ESP Educator Voice Academy
Overview
In 2019, the NEA created the Educator Voice Academies (EVAs) to help build an understanding of opportunities within ESSA and the power of lifting and amplifying educator voices for state and local affiliate members. This effort was led by NEA Education Policy and Practice in partnership with NEA’s Center for Organizing, Center for Social Justice, Center for Advocacy, Center for Great Public Schools, and Center for Governance. The first cycle featured in-person learning opportunities that brought state and local teams together to brainstorm, collaborate, and create plans of action to help continue this work in their school communities. Ohio’s 2019 team chose to organize around improving our state’s school accountability system, and that work helped lead to the successful passage of HB 82, which eliminated the A-F school report card and instituted an OEA-sponsored “student opportunity profile” which will be implemented after the 2022-23 school year.
After the success of the initial Educator Voice Academies, the NEA collectively and collaboratively sought to continue moving this work forward to leverage the voices of our members as partners in delivering equitable opportunities for all students across race, ZIP code, background, and ability. These efforts moved us into the next phase of our work: highlighting educator-created plans to improve public education focused on specific priority issues.
In 2022, OEA formed state Educator Voice Academy teams to address issues related to Teacher Recruitment & Retention and Social & Emotional Learning. From that process, OEA has laid out a comprehensive set of recommendations for addressing the growing educator shortage crisis. (Click here for details.) One of the signature recommendations of the team working on the teacher shortage was establishing a new team to focus specifically on the need to recruit and retain education support professionals (ESPs) in Ohio’s public schools. Acute shortages of bus drivers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, school secretaries, and other essential workers have significantly disrupted student learning, strained school working conditions, and highlighted the need to invest in our ESPs. The OEA Educator Voice Academy cadre for Education Support Professionals will develop advocacy and organizing strategies to ensure every student in Ohio is served by caring, qualified support professionals who are respected, given the resources they need to be successful, and reflect the diversity of our population.
Process
OEA is currently building a team of ESP members from a diverse mix of races, genders, job classifications, experience levels, and education settings from across Ohio. Applications may be submitted using the form linked on this page. This Educator Voice Academy team will be facilitated by an OEA officer with support OEA staff and will draw on resources from NEA. The schedule and format of meetings will be determined by the team, but it will involve a combination of virtual and in-person meetings held between January and the summer of 2023. Members will not be required to meet during normal working hours.
Big wins for pro-public education candidates should give state lawmakers marching orders
“Certain politicians tried to hijack this election season and turn community members against schools and teachers to keep us from coming together to demand that every school get the resources needed to provide every child with a quality education, but Ohioans overwhelmingly rejected that scheme,” Ohio Education Association (OEA) President Scott DiMauro said. “Ohio’s lawmakers have received clear marching orders from the people to support public education by fully implementing the Fair School Funding Plan, blocking the so-called Backpack Bill that would weaken Ohio’s public schools, and championing honesty in education to keep Big Government out of Ohio’s classrooms and ensure the anti-freedom House Bills 327 & 322 never pass.”
Statewide, pro-public education candidates, including a large number of educators, came out on top in their respective school board races, winning more than 80 percent of the contests in Ohio that OEA tracked. “That is a monumental success rate,” DiMauro said. “To put that in perspective, renewal levies – which are essentially the only slam dunk issues on Ohio’s ballots – pass at about that same rate.”
From Columbus to Kings to Centerville, Worthington, Copley-Fairlawn, and Sycamore, among others, whole slates of pro-public education candidates won seats. Slates of anti-honesty in education candidates failed to gain control of school boards across the state, regardless of the makeup of the districts or region.
“Ohio’s voters saw right through all the nonsense and manufactured controversy around masks, vaccines, and curriculum this election season, and Ohio’s lawmakers should take notice: Attacking local public schools is fast becoming the third-rail of Ohio politics,” DiMauro said. “Voters want Ohio policymakers to fulfill their constitutional obligations to provide great schools for all of Ohio’s children regardless of where they’re from or what they look like. The election results should serve as a cold bucket of water to those who are trying to pursue divisive political agendas that have nothing to do with educating kids.”
October-November 2021 Ohio Schools
- COVER STORY: Empowering Students
- 2022 Ohio Teacher of the Year Kurt Russell, a social studies teacher at Oberlin High School, wants his students to be authentic, confident, and know their potential.
- NOTEBOOK
- 2021 NEA Representative Assembly Looks Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities
- MAKING THE GRADE
- OEA Member Receives National Award for Teaching Excellence
Moved recently? Contact the OEA Member Hotline to update the address on file at 1-844-OEA-Info (1-844-632-4636) or email, membership@ohea.org. Representatives are available Monday-Friday, from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. | OhioSchools — Past Issues
Oh Yes, We’re Social — Join the Conversation!
OEA & NEA Recommend Tim Ryan for U.S. Senate
“The Ohio Education Association is proud to recommend a champion of students, public educators, and everyday Ohioans, Congressman Tim Ryan,” said OEA President Scott DiMauro. “We know that Congressman Ryan cares about making sure students at schools like Conesville Elementary in Warsaw, Arbor Hills Middle School in Sylvania, the David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center in Dayton, and their peers across the state have the resources and support they need to grow up and become successful at whatever they want to do in life. Congressman Ryan fought for us in Congress when we needed support during the peak of COVID-19, delivering much-needed federal support, and we know he will continue to fight for Ohio’s students when he gets to the U.S. Senate.”
“Simply put, Rep. Tim Ryan is a champion for America’s students and Ohio’s working families. He is someone who knows how critical it is to ensure that every student – Black and white, Native and newcomer, Hispanic and Asian alike – has access to quality public schools. Tim Ryan understands that educators – those who know the names of the students in the classroom – must have a seat at the table when making education policy. He recognizes that expanding the use of community schools – bringing academic coursework, health and social services, and community engagement under one roof – is the most effective way to address the gaps our students face, improve learning, and build stronger communities. And In Congress, he has a proven record of working to level the playing field for working families, while getting things done to help students, educators, and communities across Ohio. That is why the National Education Association is proud to recommend Rep. Tim Ryan in his campaign for U.S. Senate,” said National Education Association President Becky Pringle.
“As the proud husband of a public school teacher, I’m honored to have the support of educators across Ohio,” said Tim Ryan. “I know the challenges our students, parents, teachers and school support staff have faced over the last year and a half, and I’ve been endlessly inspired by the resilience and creativity our educators have brought to their work day after day. In the Senate, I’ll continue to listen to our teachers, invest in our schools, and expand access to training and wraparound services, so that they have the tools and resources to give all our kids the education and support they need to thrive.”
Tim has been endorsed by every Democrat in Ohio’s congressional delegation, along with more than twenty labor unions and the Ohio AFL-CIO, and more than 200 state and local elected officials and Democratic leaders and activists in every corner of Ohio. Tim’s grassroots momentum has also translated into record-breaking fundraising, including raising more than $2.5 million in the third quarter of 2021.
Small Moments of Joy: Can They Keep Teachers in the Classroom?
By Julie Holderbaum, Minerva EA/OEA
On March 17, 2020, I wrote about what it was like to be a Type A Teacher in the uncertain times of the statewide school shutdown. I described how I was clinging to what I knew for certain: that this was an opportunity to refocus on the kids instead of standards or testing, and that our kids needed us more than ever.
As it turned out, the next school year was even more daunting. Some of you were still teaching through a screen, trying to make and nurture human connections with kids you had never met. In my district, we were teaching while wearing masks and sanitizing everything, in person every day but still trying to post as much online as we could for the kids who were at home sick or quarantined. And some of you were in what Dante would surely consider a special circle of hell, teaching online and in person at the same time.
Last spring, a year into COVID, I wrote about changing my perspective from doing everything possible to get the job done to doing everything possible to keep myself healthy and sane. I wrote that “We can’t possibly hope to produce flourishing students if we aren’t even attempting to flourish ourselves. Sometimes you don’t do what you gotta do to get the job done; you do what you gotta do so that you can keep doing the job.”
When the end of the 2020-21 school year came, the vaccine was widely available. My teacher friends and I celebrated mightily on that last day of school. We were looking forward to a well-deserved break and a return to normal for the 2021 school year. There was joy in the air.
Well. Here we are. Fall of 2021. Not much joy, is there?
COVID still rages. School leaders and teachers are forced to reconsider, once again, how we do everything, from teaching, to athletics, to dances, to extracurriculars, to parent/teacher conferences, to assemblies. It seems every day there is a new decision to be made.
Community support has waned. Parents are attending school board meetings, angry about mask mandates. Frankly, it is absolutely demoralizing to hear people berate teachers and schools for trying to do what’s best for kids, or even worse, accuse us of not caring about kids. We are fighting for the safety and well-being of our students and we are being browbeaten for it.
Politicians are debating what part of the truth we are allowed to teach our kids, accusing us of indoctrinating our students when we are merely trying to give them the whole picture. Isn’t it our job to teach America’s full history, not just the parts that make our country look good? We teach our students how to have a respectful conversation about difficult topics with people they disagree with in a safe space. What’s going to happen if our children don’t learn these lessons? We certainly won’t become a more inclusive, rational, respectful society, will we? And I’m pretty sure I know who will get blamed for that.
Add to all that the Ohio politicians who want to give parents of K-12 children voucher money so they can leave public schools if they disagree with any aspect of their local district from curriculum to policy.
Joy, excitement, energy…school year 21-22, at least for me, has seen less of those than any other year of my career.
I know that my particular situation is a good one. I have great students who give me grace when I have a bad day. I have wonderful colleagues. The parents from our town who attended our school board meeting to oppose the mask mandate did not get violent and were not disrespectful. Our staff feels respected and appreciated by our administration more than many other teachers do around the state.
And yet, this school year, I’ve seriously considered leaving the profession.
The problem is, I’m an English teacher trying to work out a math equation: is COVID + increased disrespect from society + political agendas + the usual stresses of a teaching job equal to or greater or lesser than caring about the kids and the future + occasional moments of joy? Factor in decades invested into a retirement system and the importance of having good healthcare and the equation gets incredibly complicated.
I’ve thought about what has brought me to this point. Is it just the stress of COVID? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve taught for two and a half decades in Ohio and still haven’t seen fair school funding be made a priority of our legislature. Maybe it’s because the legislature continues to show a disregard and distrust of what we teach and how we teach it. Maybe it’s because the Ohio State Board of Education just repealed an anti-racism resolution passed last year. Maybe it’s because even COVID didn’t derail the standardized testing and data train. Maybe it’s because my salary is still not commensurate with other equally degreed college graduates. And maybe I could deal with all of that if I only had five years to go before I could retire, but because of STRS changes since I began my career, I have twelve, and being the kind of teacher I want to be, one that I can be proud of, for 12 more years seems unfathomable to me.
I’m not alone. A recent study by NEA shows that 32% of teachers are planning to leave education earlier than they originally planned.[1] Something’s got to give, or we are going to lose a lot of good teachers.
Resilience doesn’t just mean adapting well in the face of adversity, being in a terrible situation and sticking it out. Resilience is elasticity; the ability to bounce back. If the current state of education in Ohio is one that is endangering my ability to bounce back, to retain the core of who I am, to be the kind of person I want to be, then it’s not a path I can continue on. Last spring I wrote that “I still have what’s most essential to being a good teacher: I still care about the kids.” This year, I’m wondering if caring about the kids means knowing when it’s time to put them in someone else’s hands.
I’m not quite there yet. But part of taking care of myself in this third year of teaching during COVID means not just getting through each day, but examining how I want the rest of my days to be, as a person, not just as a teacher. It means being open to the idea that I might not retire at the end of my working years from teaching as I had always assumed I would. I’m not quite at the end of my rope, but the end of my rope is fraying, quickly.
There is some comfort in knowing I am not alone. Just last week in an ECOEA meeting, colleagues in schools all around me discussed feeling the same way. In addition, Cult of Pedagogy dropped a new podcast entitled “Teachers are Barely Hanging On. Here’s What They Need”, and a Michigan teacher/writer I love, Dave Stuart Jr., wrote about the struggle of teacher burnout. So many educators are seeking solutions to the problems that plague us. We are fighting for our profession. We want to find the joy again.
And sometimes, we find it. Last week on Tuesday, I did not get one paper graded or lesson planned during the school day, but I left school feeling lighter and happier than I had all year. Why? I spent my planning period and some time after school having unplanned one-on-one conversations with students. One needed someone to listen, to acknowledge what he’s been through and to affirm that he was on the right path. The other needed a nudge to make a plan for moving forward, a little support and guidance and direction. Those conversations reminded me of why I chose teaching in the first place.
There haven’t been many days this year when I’ve felt that I’m in the right place at the right time, but on that day, I felt that I was right where I was meant to be.
I hope that the challenges of teaching this year are growing pains and that the struggles we are facing will lead to meaningful changes, because I need more days like that.
We all do.
— Julie Holderbaum is an English Instructor and an Academic Challenge Advisor at Minerva High School, Minerva, Ohio.
[1]“Educators Ready for Fall, But a Teacher Shortage Looms | NEA.” 17 Jun. 2021, https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/educators-ready-fall-teacher-shortage-looms. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021
OEA Condemns Substitute House Bill 327
“Ohio’s students deserve an honest and reflective education to prepare them to engage with and shape the future of our interconnected society and economy. Ohioans believe students and educators should have the freedom to teach and learn without fear of state censorship, intimidation, and punishment. But, if the Big Government mandates of HB 327 become law, our children will be grievously deprived of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and learn from our mistakes by creating an oppressive and fear-based learning environment, and the growing teacher shortage will become exponentially worse,” OEA President Scott DiMauro said.
“Ohio’s kids need caring, qualified educators in their classrooms to help them become tomorrow’s doctors, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders. Unfortunately, the provisions of HB 327 – which have come about as part of a carefully coordinated national campaign by disingenuous organizations resulting in divisive and dishonest attacks on educators, our communities, and public schools – will drive teachers from their classrooms who can’t afford to lose their homes to sue-happy parents with a vendetta against the truth. The chilling effect on a profession already struggling to attract new entrants would be devastating,” DiMauro explained.
The substitute version of HB 327 seeks to muzzle educators and prevent them from having age-appropriate discussions with their students about any subjects deemed ‘divisive’ by certain politicians doing the bidding of a national network of extremists who want to whitewash our history so they can control a political narrative. Attempts to clear up the confusion created by the language of the earlier version of this bill have led to even further confusion about what can and cannot be taught and do nothing to address the serious underlying problems in the legislation. A similar bill in Texas has forced teachers to consider teaching Holocaust denials alongside the real history of World War II.
“Right now, no students are being taught to be ashamed of who they are or who their ancestors were; they are being empowered to be proud of who they are, regardless of where they come from,” DiMauro said. “But, by threatening to withhold vital school funding, revoke teachers’ licenses, and make educators civilly liable – with no cap on that liability, HB 327 would make teaching such a risky career path that few would choose to do it. And in the end, it’s Ohio’s 1.7 million public school students who will suffer.”
OEA will fight vigorously to stop the murky prohibitions and extreme penalties of HB 327 from becoming law. “Ohio’s educators must be trusted to do the jobs they were trained to do, following state learning standards and district curriculum in ways that use honest, accurate, and diverse learning experiences without state censorship or intimidation,” DiMauro said. “Our organization sees HB 327, and its companion bill HB 322, as a full-frontal assault on academic freedom and honesty, and we will not stand for it.”
OEA & OFT Oppose Bill That Endangers Students
“HB 454 directs professionals to go against the current standards set by their licensing boards regarding student privacy, and forces counselors and teachers to out transgender and non-binary students against their will.
This is a violation of Title IX protections and will jeopardize the health and safety of at-risk students. More than half of transgender and non-binary youth who participated in a recent survey by the Trevor Project have seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. The same survey showed that LGBTQ youth who had access to spaces that affirmed their sexual orientation and gender identity reported lower rates of attempting suicide.
We oppose HB 454 because politicians shouldn’t be making decisions that put our students in danger.”
State report cards should spur districts to spend ARP funds
The state report cards show Ohio’s public school districts saw about a 10% drop in their Performance Index (PI) scores from the 2018-19 schoolyear to the 2020-2021 one. Over that same period, charter schools in the state saw a 25% drop – a 2.5 times greater degree of loss. Breakthrough Schools, which are often touted by charter advocates as shining examples of success, saw the seven worst performance drops in the state, with PI scores plummeting 77 percent. The PI drop for KIPP, a charter school in Columbus, was 66% – more than double the decline seen in Columbus City Schools. The online charter school OHVA’s PI score fell 25%.
More troubling, the state report card data shows chronic absenteeism in Ohio charter schools jumped from 22 percent to 45 percent last year, while those rates increased from 7.5% to 17% in traditional public schools.
“Seeing that nearly half of charter school students were chronically absent in the last school year is completely unacceptable, and truly speaks to the effectiveness of those institutions in educating our children. And we don’t even have recent data on Ohio’s private schools to compare this with since they are not subject to any of the same accountability standards as public districts,” OEA President Scott DiMauro said.
“This should all serve as a serious wakeup call for proponents of the ongoing efforts explode the state’s charter and vouchers schemes and take critical public tax dollars from the 90 percent of Ohio’s kids who attend demonstrably better traditional public schools,” DiMauro added. “Last year, 606 out of 612 public school districts in the state lost funding to charters. Follies like the so-called “Backpack Bill” that was recently introduced in the Ohio House would make this situation exponentially worse.”
“Ohio’s public school students deserve every resource they need to succeed, especially considering the disrupted learning opportunities they’ve endured over the last year and a half. Thankfully, federal money has also been set aside expressly for that purpose, with hundreds of millions of dollars coming to Ohio’s schools through the American Rescue Plan package,” DiMauro said. “It is essential that school districts spend that money as soon as possible on the programs and services that will help bring students back up to their pre-pandemic performance levels. Our kids can’t afford to have districts stockpile that money for a rainy day; they need that support right now.”
Wellness Issues and Resources
OEA Wellness Cadre and upcoming events | OEA’s Wellness Grant
NEA Mental Health Program
Offered in partnership with Sanvello Healthcare, the NEA Mental Health Program is an evidence-based mobile app care solution created by clinical experts that enables members to access on-demand help for stress, anxiety and depression. The NEA Mental Health Program is available to members, spouses/domestic partners and eligible dependents* in all 50 states.
The program consists of three main options, as follows:
- Sanvello Free Self-Care Solution
- Sanvello Premium App
- Sanvello Coaching
Please visit www.neamb.com/mentalhealth to learn more about the NEA Mental Health Program. Click here to view a flyer about the app.
Resources to Support Mental Health and Learning During School Reopening
A roundup of free resources from the UCLA Center for Mental Health to assist school districts with plans to address equity and support student and staff mental health.
Bring Mock Elections to your students
Help build voting habits by bringing a mock election to your school or classroom.
The November election is quickly approaching and now is the time to plan a mock election for your school. Kids Voting Ohio has created a simple system that is free to educators and gives students a chance to learn the importance of voting as well civic involvement in an engaging and fun way. The Kids Voting Ohio Mock Election curriculum comes with all the materials necessary to build a successful mock election, including lesson plans and customizable ballots.
Learn more or sign-up by visiting https://www.kidsvotingohio.org/elections
Kids Voting Ohio is a free nonpartisan voter and civics education program for Ohio students grades 3-12. Kids Voting Ohio offers completely free programs to schools and educators including mock elections, social studies standards-aligned curriculum, student scholarships, teacher training sessions, opportunities for student events and experiences, educator and voter resources.