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No ice surge in Ohio as TPS data stays for Haitians.

And it's costing school districts a lot more money to take fewer kids to class.

We'll learn more about that this weekend.

The state of Ohio Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

Advocates for immigrants throughout Ohio are still concerned about a possible surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol agents.

But a federal judge offered a reprieve by indefinitely postponing the end of Temporary protected status for Haitians, which was supposed to expire Tuesday night.

The Trump administration is appealing to the U.S.

Supreme Court.

Governor Mike DeWine said last week he was getting mixed signals if there would be a surge.

And in a phone call with me on Tuesday said homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's office told him before the ruling there were no orders to go into Springfield, but personnel on the ground said there were.

But with no data signed.

DeWine has said several times that he disagrees with President Trump and Senator Bernie Marino, and opposes cutting off TPS for Haitians.

The president should be given, I think, and his administration, a great deal of credit for, making sure that border is, is much more secure.

Every country has the right to do that.

We focus on those things.

What's happened, though, is that while they talk about targeting and going in and only getting violent offenders, we know by the statistics and by what independent news media has come up with in looking at who's actually, held in different, different facilities that we're only like about 5% of these individuals, are in fact violent or violent offenders.

So I think we need to follow what the president said this morning and then focus on the violent offenders, focus on keeping the border, secure.

I don't think it's good public policy to go in and rip people out who are working, who are supporting their families, who are starting businesses, who are helping the economy be more vibrant.

And we see that the greatest example is in Springfield.

Springfield is moving forward as a as a community, as a county, as an area.

One of the reasons are moving forward is because of the Haitians who are in there working every single day.

So as far as a policy, I think that removing TPS from them is not right You know, I think it's in the best interest of Ohio to have these workers and these families stay in Ohio, continue to work, continue to contribute to their to the economy.

It's also incorrect, that the situation in Haiti is better situation.

It has never been worse.

This is a country, that there's massive unemployment.

Gangs are controlling most of the country.

There's violence all over the all over the country.

It's a dysfunctional government.

It nothing works very well down there.

And the United States, through the State Department has it right.

Has listed as a country.

Don't go there.

It's too dangerous.

The airport is effectively closed to us planes going in in port au Prince because you got gang members who are shooting at the planes.

So it's it's a rough, rough situation.

And, you know, none of these, very few of these Haitians, if they have to leave, are going to go back.

Hey, they're going to try to find someplace else.

They're not going to go back.

It's too dangerous.

We Republican Senator John Husted, who represented the Dayton area near Springfield in the Ohio House and Senate, has not said whether he supports or opposes TPS for Haitians.

DeWine said on Thursday he doesn't have great advice for those on edge in Springfield, other than to follow the law and notes DHS told him plans could change and that Ice operations will still continue throughout Ohio.

Meanwhile, student walkouts and protests continue, including one in frigid temperatures outside the state House last Friday.

Wednesday was the candidate filing deadline for Partizan candidates on the ballot this year.

Amy Acton is the only Democratic candidate for governor, with Sherrod Brown facing a primary in the U.S.

Senate race.

The fake Ramaswamy has three Republican challengers for governor, but John Husted has no GOP opponent for U.S.

Senate.

There are libertarian candidates in both those races.

There are Republican primaries ahead for secretary of state, treasurer, and for the Supreme Court seat held by the only statewide elected Democrat, Jennifer Brunner.

And there are Democratic primaries for Secretary of state and Attorney General.

The cost to get kids to school is skyrocketing.

While there are fewer students on busses, and more than 90% of school districts nationwide are still reporting bus driver shortages, with a loss of 6800 drivers from before the pandemic till 2025.

In Ohio, meanwhile, schools are spending $251.5 million more per year to transport 54,000 fewer students.

With 1570 fewer busses.

School transportation consultant Doug Palmer has been studying both of those problems.

Well, we still we're still covering the same area.

You know, the busses are still traveling almost every mile that they used to travel because student ridership is down.

You still have to drive past or you still have to cover every district mile.

And and also, with the number of nonpublic schools now increasing, there are more miles to travel.

They're also so we're traveling more miles in what we used to travel.

We're just not transporting enough students or as many students as what we used to.

when you talk about these, nonpublic school kids that are being transported, that's part of state law.

That's something that school districts have been dealing with.

Private schools, charter schools, anything nonpublic.

Those kids are still on public school busses.

Yes, they are.

And that's, been that way since 1965.

And that 33 2701, that revised code that that's mandates what services, public districts have to have to do.

And there might be the question of whether that's fair or not.

I mean, why should school districts be transporting kids who don't even go to their school?

Well, in a in, in a lot of, especially the rural areas that a lot of k eight buildings are nonpublic at some point those children are going to come back into the public district, not not so much in the urban in the suburban areas, because a lot of schools are K-12 and suburban and and there are even some, Christian or nonpublic high schools.

I mean, so, you know, not all the case, but in most cases, those children will end up back in the public school system at some point.

So why is there a bus driver shortage?

Because if there are fewer kids to transport and fewer busses, why is there a bus driver shortage?

Well, you know, if I could tell you how to fix that, I wouldn't work so hard on trying to communicate.

What?

What's going on?

There's a lot of things that factor into this.

In 2015 or 16, I'm not quite sure what year it was, but they allowed, people in serves which the bus drivers fall under School employees Retirement System.

They allowed them to either retire then, or have to go longer to gain the same benefits.

So there was a there was some retirements that were affected early.

A lot of our bus drivers are an older age set.

I think the last survey I saw, the average male driver was 58, and the average female driver was 56.

Well, there comes a point where you can't retain them any longer, right?

I mean, they are ready to basically hang up the bus keys and turn it over to somebody else.

And in the process to employ them, is very, very complicated.

And it's a very complicated issue because new drivers don't get to start on the best routes.

And so we have a 20 month, very often those new drivers find a different line of employment after 20 months.

And so you have the older drivers retiring.

You can't retain the younger drivers because of the situations or the places they are forced to to drive in.

And so you have this, just this.

You can't keep the old ones and you can't keep the new ones.

And it's kind of like, why, this is going to catch up to us pretty quickly.

And, and with all of the places that deliver now, I mean, my goodness, you know, you run out of screws and Lowes will deliver a packed package of screws or Home Depot or Menards or and those.

That's competition to retain bus drivers.

Oh yeah.

Because they're because they've chosen to drive for a living.

Not everybody wants to drive something to make a living.

And when you're talking about that same segment of people, it's a part time job.

School bus driver means a part time job.

It just kind of works against the schools.

Is the pay competitive?

Because we've heard some Republican lawmakers talk about that.

Schools are sitting on big piles of money that they've collected from voter approved tax levies, that schools could pay more if they want to keep some of these drivers around longer.

Last summer, recruit more drivers.

Last summer, there was a vendor here in Columbus that was offering a starting pay of $36 an hour, and they did not have one applicant.

They didn't have one applicant from a school district that was already had bus drivers.

They didn't they didn't, get any applicants from people that were wanted to drive, were driving for somebody else, and they didn't have any applicants walking off the street.

So I'm not sure pay is the it's one factor, but it's not the factor.

Let's talk about some of the solutions that are out there, because obviously there needs to be some sort of a solution.

You've talked about the timing being critical of this, that if a solution isn't developed and you talk about reforming the whole transportation system, then this will cost schools even more money.

But it will also allow them not to have to do the work.

And so if you take work away and you take the funding away, it's it's a almost a quid pro quo, right?

I mean, they don't have to do the work, but they're not getting the funding.

That funding then allows the state flexibility to use to develop another solution.

You talk about specifically the consortium solution.

What exactly is that?

Well, it's a I guess it's a fancy word for a group of people working together to solve a problem.

And so if you if you would get a group of nonpublic schools together and be able to do their own transportation, create routes, work together, look at bell schedules.

So the artificial line around school districts is their boundary, where a Catholic school, a nonpublic school, a united school, they're drawing from the county or even county lines wide.

Right.

So they they can cross these artificial boundaries.

They can find ways to make that bus sustainable.

Or if I don't want to say efficient, because efficient is usually the opposite of safety.

So but they can find a way to make their bussing sustainable and find the number of riders they need to to pay for that vehicle.

Is that something that would have to come from the legislature to change that law?

On requiring public school districts to transport nonpublic kids?

Or do you see this is potentially a volunteer effort where nonpublic districts or schools would decide to do this?

Well, I, I think it's both.

I think that, our mindset has to change and that nonpublic schools should have the opportunity to transport their own and have a funding mechanism because they don't have a tax base to draw off of.

There's nothing there's nothing there.

But, KIPP in Columbus, United schools are doing their own transportation now.

I'm not sure how they are funded.

I think they're community schools, which there's a funding process there.

But I've even talked to, the owners of KIPP and, and, United in saying, I think there needs to be just two classifications.

I think we need to drop the community school title.

I think we should have public districts and not and and nonpublic.

I think there needs to be a distinction, I think, there, because that way there could be more people working together on the same level.

The districts and the non districts.

I could imagine that the argument against that could be that, hey, these nonpublic are, as you just said, pulling in from all parts of the county.

So they're not going to be able to afford to send busses to all parts of the county.

Whereas public school districts are going to all parts of the county.

But there's also been a large decrease in nonpublic students riding the bus from over 60,000 to just a little over 30,000.

And a lot of that is related to vouchers and the expansion of voucher vouchers.

And also it's also related to Covid because people started taking their kids to school and and they found a way to do it.

And, and it's not such an impact on families, especially if nonpublic schools offer daycare after with latch key programs.

I mean, there's there's a a built in babysitter there or before school they can drop off.

So it's not just one thing.

And I think that's the hard part.

It's not just one thing.

But if you would think about nonpublic schools, a lot of their parents already carpool and this would be carpooling in school busses instead of carpooling in cars and there's a proposal that would establish a new statewide funding system for schools.

Basically, the state collects 20 mills for property tax, and the state sales tax would go up by 1.75%.

So making it 7.5%.

But part of that bill would shift bussing away from individual districts to regional educational service centers.

Is that something that you think could work?

I mean, that Bill's only had one hearing, so I don't know if it's going to pass, but would that work?

We're still covering the same time and distance with the same number of drivers.

And if we have the same number of schools to go to by regional, that you're not you're not finding, more ways to do it, you're finding a way to do it for everybody.

And most reasonable versions won't work because, who sets the time frames?

Who sets the bells?

Schedules?

All these school districts have individual teacher contracts that have set times for starts and ends.

And the custodians and and the support staff, they all have these individual, contracts.

I, I don't see how you could get that all to work together to find a better solution to free up busses at different parts of the time and day.

Republican Senator Andrew Brenner chairs the Ohio Senate Education Committee.

He supports vouchers, but says the major expansion of that is part of the issue.

He's been looking into school transportation as well, including as a member of a Department of Education and Workforce committee.

Studying why getting your kids to school on busses has become so expensive.

think part of that is we have had a major expansion of school choice, and a lot of kids are now using alternatives or going to alternative schools that didn't in the past.

And we and I think that's part of it now we have budgeted for that.

But obviously because of inflation over the last 5 or 6 years, those costs have gone up beyond that.

But actually overall enrollment, as you mentioned, has actually gone down in our traditional public schools pretty significantly by about 5% since 2020.

So but given that there are still a lot of problems and, you know, you can talk to pretty much any major urban school district, they've had problems.

One of the thoughts that I've had, and we did put, by the way, in the state budget, a study committee to study school transportation, work group that the Department of Educational Workforce has been, convening.

I is an ex-officio I'm a member of that.

And, you know, they're coming over different ideas.

I've been a little frustrated because it feels like it's been coming from one side, and from the public school, from the public school side, when the bulk of the problems are actually coming from kids that are going to community schools, which are which are public schools, but they're just, you know, privately managed, from a standpoint of they've got their own types of curriculums and ways of teaching and kids can go to those schools and, from the charter, nonpublic schools like Catholic schools and others, there have been a lot of problems.

So we're trying to come up with solutions.

And I even proposed my own proposal in Senate Bill 93, where I think what we need to do is we need to consider regionalization and not just have, school transportation for one district, but regionalize it and basically require a synchronization of Bell schedules for all schools.

It doesn't matter if you're going to a traditional public school or private school or whatever.

All kids in Ohio are required to be transported.

And when you have large amount of kids that just aren't being transported, that's a problem.

So I think that if you regionalize that you do a couple things.

Number one, if you do that, what you're going to end up doing is, you're going to have pools of substitute bus drivers, which I think will help, because what I'm hearing is that there's, you know, bus driver shortages because they can now go work at Amazon making more money.

They've got regular hours and full time pay and benefits.

Whereas a lot of, you know, bus drivers that are on traditional schools, their routes are, you know, they're they're full time, but it's a lot less pay because they're not working as many hours as you would, doing like an Amazon.

So I think if you were to regionalize that you could get pulls of bus drivers that are part time, but they're full time.

So that they can go do substitute work where you've got bus driver shortages.

If you synchronize the bell schedules, I think they can work the routing out better.

I think that they need to also consider looking at if you can regionalize it, using the modern software to be able to better plan the routes more efficiently, because right now you've got neighboring school districts that are but the different school busses will go up and down those same streets.

That's a redundancy that could potentially be eliminated.

And that will save costs.

And it will also allow for for more bus drivers to work.

And I think that the transportation workgroup is looking at a lot of these options.

Does do you run into a problem with synchronizing Bell schedules with employee contracts, teachers and others who are under contracts that specifically indicate what hours they're supposed to work?

I believe that probably will be an issue that's gonna have to be worked out probably over the next couple of years.

I suspect if we do get some legislation passed, we'll probably say, look, when those contracts expire, they're going to have to now adjust to this new setup.

But I think if kids are on time and going to school, which has been the biggest complaint I've heard from community schools and Charter Nonpublic, is that they're not going there and not getting there on time or they're not being picked up or they're not being dropped off.

That's a huge problem.

But the other issue that's at play here is we also have a high chronic absentee rate and the high chronic absentee rate among a lot of the schools is because many of these kids aren't being picked up.

I've heard that some, public schools, are considering dropping their bussing.

I, I think Columbus Public is considering it for the high school students, which they're not required to.

However, when you've got school districts with high chronic absentee rates, I think that should also be taken into consideration.

I think maybe we're contemplating a changing the law there that if, the state average chronic absentee rate right now is about 26%, which is way higher than it was before the pandemic, that needs to be brought down.

But I think that, if you've got a chronic absentee rate this way beyond the state average, that I think that those kids should be transported regardless of whether they're allowed to or not, because, you've got to get those kids into those schools, and if they're not being picked up, they're probably having a higher probability of not showing up to school.

Those are going to be the districts, though, that already have the most problems in attracting bus drivers and that sort of thing.

Those are going to be the big urban districts cracks.

So again, and I think that's why we should consider this regionalization approach.

And I in my proposal, I allow education service centers to try to take over the management.

I think you're going to need to find companies and software and organizations that have been doing it for a long time that are and are doing it well and bring them in to help with this.

Because and I can understand that, Columbus Public Schools, they, they do have an argument.

They're only allowed to have one, transfer, for those students within the busses.

Maybe we should be allowing the two transfers.

So if you've got a kid in the southern side of Columbus Public Schools that wants to go to a charter school in the northwest side, that's not easy to get that kid from point A to B. So we have allowed and we're trying to allow more flexibility there.

And I think that's something that needs to be looked at as well.

I think we put in the budget, transportation budget last year, I think, Nathan Manning helped put this in, was an amendment that essentially allows for these alternative forms of transportation to be able to be used.

We're still working through some of that.

There were some issues, I think, around Uber and some of those things to make sure, you know, you have proper background checks and you're not putting, you know, little kids and something where you don't now.

But I think that there's some ways we can help mitigate that as well.

And I think there's some things we're working on there that will hopefully solve that transportation issue for those districts, going forward.

But should the state consider just requiring nonpublic schools to transport their own kids?

Well, we could do that.

And I think that's an option.

I know we've had several of the charter schools as well as a charter nonpublic say, look, if you pay us, maybe we will transport our we could transport our own kids.

I think that's definitely an option that's on the table.

The problem is most charter schools are one charter school, maybe 3 or 400 kids.

There are some charter school networks.

I think they can do it.

I think there's some, you know, like Catholic networks that could potentially do it.

But I think there's a big issue with the a lot of the smaller charter schools that wouldn't be able to do that.

So I think maybe we should allow some flexibility for where the where they can do it.

Let them do it now where they can't try to maybe get them to, come to some coordination among those charter schools to maybe come up with their own network and a consortium to be able to transport their own kids.

And I think I'm open to that.

And I think that, the school districts are open to all of these various options as well.

The idea of a school bus driver shortage, because you can't get the drivers, there's a lot of competition, but there's also the pay issue here.

Do you believe that the school bus driver shortage is significant?

I mean, more than 90% of the school districts say they're having this as a serious problem.

They're saying this, I've not I've seen some data that would back up some of it.

But I think that there's a situation where the competition for things like Uber, where you've got Uber drivers, they can go make some decent money doing that with their own vehicles.

Then you've also gone you've got other transportation, such as the logistics companies.

They're taking a lot of those bus drivers away.

And I think that is an issue, in which case higher pay is needed.

But we have, in each of these last several budgets, increase the amount of money going for transportation, to help cover those costs.

Some of it is kept up.

I think some of it hasn't.

Depends on the area.

You know, we had rural school districts that have had this issue for a long time, but in the case of rural school districts, there isn't really any other choice, though.

So you go to a rural district in in parts of my area, like in Coshocton County, you've got just a couple of school systems.

There isn't a charter school, there isn't necessarily a Catholic school or something else competing.

So you're just transporting your own kids.

And that also become an issue.

Brenner is also sponsoring a bill that would allow for the shutdown of poor performing public schools based on certain metrics.

Unless most of the staff is replaced or an entity with expertise in school improvement is brought in.

We'll have that next week.

And that's it for this week.

My colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

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Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter, right, is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter.

Right.

Com Porter Wright inspired every day.

You know, Ohio Education Association representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at o h e talk.