talk about the heat.

So I was walking the dogs with my wife the other day, Shana, and, that real hot day, not yesterday, but the day before.

And we were going so slowly.

She was like, "Why are we?"

And it's like, because it's like 95 degrees.

- [Shana] Walking through a wall of heat.

- It was like semi soft butter we were walking through, right?

But about that heat, you know, we can complain about it and then go back to our homes.

There are many people who are in situations where it's incredibly dangerous and you need cooling centers.

And then you need to get to them.

- Yeah, that, and even just thinking about some of our older homes.

You know, everyone doesn't have central air yet because a few years ago you could get by with a window unit.

And this week showed that this may not be the case.

But, you know, it's not just the electricity, you know, it's the transportation, it's a system-wide like issue that we need to look at when we start thinking about climate, 'cause I'm just not used to this kind of heat this early in the summer.

- Activists say lawmakers need to focus on climate, saying, "This is a taste of what we're in for," that, Shana just said, this early in the season, having this kind of heat.

But there are those who say we need to work on modernizing the power grid, which brings opposition to House Bill 6 back into play and it's move away from renewables.

- Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot of people say that both needs to happen.

And so when it comes to the effects of climate change, the power grid is set up to deal with a certain set of issues throughout the year.

You know when it's gonna get hot, you know when you're gonna get your peak temperatures, when you're gonna get your lower temperatures.

But with climate change and when it becomes less predictable to guess when that's gonna happen, then that creates reliability issues.

How much power are you going to need ready to go on the grid?

And so here in Columbus, like you mentioned, there were widespread outages that were done on purpose to make sure that the grid didn't take too much of the load and then cause an even wider power outage.

And then it needs to be mentioned that the neighborhoods that lost power because of the decision to turn off the power, not because of an unplanned outage, but a planned outage, a lot of those neighborhoods were in the lower income communities.

And so poorer Columbus residents were disproportionately impacted because of that.

So you've got a lot of issues when it comes to grid reliability, you got a lot of issues when it comes to being able to predict the weather patterns, when you're able to predict when you're gonna see a spike in temperatures, and if the grid can handle those changes.

- I suppose I understand the logic, but if I'm somebody who has my power shut off because it's a precaution, I think I'd be hot in a different way.

So I would imagine some reaction to that isn't particularly great.

And I understand that even though that's a standard thing, the PUCO, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, is gonna investigate that.

- That's right, now the PUCO often keeps track of these unplanned outages and major outages.

And this is definitely something that they're keeping an eye on, but the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Council, this is the top state watchdog for consumers in Ohio, especially when it comes to energy policy, they are calling for a thorough investigation from the PUCO into what happened with the AEP.

Why did they make the decisions that they made?

How did they come to those decisions?

How did they alert people?

We're hearing from a lot of people who didn't know that they were about to lose power, even though it was planned and that they could have used a heads up.

There's a lot of things going on here, but to get back to something that you mentioned earlier, Mike, with HB 6, and just to remind people, that was a comprehensive energy bill that ended up bailing out nuclear power plants, but it also got rid of a lot of green energy standards to incentivize bringing in more renewable energy from wind and solar.

That was a bill, and that's also tied to a big bribery scandal that's currently being investigated in federal court, that did away with a lot of things that environmental advocates say could have helped in this type of situation to diversify the energy grid, to bring on more resources, to rely on more resources.

(dramatic music) - Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman says a controversial transgender sports ban will still move forward in the legislature, but he plans to drop the section that would've allowed for invasive genital examinations.

Huffman made the comments at the City Club of Cleveland Wednesday during a forum with former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

In response to a patron's question during the traditional Q&A, DeVos called out Huffman, who happened to be in the crowd and said, "He'd be better able to address it."

House lawmakers had added the transgender sports ban language as an amendment to an education bill that passed the House earlier this month.

The Senate bill has not received a hearing and Huffman, who stood up to use an audience microphone during the forum, said the House passed it in the dead of night without conversations with any of the senators.

He said the exams are unnecessary and said any tests, which he still would be in favor for, regarding gender can be accomplished with a simple DNA swab.

So Andy, the Senate president is still for this idea of testing people, that there's a problem with transgender students competing, but says, "We didn't know anything about this, this exam thing, and we're not into it."

- Yeah it was controversial language already in a very controversial bill.

And these were issues that were brought up by House Democrats on the House floor late one night during session while they were trying to pass this bill.

And they said, look, they're already against the idea.

The Democrats are already against the idea of banning transgender athletes from women's sports.

But on top of that, there is language involved where if an athlete's sex is disputed, then they would have to get a signed statement from a physician after that physician performs all these different types of tests, including a, quote, "internal and external exam of reproductive anatomy."

So in this case, the other question here was, well, who could dispute an athlete's sex and what kind of trauma is involved in that kind of process as well?

There are all sorts of issues with it.

It seems like Republican Senate President Matt Huffman, to him, it's a non-starter, they're gonna still try to pass a bill that bans transgender athletes in women's sports, but he says without that language.

And, really quick, I think that was such an interesting exchange between a member of the audience, the guest Secretary DeVos, and then with Matt Huffman coming up there, just the exchange, it really seemed like a cool community discourse at the end of the day.

- I wanted to say the very same thing.

It points to the importance of institutions like the City Club of Cleveland and forums like this, because oftentimes I know you'll, I've seen you run after people to try to talk with them as they're running away from you.

And you'll always throw the question out there, but often, you can get the shrug, you know, "I'm busy," or you get a non-answer answer.

And that happens sometimes with the scrum of media.

It was difficult here, it would seem to be, for anyone to shake that question, especially when Betsy DeVos says, "Well, he's sitting right here."

And so you get an answer and I think that's, you're right.

It was an extraordinary exchange.

Katie Paris asked that question.

She's from an organization called Red Wine & Blue.

And she was in the audience there too.

And then followed up with him afterward in a one-on-one where she continued to press him and said, you know, "Are you dropping this amendment?

Are you dropping it?"

And finally got an acknowledgement that yes, they are.

One other point, and I wanted to just highlight this.

We talked last week and you jumped in with a really important point.

And I don't think there was enough time to talk about it, but the fact that the Ohio High School Athletic Association already has policies in place.

The Governor says he wasn't interested in the state regulating transgender athletes.

But the fact of the matter is there already is a policy in place, "It seems," many people say who are opponents of this legislation, "that it's in search of a problem."

- That's right.

The bill is even called Save Women's Sports.

And the OHSAA, again, the regulating body that oversees athletics from middle school and high school in Ohio, they say, "Look, we already have policies in place to make sure people do not have a physiological advantage over other people on the team."

And so there are different, there are different procedures that need to be in place, and they do check hormonal levels to make sure that the athlete is on the same hormonal level as other, physiologically, as other people on the team, on the sport that they're gonna play.

But the number one part of their policy says that they believe that transgender athletes should have the ability to be included in sports.

And this is the way that they believe they can do that.

And back last year, when this topic was being discussed, Governor DeWine said that he didn't believe a bill was needed because of the OHSAA's rules already in place.

Now, other people have said it might be worth taking a look at what the OHSAA does and shoring up it a little bit and asking that regulating body to include more policy in it.

But there are a lot of people, even Republican leaders, who say maybe it's up to the OHSAA to do this and not a bill that bans transgender athletes altogether.

- Yeah, I think that, you know, this has a lot of concern, especially just as a parent.

Number one, we're talking about kids and we're talking about middle schoolers too.

So let's not just think, you know, you're 17, 18.

We're also talking about your 12, 13s.

But also, when you think about the question that Andy brought up, who gets to decide if the kid has an advantage or they're playing well.

And we've seen in sports where Black athletes, specifically women, are like, "Oh, she plays like a man.

She looks like a man."

They said that about Venus and Serena when they first came on the scene, right?.

And so now we would've subjected them to a genital exam?

Like that is just, it's gonna, it's, again, trying to govern women's bodies, in some cases, and Black bodies, and that's just like, I just can't.

- Let me ask you, though, removing the exam part of it, which is what the Senate President said.

He still said, you know, "A cheek swab.

We still wanna find out."

It's still, in your view, is that, is that still?

- I think it's still concerning that we just want to swab and DNA people.

I mean, for Black and brown folks who've been marginalized or anybody that's been marginalized, like trying to grab our DNA and just see who you are.

Like, that's very invasive for anything just so that my kid can play soccer.

Like that just seems problematic.

- Andy, were you jumping in with something before we move on?

- Yeah, I'll just add two things.

So there are child psychologists who say that young people already go through body image issues.

And so if a young athlete's sex is disputed and having to go through some sort of exam to prove who they are, they say that can add more trauma.

And there's, right now, OHSAA says that there is one transgender athlete playing on a girls sport in Ohio.

(dramatic music) - The nation's newest federal holiday, Juneteenth, will be observed on Monday.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19th, 1865, the day on which word finally reached the last enslaved black people in Galveston, Texas that they were free.

Shana, let's talk a little bit about Juneteenth.

I think it's really interesting that, I would say, a number of my white colleagues and friends five years ago would not have had any idea what Juneteenth is.

And yet now everyone seems to know.

There has been an education campaign in five years.

- And I think, you know, it's because of all that we went through in 2020 for people to wanna learn.

So Juneteenth has been around and you can go to Galveston or so many places and celebrate it and it's a great holiday.

But up here, it's been ignored or folks just didn't, that was a Southern thing and- - [Mike] Or a Black thing.

- A Black thing, and now just the idea of wanting to learn more about, I guess, Black people after George Floyd, or just the existence of what people go through, that's how it kind of happened.

So I'm glad for that.

- How will you mark it, and obviously differently than I will, but what do you do at this time?

Is there a moment of reflection?

Is it a celebration?

What is it?

- All, I think, you know, I knew the question kind of was coming and I don't think it's a moment of reflection because we still have so much work to do.

It needs to be a moment of activism for our allies and friends, because, you know, if you think about how this became a holiday in 2020 and George Floyd, we wanted all these things.

People had uprisings and marched and all kind of stuff happened.

And then in two years, what have we gotten?

You know, we still don't have the Voting Rights Act passed.

We still don't have the C.R.O.W.N Act and Black hair protected.

And some of the things we just talked about here on this show with the idea of just choosing which neighborhoods who don't have power in the heat waves.

So I think it is a moment of reflection for many, but also how do we get better as opposed to like, let's just, like, look at this great holiday and aren't we glad slavery is over.

For myself, I'm gonna go see some of the great events that are happening, I think downtown, there's like four downtown on Saturday.

So I'll hang out down there, spend time with family.

And then just kind of support folks that I know are doing great stuff that deal with these issues.

So it might be a donation to some of the local smaller nonprofits, because they're, you know, they're doing the work and, you know, they could use some support and love.

(dramatic music) - Akron City Council has started a new tradition.

Each month, a different member of council will be in charge of coordinating the opening prayer at meetings.

Council members will draw on the diversity of their communities in an effort to make the meetings more inclusive and not always Christian-centric.

Anna, that's interesting.

There are some cities like Cleveland that just has a moment of silence now.

And I know they used to have a prayer.

In Akron, the prayer continues, and really, almost all the time, it was a Christian prayer.

How did it come up that that was an issue?

- So, and actually, it's interesting that you mentioned that Cleveland used to pray.

Akron City Council actually used to do the Lord's Prayer.

And now that has moved to, it was mostly Christian.

The council members told me it's because a lot of people's schedules weren't aligning.

And it just always usually happened to be somebody from the clergy would do a Christian prayer before the meetings.

But actually, the first Akron City Council meeting I attended when I moved to this beat, a resident by the name of Paranita Singh spoke in front of Council and did give them feedback about these predominantly Christian prayers.

She is not Christian.

She was raised Sikh.

She's no longer religious, but her criticism mainly came from the fact that a couple weeks before that, it was the Muslim holiday Eid, and it was not mentioned at all and a Christian prayer was given.

And she was basically saying, "Akron is so diverse.

We have so many immigrants, so many refugees.

We have so many people who aren't religious.

Why is this a predominantly Christian prayer?"

And so what Council President Margo Summerville has instated now is they, each council member is going to get a month to coordinate all of the prayers, invocations, with a focus on diversifying that.

So first up, there was a kind of secular prayer that focused on nature.

So it was, you know, "Bless this ecosystem of Akron," is what they said.

And in a couple weeks, it's gonna be a Buddhist prayer, tentatively.

Again, a lot of this comes down to can people come?

Can people make time on Zoom?

But now they're trying to be, quote, "more intentional about reflecting the diversity of Akron."

- Monday on The Sound of Ideas on 89.7 WKSU, the team is off in observance of Juneteenth.

In our place, we'll hear a special program, "The Arc of Justice," which looks at the racial wealth gap between white and Black households and how it came to be.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching and stay safe.

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