Kasich will focus on job training

COLUMBUS

Gov. John Kasich has given a few hints about topics he’ll cover in his State of the State speech over in Steubenville.

The location, a high-ranking public school, means education issues will be front and center. That’s a no-brainer. It would be hard to get through a State of the State without some focus on education and school funding reform.

As he’s done in countless other speeches, Kasich will probably talk about the state’s dismal high school and community college graduation rates, about the need for a coordinated, noncompetitive system of public universities and about ways to keep more students in Ohio — employed in high-paying occupations — after they earn their degrees.

Kasich also will use the Steubenville site to tout the potential economic boon and the cautious approach his administration is taking to horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, an emerging means of extracting oil and gas from shale deposits deep underground.

(Though let’s hope he drops the “foreigners” joke that often goes along with those comments, foreigners being people from other states. It may have been funny the first 20 times, but it’s getting old.)

It’s hard to imagine a Kasich speech in which he doesn’t go over the growing list of accomplishments under his leadership — criminal sentencing reform, Medicaid reform, tax cuts. You’ll hear about the $8 billion budget hole he filled, the drop in unemployment rates, JobsOhio. He may take a few swipes at us media types for not writing enough stories on such issues.

Seminal issue

But one of the biggest issues Kasich could tackle in his annual speech to the Ohio House and Senate concerns job training, which he last week called his seminal issue of 2012.

“We have to train people for jobs that exist and give them the skills they need,” Kasich told an audience representing career technical schools. “... We need to get the universities to begin to [understand] that they’ve to start enrolling kids, committing to graduating them for what’s out there. And the same is true for community colleges.”

Kasich has been talking about the need to improve the state’s job-training programs since before he was elected governor. During the campaign, he outlined plans to consolidate and overhaul the existing job-training programs — 77 or so housed in 13 different government entities.

“Nobody knows what anybody else is doing,” Kasich said of the structure. “No accountability. That’s typical of government, just create a program, don’t care if it works.”

The governor wants businesses to forecast their labor needs, then work through schools, particularly community colleges, to ensure there are enough people with the right skills to fills job openings.

“If you don’t know what they need, how are they supposed to train people for it?” Kasich said, adding, “We’re going to create a work force operation inside the governor’s office. We will have business people that will serve on that. This is going to be a big overhaul.”

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.