Ohio Democrats seek audit of Youngstown City Schools

COLUMBUS

State Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan of Youngstown, D-58th, and two other state representatives are seeking an immediate audit of the three Ohio school districts now led by state-appointed Academic Distress Commissions, including Youngstown’s.

Right now, there’s not enough oversight on commission spending, Lepore-Hagan told Mahoning Matters on Tuesday.

“It concerns me that the finances are not going into the classroom and [instead] into administrative costs,” she said.

The General Assembly enacted HB 70 — colloquially called the “Youngstown Plan” — in 2015, which ultimately placed the three school districts under the control of Academic Distress Commissions, and appointed CEOs to run them.

The state’s latest biennium budget bill, which passed last summer, gave districts a pathway out of state control, requiring them to draft three-year academic improvement plans that will go up for review. The Ohio Department of Education in December accepted the plans submitted by Youngstown City School District and the two other commission-led districts in East Cleveland and Lorain.

The new law requires the state auditor to conduct a one-time performance audit of the school districts at some point during that three-year review. That’s something that hasn’t been done since 2015, Lepore-Hagan said.

But she said she’s concerned the audits may come too late to make them useful for school administrators, who must meet certain benchmarks in their three-year plans in order to regain local control of their districts. Districts that don’t hit enough of those goals will remain under state control.

Lepore-Hagan said she wants to make sure the money allocated by the commissions is going toward student success, rather than administrative costs. A thorough financial audit will give the locally elected administrators a better idea of how to proceed, she said.

“There have been overall audits, but they’re not detailed — to the point where the school board doesn’t know how many employees there are, what contracts they have, their salaries or just an overview of the financial aspect,” she told Mahoning Matters. “There’s been a lot of conversation from the faculty and teachers and some of the parents about heavy administrative costs and new positions that were implemented since the [commission was installed] in 2015.

“Less money spent in the classrooms, teachers talking about not having enough books, then having to photo-copy sections of the books for themselves at their own expense,” Lepore-Hagan said.

Youngstown Schools CEO Justin Jennings could not immediately be reached to comment Tuesday.

Youngstown City School District financials from fiscal years 2019 and 2021, submitted to the state education department and summarized by Mahoning County Auditor Ralph Meacham’s office, suggest the district now has fewer administrators per pupil than it did two years ago, and it’s also spending less per pupil on administrative and building operation costs and more on instructional costs.

The district’s total expenditure per pupil increased nearly 9% in those two years, from about $18,000 to $19,600, the auditor’s reports show.

Those figures are based around the district’s average daily membership, which is the number of eligible, full-time K-12 students living in the district and is used in the state’s education funding formula. Youngstown’s membership fell 2.75% between 2019 and 2021, according to Meacham’s report.

According to the district’s five-year forecasts, salaries made up 51% of the district’s fiscal year 2021 operating costs, up from 38% in 2019. The district is also spending more on fringe benefits — 24% in 2021, up from 15% in 2019 — and half as much on purchased services — 21% in 2021, down from 45% in 2019.

Lepore-Hagan and state Reps. Joe Miller of Amherst, D-56th, and Kent Smith of Euclid, D-8th, sent a letter to Ohio Auditor Keith Faber on Tuesday, calling for an “immediate audit” of the school districts, a news release states.

“The audit is an essential step toward restoring the public’s trust in the school system that was undermined because HB 70 enabled the [Academic Distress Commissions] and CEOs to avoid scrutiny as they spent, and likely misspent, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. We need to know where those dollars went and why,” Lepore-Hagan said in the release. “The state report cards issued from 2015-2021 clearly indicate the money wasn’t used to educate students.”

House Bill 112, introduced by Lepore-Hagan and Miller in February 2021, and cosponsored by Smith, would have required a performance audit within 90 days after the effective date of the legislation. But that bill stalled in the House’s Primary and Secondary Education Committee. It’s been nearly a year since its introduction, and it’s yet to have a single hearing.

“It was the state of Ohio that took over the Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland school districts, so we are asking for the state to provide meaningful oversight of these three districts,” Smith said in the release. “Since local leaders have had their authority removed, it is important that the auditor hold the Columbus-appointed CEOs of these districts accountable.”

The letter to Auditor Keith Faber can be read below. Click on the icon in the upper-right corner for the full-size version.