Being at the bottom line of a budget item hurts local students

By the time the news came that the Amherst Steele News Live program was facing its demise, instructor Hannah Dougall wasn't really surprised — but still devastated. "I had a bad gut feeling after our November levy failed but I was holding out hope for a really long time," she said. Dougall, who had taken the job when school started, figured she'd be one of the first to go when the district cut 48 jobs as part of its $13.2 million budget reductions after voters rejected a 1.5 percent earned-income tax. The last show aired May 21, marking the end of a 40-year run of the student-run morning news show that gave generations of Comets a spotlight on issues that mattered to them. Most importantly, it gave them an opportunity to spotlight themselves. "That's where the real loss is," Mark Lowrie, who led SNL until 2019, said. "It's the vehicle where excellence got saluted. It served all the students, represented all the student body. Those kids deserve the attention, they deserve the spotlight. Maybe it's an Eagle Scout. Maybe it's a kid that gets a perfect score on the SAT, or a theater kid. But now it's back to the PA announcements in the morning. After 40 years, that's kind of hard to swallow." Even after the cuts, the district returned to voters again earlier this month, dropping its ask in half. Voters again said no. School officials already have said they have no choice but to try to ask again for something this November, based on the abysmal shortfall they face no matter what they do, since state and local officials have hamstrung their finances. It's the same story heard around Ohio in a lot of places these days: rising costs on top of a rampantly flawed school funding system that forces districts to continually return, hat in hand. Sophomores through seniors took intro- and advanced-level classes, learning how to make films, ads and shows along with the daily news, while earning college credits for their work. "It helped me a lot to decide my future career," Caitlyn Gilboy, a new graduate who'd been part of the SNL team for three years, said. She plans to study graphic and scenic design and is finishing her associate degree at Lorain County Community College. "It was a graded class, but we were graded on stuff we loved to do," she said. "When I came in my freshman year and I saw the senior class on the news, it's the reason I got into it the next year. My life would be completely different if I didn't get it into it." Dave Cotton started the program in 1986. It began as an arrangement with a local cable company and the city to provide a television studio, which was set up in the high school. At first it more of a club than a class, with student volunteers running it like a cable-access channel. There was a cooking show, a morning talk show format with community members as guest, a Saturday morning clown show with elementary students, City Council coverage. Eventually they started the morning news broadcasts that became their hallmark. "I'm more than sad," Cotton said. "All these current students who just loved what they've been learning, are now they are cut off from that. I went to Amherst High School as a student, graduated, and came back to teach there. Sports always dominated, sports always got whatever they needed. And this just feels like one more thing of what happened there. We were the second high school in the whole state to have a TV studio when we started, and now lots of other schools have them, and we've thrown ours away." Cotton passed on the job to Lowrie, who now leads a similar program at Gahanna Lincoln High School near Columbus. In Lowrie's 18 years there, his students won 55 regional student Emmys and three national student Emmys. It won a few more in the past few years before Dougall came, and was nominated for one this year as well. Under Lowrie's tutelage, students wore hidden cameras and did ride-alongs with Amherst police to see how easy it was for minors to buy alcohol at local businesses. They did a similar investigation to purchase opana, a street drug popular at the time, and a Cleveland TV station came out to interview the student reporters to follow their report. Student reporters won a regional Emmy and were nominated for a national award for a story on transgender students. They won a National Scholastic Press Association News Story of the Year award for a story on heroin abuse in Lorain County. "We were not just reading announcements, we were doing real journalism," Lowrie said. But in a state where billions are shifted into private vouchers and away from public schools, these are the headlines: In fiscal year 2025, more than $1 billion went to private schools. Nearly that much went to private schools in 2024, too. Policy Matters Ohio, a nonpartisan research group, found that K-12 schools are being underfunded by nearly $3 billion over the next two years. When you vote for people who decide the best use of your tax dollars is to hand it to people who often already send their children to private school to fund their tuition payments, this is what happens. These are Ohio's priorities. These are Amherst's priorities. Even if voters earlier this month would have said yes, it would not have resurrected SNL. Nor would it have saved Amherst's entire French program or the several elementary school teachers now gone, the busing for high schoolers. You get what you vote for, but in Ohio that gets more puzzling by the day. "It's sad to see that opportunities are being taken away from students because of cuts. I'm not mad at Amherst, it's not their fault," Dougall, who will continue on contract as the theater director, said. "I had a lot of underclassman and all of them were planning to come back and there isn't something else they want to take." "The state isn't helping anybody. Regardless of how successful you are, everybody is getting cut," Lowrie said. "'Mr. Holland's Opus' is one of my favorite movies and one of his lines says 'if you just have reading, writing and arithmetic, pretty soon you'll have nothing to read or write about.'" Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.