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Ohio voters won't decide on a minimum wage hike this fall.

We look into why.

And an Ohio based program is bringing tens of thousands of public school kids to Bible study with parents right at the heart of the debate over it.

That's this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

The plan to overhaul the process for drawing lawmakers district lines seems likely to be the only one on the fall ballot after backers turned down nearly double the number of valid signatures they need.

But a group hoping to ask voters to increase the minimum wage in Ohio said at the deadline on July 30th.

It was close, but did not get enough signatures in some rural counties.

But as my Statehouse news Bureau colleague Sarah Donaldson reports, what went wrong with the campaign depends on who you ask.

For months, paid circulators and volunteers with Raise the Wage Ohio have been getting signatures to put a proposed constitutional amendment before voters.

The amendment would have boosted the minimum wage in the state for most workers to $12.75 per hour by 2025, and $15 per hour by 2026.

It also would have eventually gotten rid of the sub minimum wage for some workers making gratuities like servers and bartenders.

That stuck out to Evan Holt.

Holt is a long time restaurant and bar worker who ran for Cincinnati City Council and lost in 2021.

He says he cared about the issue, but that raised the wage.

Ohio's effort was marred by dysfunction and mismanagement.

It seemed like a huge waste of time, effort on my part.

Hope work.

Two brief stints with Raise the Wage Ohio, leading canvasing efforts in Cincinnati and its suburbs.

At first, he says, it was a struggle to get anything in the office because more pens and more printer ink and things like that.

And somehow we were like, never getting these basic things that we needed.

Within a few months, Holl quit because of issues with the regional organizing director, who he says was fired a month later.

He started again in October and then left again by early 2024, saying he felt frustrated with the way it was being led to canvassers managing the office in his absence eventually quit too.

We could call one thing one week and the next week we're doing something different, you know.

Moriah Ross, the initiative state director, did not answer a request for comment on Holt's allegations.

Two days before signatures were due, the anti gerrymandering organization Citizens Not Politicians was celebrating submitting nearly double the number of signatures needed in the Ohio State House atrium.

Volunteers with Raise the Wage.

Ohio lingered on the peripheral for a last minute signature push.

Ben Kindle, a spokesperson with Secretary of State Frank LaRosa office, says his interactions were similarly disorganized.

They were told several different signature delivery times before raise the wage.

Ohio decided not to submit.

The organization blamed some of its shortfalls on violence and intimidation toward its nonwhite canvassers.

A statement on July 3rd said they were verbally abused and harassed.

It was the first time the potential issue had been highlighted publicly.

In an earlier interview, Ross said.

Some of that alleged treatment came from law enforcement agencies, including the Dark and Preble County Sheriff's Offices.

We even had sheriffs in multiple counties escort our canvassers out of the county, telling them, if you want to collect in my county, you need a permit from us.

But both sheriff's offices rebutted those claims.

Stark County Sheriff Mark Whitaker said one of his men told a person circulating a petition to move on from a ten at the sales Poultry days in mid-June.

The Dark County Sheriff's Office did not ask or anybody to the county line or throw anybody out of the county.

Circulating a petition is a right guaranteed under the First Amendment, but it can get dicey in places that are not entirely public.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it's not soliciting to gather signatures outside of a festival or affair held on public grounds, but organizers can prevent canvassers from doing so within the event.

Ross says, raised the wage Ohio did not file anything officially on the violence and intimidation claim.

When asked why he did not offer more details about or evidence of the alleged dark in Pueblo County incidents, Holt says his canvassers never ventured outside of the Greater Cincinnati area, but that nothing, to his knowledge on his watch cross into threats of violence.

The coalition will try again for 2025, a year likely to see significantly lower turnout, although they are eyeing a later ballot.

Ross says they want to submit all their signatures by the end of this summer, so that fewer are invalidated.

We don't want to waste the work that has gone into this from all the people who are canvasing for us.

To all the people who have signed up, it's all the money that has been invested.

We don't want to waste that.

Hold said he wasn't shocked when he saw the organization didn't make the ballot.

He did feel discouraged.

I just don't know why it had to be the way it was.

Of the 28 proposals to increase the minimum wage in states across the country since 1996, 26 of them have gone through their Donaldson.

Statehouse.

News bureau.

This week, a former teacher hired by the Ohio based Christian nonprofit Lifeways Academy was dismissed after it was publicly revealed that she had been fired from a high school teaching position in 2018.

Over reports that she sent sexual and explicit texts to students.

A member of the group Parents Against Life, Wise, is taking credit for discovering the teacher's past, which LifeWay said she didn't fully disclose, though she never faced charges.

But the incident has fueled more criticism against the program, which is enrolled 30,000 students in 12 states since it started in 2019.

Life wise, which is based in Hilliard, allows kids to leave school for Bible based instruction.

That's privately funded but free to participants.

Life wise features a sample of its curriculum on its website.

Life wise is suing Zachary Parish of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for copyright infringement for publishing the full curriculum after he accessed it on the LifeWay site.

Parrish is one of the founders of Parents Against Life Wise, and the father of an elementary school student whose school participates in the program.

I was just looking and investigating.

I mean, really, yeah, it wasn't it with the intent to go look at the curriculum?

No, but it was just with the intent to see what it was about, to look at the background checks, to look at the training, to look at the certification.

I definitely had no intent of being a volunteer.

I was just trying to gather information and I got into the curriculum, but that was not my intent of what I was looking for specifically.

And now, Molly, you met up with Zachary, through the internet, essentially that, there were these posts out there about what was going on life wise.

So you are also concerned about what life wise has been teaching kids, essentially?

Yeah, absolutely.

you know, from what we've heard, they're touting themselves as non-denominational.

They're making themselves seem to be very innocent, like, your Bible school from the past, you know, that our grandparents would have talked about singing songs, coloring this sort of thing.

and the further we dig, the more we find out, and the more it becomes apparent that that is not what it's occurring.

they're very in-depth.

curriculums for elementary school kids, stuff that's dealing with, like, Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of Ruth.

just some things that are they they require a nuanced, you know, talk when you're dealing with young children for these types of lessons.

And these teachers don't have any certifications.

They're not required to.

so that's, that's concerning in and of its own.

and then I, you know, like you said, the further we got into it, the more we discovered and they're not doing background checks.

It's basically a consumer report.

You know, they can tell you that they're doing a background check.

but that there's so many different kinds of background checks that you need to really find out what it is that they're doing.

And we found out that they were at the time using a company called Protect My Ministry.

and that is where Zach would have put his information.

And just as though he was wanting to be a volunteer.

and he did submit all of his real information.

Zach has, a bit of a past from being younger.

Nothing serious.

Drugs and alcohol, that sort of thing.

But he would not have been given an Ohio teaching license ever.

Currently at this state in time in his life.

If he wanted to, he would not be given one.

And life was passed him through immediately, gave him access to all the training materials, gave him a certificate.

He could go right now and buy a LifeWay shirt.

Well, anyone can do that.

I haven't take the training and I have a life white shirt.

so.

But he could go and do that and walk up to a school and essentially pass himself off as being someone who is affiliated and works with life wise.

What did you find when you got into the curriculum?

Because, again, the curriculum is not posted on the Life Wise website.

It's just a sample curriculum.

What did you find out and what did you do with that when you found it out?

Oh, well, I mean, it's kind of the typical thing that you would think it is.

It's, you know, marriages between a man and a woman that's referenced in there a couple times.

It's just that kind of stuff.

And like Molly was saying, it's just these nuanced topics, you know, they're talking about suicide and some lessons and things like that.

purity culture.

You see all of that stuff when you look in the lessons and I posted online on my website that we made Parents Against Life was not online because I believe parents have the right to see that.

I believe they should be able to review that.

If if this organization is coming into our public schools and asking us to sign over the custody from the public schools to them, they should be providing the curriculum to us to review or the schools or the churches or anybody.

I'm not a lawyer.

I've been talking to lawyers.

They say I have a pretty good defense for fair use of a couple other things to the lawyers I've talked to are very confident they can get a dismissal, if not a whole defense against this.

So we'll see what happens.

I'm not going to I'm not going to settle.

So if they want to fight and they want to drag this out, I will too.

And it wasn't me that took the material down voluntarily.

It was taken down by the website.

So Molly up to me.

It would still be up.

Molly.

These kind of release time programs for religious instruction are legal, have been legal since 1952 with the U.S. Supreme Court.

So what lifeways is doing is legal, They're exploiting that wall that was meant for minority children.

That was initially meant, we need to discuss this to for people that couldn't afford private religious education, you know, so this would have been a public school child who was maybe needed to get that education to get their their bar mitzvah done.

They would go and they would do this, you know what I mean?

And they wouldn't have to go to a private Jewish school to do so.

They could still go to their public school.

And that was what it was originally meant for.

And they are using it, for their own advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else.

This is not the only, Ohio is where we are, but it's not the only state that they're affecting.

they've already went through and lobbied life places, lobbied for Indiana to pass hate.

House Bill 1137.

It's passed.

They went in and lobbied for Jill Pence spoke and lobbied for Oklahoma House Bill 1425.

It passed.

So Indiana passed in March.

Oklahoma passed in May.

In Ohio, they have HB 445.

And, that's in process right now.

We have not yet been able to voice our opposition.

We're waiting for that moment for that.

She has to do so.

but that would change one word in the Ohio law from May to Shiloh.

And right now, the only way that a school board or a school district can keep lifeways out is to not have an arbitrary policy.

The only reason a school would have in our tri policy, traditionally, would be that we, as a family or a student would come to them and say, I need this for my religious faith, my learning, my schooling, this, and they would give them where they're going, etc., etc.. you know, but that's that's not what's happening here.

And you know, for an MPO, we're having a lot of trouble understanding how he's allowed to go on and lobby and speak so much and push so much and be involved in so much of our politics and our state laws.

This is not MPO, this is not how MPOs are supposed to, you know, conduct themselves.

So that's a lot of concern too.

I want to ask exactly one more question about the, response to the lawsuit from likewise.

it has said that your primary goal is to damage its reputation and galvanize parents to oppose Lifeways Academy chapters in their communities.

Is that what you're trying to do, or are you just showing parents what is out there?

Well, I, I guess it's both, to be honest with you.

I mean, the parents need to see this stuff, but people need to be aware.

I'm not I'm not galvanizing them.

I'm showing them what's there.

They're making their own decisions and opinions.

The whole thing was, life wise, has been doing this behind closed doors.

They've been targeting these rural communities where they get no pushback.

They talk to the school boards behind closed doors.

They send emails directly to them.

They are so intermingled with our schools.

And by the time anybody in the community knows about it, it's too late.

They're already already right.

They're already enrolling children by that point.

And all the parents are shocked and they don't know what to do.

And they're told by their administrators and their superintendents, our hands are tied lives.

The doors, the fire City schools is where I started with this.

And I brought the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and they sent a letter to them.

And the school's lawyers basically called me a liar.

So it's definitely personal for me.

I had all the receipts.

There was a lawsuit to be made at defiance, and they didn't do it.

So it definitely during personal for me.

They're I know the folks who are supporting life wise and House Bill 445 I said, this is, you know, parents have a right to be involved in their child's education.

So I just want to close, Zach, don't parents have a right to say I want my kid to be able to attend a religious instruction during the day?

Absolutely.

This isn't about shutting down religious instruction.

That's not what this is about at all.

It's about they should be maintaining the same standards and same transparency as everybody else.

They shouldn't be disrupting the school day.

They shouldn't be taking away from Art and Jim as a whole.

If parents want to choose to take their kids out of a class, that's fine.

But they are coming in and having schools rearrange the schedule to accommodate them.

You know, I think it's it's I think it's awful.

I'm going to be honest with you.

Do the parents have a right?

Yes.

What about our rights?

I'm a parent.

Zach is a parent.

There's hundreds of parents that have talked to us that have provided their testimony about their lives and how it's affected them and their children and the crying and the trauma.

What about our rights in our country?

We have come so far since 1952.

There's vouchers.

There are so many things that you can do to provide your child with a religious education.

That is not going to encroach on my child's public school day.

There shouldn't be any peer pressure.

There shouldn't be you having to go to school and worry about not fitting in, because you don't go to a religious club that the other kids go to.

In a lot of cases, that's because your parents won't allow you to.

What kind of what kind of situation are we setting up in our elementary schools for these kids?

They're already dealing with racial, racial divide and political divide from their families.

And, you know, everything else.

And we're going to add this into, you know, it used to be that we didn't discuss this sort of stuff, you know, and this is why it's supposed to be separate.

but Life Wise has influential backers, including Representative Gary Click.

He's a sponsor of the bill that would require schools to allow release time for religious instruction.

And as a pastor in his district in western Ohio.

the change from May to shall make sure we ensure the parent's rights to make choices for their children.

So it says that the school shall have a policy and does not dictate what the policy is.

But it says that you should have a policy for most schools, it's not going to be to change.

75% of schools in Ohio have a policy.

there's just a few schools who, for whatever their reasons are, are refusing to allow parents to have their rights to direct their children's religious education.

And so we just want to make sure that parents are entitled to make the choices for their children.

So it does require that students are released to go to religious instruction.

Yes, it requires that they have a policy, regarding that, it doesn't say what the policy is, because it leaves a broad parameter of choices for the schools because we want it to work, everywhere and every school's not the same.

Every situation is not the same.

All circumstances are not the same.

But we just want to make sure that parents and children have the rights.

Now it seems like it's I know it's been in existence before, but life wise, obviously, and it's the number of students who have signed up for that has kind of pushed this forward a little bit.

Why shouldn't these release programs be targeted at things that are before or after school programs?

Why release kids during a school day when there's so many things teachers need to be teaching and so little time to do it?

Well, that's a very good question, Karen.

So there's two parts.

And first of all, the reason is because some kids are left out because maybe they ride the bus and they don't have transportation.

And if it's before or after school, those those kids are eliminated from the process and that opportunity.

So this ensures that they have the time to do it.

And it works in every school.

They cannot miss core curriculum or court classes.

The amount of time needed is not a huge amount of time.

And many schools make it work by, you know, using lunch in recess.

So not only are they not missing core classes, they're not missing any classes, and the kids have a great time.

And then there's actually been studies done that report that actual school attendance increases.

we find that in school discipline, in school suspensions are decreased.

Out of school suspensions are decreased.

It has a very positive effect on, behavior of the students.

it helps the students self-image and their self-worth.

It's just really a net win win all the way around, and it does not interfere.

so many administrators and many school teachers have implemented this and used this, without any incident or any problem.

But, there are people out there who really, I think just for a minute reasons, they keep creating all these boogeymen and say, well, this will happen and that will happen.

But really, that's never been proven to be the case.

The things that you're citing there are those studies specifically on the life wise didn't does those statistics and those things come from life wise itself, or are these all sorts of release programs that have been in existence for a while?

Well, life wise commissioned the study.

and so it does this very specifically, I believe, with life wise, but they're really the largest players in the field.

You know, they saw that this was, something that was available.

They just started on a small scale and they said, well, maybe we can be in 25 schools by 2025.

And I think, you know, they're already and three that aim somewhere between 3 and 500 schools.

And that doesn't happen unless you're doing things right.

they are very successful.

schools have found that it's done very efficiently.

The teachers are well trained, well prepared.

They have an efficient system to get the kids where they're going to get them back to cause a minimal amount of interference in the schools.

If they weren't doing their job right, it wouldn't be popular.

Now, wife wise is suing a Indiana man who got a hold of the curriculum and published it on his website.

He's take it's been taken down now, but I want to ask you the wife on his website lists sample curriculum, but you can't access the full curriculum.

Now, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is website notes that Ohio law is parents and guardians, the right to review curriculum that's being taught in their kids schools.

So I know life wise does a lot of things well.

There's all the things off school property, but shouldn't parents have the right to look at what life wise is doing their full curriculum and look it over and judge for themselves?

Well, I think you're really talking about two separate issues.

of course, I 100% believe in parents rights.

And I think parents can make that request, to life wise into the officials.

that's not what happened here, though.

This is somebody who, for bigoted reasons, went and stole something.

And it really it copyright laws exist for a reason.

And just because, you know, he's a vigilante and and really, it's just based on bigotry.

And so he goes and steals something and puts it out there.

You know, you can't go steal a CD or CD.

That's just how old I am.

DVD or VHS, you know, you can't just go steal other people's intellectual property and post it.

That that's common sense.

Everyone knows that, and he's just doing that to try to harm, them.

As far as I know, I really don't know much more than, you know, I just what I've read about it in the papers, but it makes no sense for him to claim to be doing something right.

You know, he's trying to be a Robin Hood, but he's just acting like a hood.

I know that the concern about the current.

I know the concern about the curriculum not being able to be read is one of the things that's been brought up.

But there's another thing that some critics have brought up is that the people who work with life wise have not gone through background checks.

And I'm wondering, you've probably been in touch with the folks with life wise.

Is that the case?

Are these teachers and the drivers of vehicles that take the kids back and forth?

Are they fully vetted and background checked?

So there's two answers to that.

Number one, yes they are.

They do run a background check on everyone that is a part of their program.

But the second answer to that is that, remember, schools get to create the policy and a school can add that to the policy.

There's no nothing that would stop a school from saying that's part of their policy.

And you're also a co-sponsor of a bill that would allow schools to have chaplains.

And you have said that this what you've got here of the, release policy is open to opportunities of all faiths.

But there are certainly people that look at the chaplains idea, some of the other proposals, and think that the legislature is inviting the church, especially the Christian church, in the public schools where kids of all faiths and even no faith are there to get their education.

How do you respond to that?

I don't know.

So and I think a lot of people want to mischaracterize things.

So, so and let me just speak from experience.

I have been a chaplain.

I've been a law enforcement chaplain.

I did that for a decade.

And sometimes people just need somebody who's going to sit and listen to them and talk with them, you know?

And and I was a hospice chaplain for a few years as well.

And as a hospice chaplain, I didn't say, well, what is your religion?

You know, I can't pray with you if you're not my religion or and I never force my religion on anyone.

Sometimes it's really in certain times somebody, it's really like a mentor.

And you're there for someone and you can talk just some basic common sense to them.

You're not necessarily a mental health professional, but that's not always what people want or always what people need.

And they need somebody.

And maybe they just so many times people just said, hey, could you just pray with me?

And to be able to offer up a prayer or to give some practical wisdom, some practical advice, some character building instruction, and people read too much into this.

That's not there.

And I had something.

I had an atheist, one time when I was a hospice chaplain, his wife was in the program, and I would go and I would visit and we talked in different things.

And the only thing is I we kind of both laughed because I had to tell him.

I said, you're not an atheist.

He says, I'm not.

I said, no.

He said, well, what am I?

I said, you're an agnostic because he didn't know the difference between an agnostic and an atheist, and which he says, I don't think you can know, which is that's agnostic.

An atheist says, definitely there is no God.

And I'm probably getting too detailed for you here.

But, but his wife got better for a little while, and she was no longer in hospice, and so I, I wasn't visiting anymore.

And she did come back into hospice.

He says, oh, I couldn't wait to you came back and we were I didn't push my faith on him.

I'd I'd ask you any answer, any questions he had.

And we just had good conversations and I'd pray for him and his wife and and they were happy because you don't have to force anything on someone to be an effective chaplain.

We mean a chaplain.

Ministers to everyone.

and you meet people where they are.

Click says he thinks there's a place for religion in public schools and everywhere because quoting him, in our country, we have the freedom of religion, not the freedom from religion.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News Talk or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

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Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts, and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

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 Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.