Changes in Ohio education undercut Youngstown’s case

Over a period of 40 years, there have been several attempts by residents of Coitsville Township to sever their ties with the Youngstown City School District.

The Ohio Department of Eduction has traditionally rejected attempts to redraw school district lines in most circumstances, and it has consistently rejected requests that Coitsville be permitted to withdraw from Youngstown. The most recent request was that Coitsville be divided among the Hubbard, Lowellville and Struthers school districts.

But for better or worse — better for Coitsville students, their parents seem to be saying, and worse for Youngstown, which would lose part of its tax base — Coitsville may be on the verge of success.

That’s because much has changed over the last 40 years in Ohio law, in the demands placed on school districts to perform to certain standards and, perhaps most important, in the way the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in cases that pit issues of racial balance against issues of individual rights.

In the most recent case, the Ohio State Board of Education once again rejected Coitsville’s petition for separation, but this time a Coitsville citizens group appealed to Franklin County Common Pleas Court, and won.

Concerned Citizens for Quality Education is in a much stronger position to prevail today than any group has been in the past.

For one thing, it can now point to the fact that 55 of the 63 children in the township have chosen under open enrollment to attend schools other than Youngstown’s. The realities of open enrollment have given them a chance to argue that Hubbard, Struthers and Lowellville school districts, which are educating almost 90 percent of the township’s children, should be receiving the local school taxes, not Youngstown.

The citizens groups can also point to the fact that the state rates Hubbard, Struthers and Lowellville as excellent school districts, which have met, respectively, 24, 25 and 29 out of 30 quality indicators. Youngstown is rated in academic emergency and met only two of the 30 indicators last year.

That puts Youngstown in the difficult position of arguing that it should continue to collect local school taxes from residents who are already sending their children to other public schools because of Youngstown’s poor performance.

Avoiding chaos

Youngstown’s best argument might be that divvying up a township among three other school districts would invite chaos if it established a precedent that spread across the state. But, frankly, public education in Ohio is already in a state of chaos given open enrollment, the unbridled growth of community schools (some of which fail as spectacularly as the poorest public schools), vouchers that have managed to shift public dollars to parochial education (which the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed) and the growth in home schooling and online schools.

Faced with a demand by the Ohio Supreme Court that it provide an efficient education to Ohio students, the General Assembly decided a decade ago that it would throw the court off its scent by throwing construction money at public school districts. The tactic worked. Eventually the court gave up. Meanwhile school districts like Youngstown spent hundreds of millions of dollars building new schools while their students were being siphoned off by charter schools and vouchers.

Obviously, avoiding chaos hasn’t been a high priority of the Legislature. Whether the Youngstown school district and the Ohio Department of Education can get an appeals court to see some danger in the Franklin County court’s ruling is another question.

In the past, the trump card in this legal dispute was the issue of racial disparity, that is the argument that withdrawing Coitsville’s predominantly white students from the predominantly black Youngstown school district would have a deleterious social effect. Given U.S. Supreme Court rulings on school busing, on student access to magnet schools and on public employment policies — all of which have placed greater value on individual rights than on combatting segregation — that argument is not going to carry the legal weight that it did in the 1970s.

The nation is in the middle of a legal era during which any lawyer has to be more confident arguing for specific individual rights over the fuzzier concept of community welfare. That could make the Coitsville vs. Youngstown battle a fascinating case to watch.