Elect Fedor to the state school board

Teresa Fedor would make an excellent member of the Ohio State Board of Education. The incumbent board member representing District 2, Kirsten Hill, a Republican, isn't seeking a second four-year term. The district includes Erie, Huron, Lorain, Lucas, Ottawa and Wood counties and the northern portion of Hancock County. The state school board's 11 districts are each comprised of three contiguous state Senate districts. However, when GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, created the school board map in January, he was using a state legislative map that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. (The governor appoints another eight members to the 19-member board.) It's further proof that Ohio's redistricting process has been a complete mess. The end result is that the state Senate districts being used this year don't match up with the state school board map, which could create confusion. Although the board seats are nonpartisan on paper, the party affiliations of Fedor and her opponent, Sarah McGervey of Avon Lake, are hardly a secret. In August, McGervey unsuccessfully ran in a Republican primary against Marty Gallagher for the chance to challenge state Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, this fall. Fedor was until Monday a state senator representing the Toledo area as a Democrat. (She announced a little more than a week ago that she was retiring.) She served in the U.S. Air Force and Ohio Air National Guard before becoming a public school teacher, a career that spanned 18 years before she entered politics. Between the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate, she spent 22 years as a state lawmaker. She also was former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley's running mate in his gubernatorial campaign earlier this year. They lost the Democratic primary in May. Part of the reason Fedor, 66, got into politics, she told us in an endorsement interview, was to improve education policy because of what she saw in the classroom. She recalled teaching in cramped quarters, dealing with inadequate training and buying her own supplies. She talked passionately about modernizing education and making sure that all schools have the resources they need to succeed. She has pushed to improve state report cards on schools, to increase oversight of charter schools and to find a better way to fund public schools. She also said she wanted to reduce the focus on standardized testing. Lorain County voters are probably most familiar with her because of her efforts to undo House Bill 70, a disastrous law passed in 2015 that allowed the state to take over academically underperforming districts, including Lorain Schools. Those districts are now working under a plan that would allow them to return to full local control. McGervey, 32, is a Catholic school teacher in Cleveland. She expressed an interest in meeting with us, but ultimately declined after we told her we wouldn't give her our questions in advance. She did, however, send us a news release that summarized the case she's making to voters. "A few of my common sense goals include a curriculum that focuses on the basics, school funding that follows the student, and protecting parental rights," she wrote. School choice was a key component — along with banning abortion — of McGervey's campaign against Gallagher. She argued that taxpayer dollars should follow students to private schools, even if they're religious. Ohio already provides public funding for some students to leave public schools for private and religious schools, but the practice seems to us to infringe on separation of church and state. Reallocating taxpayer dollars to private schools also drains public schools, which often run short of funds they need to educate students. We also are leery of McGervey's claim that she would protect "parental rights." Parents do have a role to play in education, but given McGervey's hard-right stances, we fear she would favor the rights of parents who agree with her politics at the expense of those who don't. For instance, her campaign's Facebook page showed she supported measures such as requiring schools to tell parents if their children asked to be called a different pronoun. She also expressed opposition to a Biden administration rule that ties some federal funding to implementing anti-discrimination policies to protect LGBTQ youth. A resolution is pending before the school board that would urge local school districts to defy that rule. Those who wish to serve on the state school board should be devoted to protecting all students equally. Fedor rightly told us that culture wars shouldn't be waged in the classroom. Rather, she said she would focus on the state school board's mission, which includes crafting education policies based on laws passed by the state legislature, overseeing the Ohio Department of Education and finding a new state superintendent. Fedor made a strong case that she has the policy chops and the experience to help guide Ohio's education policy. Voters should give her the job.