Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutuel, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at med mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

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More at Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online.

At OHEA.org Lawmakers work late before taking off for an extended break and they took on some controversial bills dealing with armed personnel in schools.

Billions of dollars in state spending and tax incentives, and a ban on transgender athletes in school sports.

That's all this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

State lawmakers left Capitol Square after midnight on Wednesday intending not to return until after the November election.

And they did a lot of work before they left town.

One bill lawmakers overwhelmingly agreed on the three and a half billion dollars capital spending bill, and it includes $1.1 billion promised for the Intel Semiconductor chip factory planned for Licking County, including tax incentives and money from the general revenue fund or group.

695 million is growth to go to local roads and the on shoring incentive which of course is 300 million per pad to incentivize groups like Intel to come and build in the United States and in Ohio as compared to the cost of doing it other places you should know though that the that has a clawback provisions of Intel does not in fact go forward.

The state is allowed to claw back those dollars.

The capital bill also includes $608 million in matching funds for K through 12 school buildings.

$557 million in public works money $515 million for projects with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

$457 million for college and university facilities.

$353 million for prisons, and $103 million for juvenile facilities.

The Capitol bill also includes $191 million for local projects.

One of the biggest outlays is $2.4 million for the Lima Community Pool.

Senate President Matt Huffman and Speaker Bob Kopp are both Republicans from Lima.

Other highlights two and a half million dollars each for the Heritage Trail extension and a multipurpose building for the nonprofit Anti-Sex Trafficking Group Grace Haven, both in Franklin County, $2 million each for the Findley Margaret Garage in downtown Cincinnati and the Columbus Symphony Orchestra.

$1.7 million for the Cleveland Zoo, Primate Rainforest.

And $1.4 million for the Columbus Zoo.

One and a half million dollars for Blossom Music Center.

One and a quarter million dollars for the Toledo Museum of Art.

And $1,000,000 each for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Playhouse Square in Cleveland.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The Franklin Park Conservatory.

The Port Regal Theater in Cincinnati.

And the renovation of the historic arcade in Newark.

There was also a separate bill to pour half a billion dollars into projects in Ohio's 32 Appalachian counties.

And it includes $20 million to run the August 2nd primary elections for state House and Senate districts.

The decision on that happened late last Friday with two of three federal judges ordering what they called the best of our bad options to be put into place.

House and Senate maps approved by Republicans on the redistricting commission that were found to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered by the Ohio Supreme Court in March.

Chief Judge Algernon Marbury dissented, saying, quote, The majority's April opinion assured the commission that if it simply waited another month, the panel would enable it to circumvent the Ohio Supreme Court and realize a map with a desire.

Partizan favoritism.

The commission took the invitation.

The maps are split.

54% Republican.

46% Democratic districts.

But the Supreme Court found a disproportionate number of those Democratic seats are tossups.

This week, lawmakers sent to voters two constitutional amendments that they will see this fall.

The First Amendment would require judges to consider the risks to public safety when setting bail for defendants.

But Democrats opposed it, saying there's already a bipartisan bail bill pending in the Senate that Republicans could move forward or that this amendment is a tactic to scare the public and turn out the base in November.

That passed along party lines.

But a resolution to ask voters to clarify in the Constitution that only citizens can vote in Ohio passed unanimously.

And in a late night last minute move before state lawmakers left town until possibly after the fall election, Republicans in the House voted to ban transgender girls and women from competing in high school girls sports or college women's sports in Ohio.

It was after 11 p. M Wednesday when a bipartisan bill that provided resources and mentorship opportunities for new teachers was amended with that controversial proposal, which came up almost exactly a year ago.

Then it was also attached to a popular bill that one wasn't allowing college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness Democrats were furious over that addition, and the transgender affix ban did not pass last June, but it did on Wednesday.

With the support of Republicans and over the strong objections of Democrats.

That bill would have to go to the Ohio Senate for approval before heading to Governor Mike DeWine's desk.

Possibly the biggest of the high profile bills that lawmakers passed on Wednesday was the Republican backed measure that seeks to lower training requirements for armed personnel in schools for more than 700 hours and current law to 24.

It comes less than a week after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in locked classrooms in an elementary school in Texas with armed law enforcement officers standing outside.

DeWine said at an event in northeast Ohio on Thursday that he will sign that bill as a must sign the bill.

We were able, working with the legislature, to make significant improvements in the bill.

My concern has always been that if there's a teacher in the classroom, that the school makes the decision and ultimately this is the school's decision, not mine, but the school makes the decision.

They want to arm a teacher.

It's important that that teacher have sufficient background in that that training be specifically to what happens inside a school building.

The Armed School Personnel Bill will arrive on DeWine's desk less than a week after he was asked what Ohio should be doing.

Following that horrific tragedy in Texas, we continue to pray for the families who have lost children.

There is, I think, nothing in the world that is more difficult or tougher than to lose a child.

And our heart goes out to them and hard for us, frankly, to even imagine the horror they went through that day and what they continue to suffer.

So we think about them.

I want to talk about where Ohio is in regard to protecting our children and school.

We created the Student Wellness and Success Fund.

So far, a $1.2 billion investment is now part of the school funding formula to provide wraparound services for students.

Mental health services are one of the allowable things, but can't they can use this money for so far.

Now the funding this funding has launched 1300 different mental health programs in schools throughout the state of Ohio trained 6500 educators and school professionals.

I want to talk about a little bit more about that in a moment.

During the pandemic, we led the nation in money for mental health in regard to our colleges and universities.

13 and a half million dollars we put directly into these schools.

Next we have invested $84 million.

We just announced one that was going last week.

This is going primarily to children's hospitals.

But again, it's children's mental health.

So I think whether the lawmakers, believe it or not, it could be a message to people who see it as common sense.

A vast majority of people believe an expanded background check.

So even if the legislature here won't pass it, wouldn't it send a message of hope to people who believe in common sense regulations and think what people.

I don't think people want false hope.

I think what people want is for a leader to tell them the truth.

About what's doable and what's not doable.

We can debate and people can write up ads, and that's great.

I mean, they can talk about aspirationally what they would like to do.

My job is to take the world as I find it today and try to improve it.

My job is to make our kids safer and this job will not be done.

If we do all these things in here and and by the way, this is something we're going to have to work on every single day.

The point about having the school safety center is its ongoing work with the schools.

Our schools do not many times have the expertize we want to help get them that expertize some of them have already brought in experts, and that's great.

We just want to make sure there's a uniformity for all the 5300 public schools and the thousands of private schools, too.

So I'm going to focus on things we can do.

I'm going to focus on things that matter.

I'm going to continue to talk with members of the legislature.

As I said, we're going to have to spend some very significant money.

But again, what's more important to our kids, there's nothing more important than our children.

The bill got a long and emotional hearing on Tuesday featuring more than 100 people who wrote or spoke against it, including teachers, unions and law enforcement.

Only three came out in favor of it, including the president of the Business, run by Senator Frank Hoagland, the chair of the committee and the sponsor of the bill.

That company he owns advises schools on security.

Putting a gun in a teacher's hands.

I've been in a lot of schools.

I will be honest with you.

I have teachers that come up to me prior military, prior law enforcement.

They want to volunteer here and do this.

I don't think they're putting.

You guys are going to go out there and say a more you you're going to do it.

It's a voluntary basis.

School shooters are often past or present.

Sorry, I'm nervous.

Past present students.

And this asks teachers or other school staff.

My teachers, the principals who accompany us on school trips who get to know us as people to ask the two.

You're asking them to shoot and potentially kill their own students.

This is an impossible task for them in other chambers.

There are there's testimony happening about how teachers aren't trusted to do a curriculum.

We aren't trusted with the books we choose, but somehow we're supposed to be trusted with a gun in school.

I really hope that the irony is not lost on this committee on the floor.

Hoagland defended the bill and got pushback from the two Democrats on the committee that heard it.

Cecil Thomas, a former police officer, and Teresa Fedor, a former teacher Ohio is taking ownership and the burden of ensuring a safe place for education.

We are developing a professional force that can be integrated into every school across the state with the focus of enhancing and hardening our school safety protocols.

What does that 24 hours entail A small portion of that is firearms training.

A small smidgen Then we got mitigation techniques, communications capabilities and coordination and collaboration techniques, neutralization you know, potential threats and active shooters, accountability, reunification, psychological psychology of critical incident, de-escalation, techniques, crisis intervention, trauma and first first aid kit.

The history and pattern of school shootings.

Tactics of responding to critical incidents in schools.

At least 4 hours of training in scenarios based on stimuli, simulated training exercises.

Completion of tactical live fire arms training, and finally, realistic urban training.

All of that in 24 hours.

25 hours.

This is a madness.

I think it's crazy.

This bill is crazy, and the people support it.

You really need to think about what you're doing because you don't know.

You don't want to be back here when there's a terrible incident.

And everyone in this room will have blood on your hands.

Republican Senators Matt Dolan and Stephanie Coons, he voted with Democrats against the bill, but it passed the Senate and went back to the House since the Senate had changed it.

It passed the house on a mostly party-line vote.

The bill creates a mobile training team funded with $12 million that will develop curriculum and provide instruction for armed school personnel.

And it allows schools to require more training than what's in the bill.

The capital bill I mentioned earlier also puts $100 million in security upgrades in schools and $5 million in security at colleges and universities.

But the lingering question for many is do these expensive and controversial ideas about hardening the soft targets that our school buildings really work to protect the kids inside them from shooters?

And if not, what will?

Brian Warnock is a professor of educational studies and the program chair of the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio State University.

He's written and researched school security going back to before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people, 14 students and three staff members were shot to death in February.

2018.

I completely understand the need to keep kids safe in schools.

Schools should really be places of safety and security.

And I also understand the need for various common sense security practices.

It does seem to be appropriate that we know who is in our schools, that we monitor access and we can control access to schools.

This all makes sense.

But when we start layering security practice upon security practice and we build these fortresses, it can have a negative impact on the school environment.

So we know from the research that when we harden schools in this way, students actually feel less safe, they feel more fearful, they feel more anxious about the environment that they're in.

We also know that security harden.

Schools have less community participation.

There's less a sense of community trust between the school and the community.

There's even less student participation in extracurricular activities.

When we have these schools with these intense security procedures, and we shouldn't forget the lessons of zero tolerance, these policies were put into place in the 1990s in response to school shootings, and they had led to a vast increase in suspensions and expulsions of students.

So all of this, you know, all of this might be worth it if it did make schools safer and if it did prevent school shootings.

But there is little empirical evidence that these practices actually work to make schools safer.

It's interesting that you know that all of this armed security and strengthening of security doesn't make students feel safer.

What about the effect on the student teacher relationship?

It was brought up in the hearing this past week on the Armed School Personnel bill that many school shooters are either current or former students and so you could have a situation where a teacher might be facing a current or former student in a situation like this.

So how does this change that relationship potentially between students and teachers?

Yeah, it is certainly possible that if we arm teachers, we might be in a position where a teacher is asked to shoot one of the students in their in their classrooms.

And it is the case that shooters sometimes come from the school community itself.

They are actually students in that community.

This was true in Columbine.

This was true in Parkland.

This was true in the Virginia Tech shootings.

These are actually students in this in the school communities.

Sometimes it's different.

Sometimes it's an outsider coming in as is as was the case in the situation in Texas.

That was the case in the Sandy Hook school shootings.

But, yes, sometimes it is the shooters themselves coming from the student body.

But I also worry that if we do things like harming, if we do things like arming teachers, we will change the teacher student relationship.

So when everyone when we give somebody a new tool to do their job, it changes how we think about the job that's supposed to be done.

There's the saying that if we give people a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail.

And I don't think teachers are going to start shooting students, but I do worry that it will change how teachers see students instead of being potential learners.

Teachers will see students as potential threats, as somebody who will potentially shoot up the classroom.

And I think that changes how teachers see their job.

It changes how they see the relationships they have with students.

And it will be detrimental to that to that relationship.

And it will also, I think, serve as a distraction from the things that we know do prevent school shootings We have documented cases where school shootings are prevented because students are or are monitoring their friends and their peers and they can tell when a peer is in trouble, when they're making threats or when they're angry.

And these students tell their teachers, the teachers tell the community authorities And there's something that is done that prevents the shooting from happening.

What does this mean?

It means that if we want to prevent school shootings, we need to nurture relationships of trust.

We need to nurture relationships of open communication.

And these are the things which have a documented impact on preventing school shootings.

So arming teachers, I think this is a dist Talked earlier about how making schools into sort of fortresses can have an effect on the community.

It can even have an effect on potentially participation in athletics and extracurricular activities in a lot of suburban areas.

The school is a centrally located place.

Kids could walk to it.

There are athletic fields nearby.

Sometimes other places, like pools and daycare centers, family centered businesses are you concerned about how hardening those targets to keep the kids inside safe?

What the effect might have on the larger community, target hardening like we want to do in schools.

At least that's what the proposal is.

We'll build walls between schools and communities by design.

And that's what that is what it's intended to do.

And we have seen that when schools do this, there is less of that sense of trust between the community and the school.

There is less community involvement in the school.

Schools will seem less open, more shut off.

They will be less these centers of community gathering, less centers of community participation, and more distant island fortresses set apart from the rest of society.

We've also heard a lot about how this is a mental health issue.

And you've even spoken to that, that sometimes students will know what's going on with other students and draw adults attention to that.

But how does that work in practice?

I mean, how do you make sure that happens?

How do you ride that line of making sure that you're not, say, violating the privacy of a student as you're trying to figure out what's going on?

So I think there's a number of things we can do to make schools safer.

Without violating student privacy.

We don't need regimes of surveillance that monitor everything students say.

Students do deserve areas of freedom and areas apart from our social control.

And I think some things we can do or have a really strong school counseling staff have a sufficient number of school counselors within schools that have relationships are able to build relationships with students in the schools and that that will help.

So the school has there the pulse of the student body.

They can serve to help identify problems and building these relationships of trust, making sure that that students can trust teachers and that teachers are open and can communicate, and that there's a sense of trust between schools and communities.

We don't have to violate student rights to privacy in order to detect problems that are going on within the student body.

Students will talk if their peers are in trouble and teachers can talk with authorities and we can prevent school shootings in that way.

There's also we can build threat assessment teams within schools.

These are teams of educators mixed with social workers and law enforcement.

When an issue comes up in schools, these are teams that are trained and dedicated to figuring out if there really is a threat here and what should be done in response to that to that threat.

I would say that I would worry, though, that we're placing so much burden on schools, on teachers and students to to create safe environments that we're forgetting the burden that should be placed on the larger, larger society.

We are placing the burden on students with these that these drills that we put them through, these these run, hide fight trainings, we place the burden on teachers now to be armed guards within schools.

The larger society needs to step back and say, what can we do?

Schools, we want to preserve schools as places of safety.

What do we need to do in the larger society?

What can we do to make our society less prone to gun violence?

And I think placing the burden over and over again on schools to become these safe fortresses misplaced is where the burden should be.

And the burden is also potentially on taxpayers.

As we're talking about some very expensive things in terms of hardening targets.

I mean, there's money in the capital budget for school security, but keeping that all maintained over time But also some of the things you've talked about, a potential expense of hiring counselors and that sort of thing.

This is a this is potentially a taxpayer burden eventually.

Yeah, and I think, frankly, that's one of the things that the larger society needs to do to make school safety.

We need to maybe be prepared for a larger tax burden and to do the things that we need to do to make sure that schools are safe, including increasing counseling staff and fostering programs that maybe build trust between communities and schools.

We need to think to stop thinking we can do this on the cheap.

We need to start thinking that we can preserve our our easy access to firearms arms and that sort of thing.

We need to do things to change the larger society.

And yes, there will be a price tag with some of that.

Well, state legislative leadership says lawmakers are not scheduled to return to the statehouse till the lame duck session after the November election.

It's likely they will come back at least once this summer.

Leaders have expressed interest in passing a total ban on abortion that would be triggered by a US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe versus Wade.

The draft opinion leaked in April suggests that will happen.

So legislators may be back to pass that ban.

And that's it for this week.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our Web site at State Newstalk.

And you can follow us on the show on Facebook and Twitter.

I'll be gone for the next two weeks.

So please join my Statehouse News Bureau colleagues Joe Ingles and Annie Chao.

Next time for the state of Ohio, support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutuel, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at ADMET Mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP Now with eight locations across the country, Porter Wright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community More at Porter right dot com and from the Ohio Education Association representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OHEA.org