I had a nice post ready to go about my recent conversations with Statehouse republicans, but Columbus City Schools incompetence felt a bit more pressing as I glanced over this week’s upcoming board meeting agenda.
The buildings in Columbus City Schools are mostly deplorable. The district has somehow apparently fumbled millions upon millions of dollars by mismanaging their own programs, and they’re gearing up to announce $50 million in additional cuts before the holidays.
The biggest plights of Columbus City Schools are mostly the fault of its own leadership, coupled with the fact that no one in any position of real power has any idea what the hell is actually going on, how a school building should operate, or what a child needs to learn. …Which is an easy explanation as to why it’s beginning to look and feel a lot like DOGE around here.
Below is an email obtained by Shotgun Chelsea sent from the CCS Chief Talent Officer Amy Grover of the HR Department to administrators on September 4, 2026.
Popping up on the agenda for the upcoming Board meeting on Tuesday, October 20th is Board Policy 1540, which denotes how administrators are reduced in force (RIF’d). As the email notes, Ohio law demands the policy be developed with input from many levels of administrators, including building principals.
Below is the draft of the policy Grover attached to the email:
Administrators had one week to provide feedback via a Google form, and have not heard from the HR department since then regarding the policy or any proposed changes, despite it going to the CCS Board of Education for a vote tomorrow.
I’d be willing to bet there was feedback submitted, especially considering the policy notes seniority going out the window and the Superintendent choosing which administrators to keep and which to RIF based on whatever criteria they want to exist.
This makes it troublingly easy to discriminate; I would actually say it encourages the practice. Teachers should get used to this, too, as the biannual budget the Ohio legislature passed in 2025 detailed the Superintendent now has the power to circumnavigate any seniority protocols in collective bargaining agreements when considering educator placements and reductions.
Echoing the call citizens around the world have been warning the American people in regards to their government: What they do to others, they will do to you.
Along with the draft policy, attached was the classification of administrator jobs in the district:
Pardon me while I laugh my ass off. Chiefs and Senior Chiefs? Each Chief gets to be assigned to their own individual employment area? Special Assistant to the Superintendent? Professional I, II, III?
It will be interesting to see which administrators get shuffled around, and which “vacant positions” CCS Superintendent Angela Chapman will choose to “eliminate” to “save money”. …Probably not any of her Special Assistants, but maybe some Professional I’s.
I hope readers can see how preposterous these position classifications are in a district that has a vast majority of special education teachers over legal caseloads, water pouring from the ceiling into a trash can every time it rains, mold crawling through peeling paint, and dead roaches decorating school doormats.
To add insult to injury, school building administrators were called to a meeting at East High School and told they must be working all ticketed sporting events, including Saturdays, and spoken to like they are dead roaches decorating school doormats.
While building administrators weigh their options and start to get their affairs in order to jump ship or digging up dirt on their coworkers to save their own job (unrelated: Shotgun Chelsea’s anonymous tip line is open), we look to the next level up for behavior mimicking that of our own government.
CCS Superintendent Angela Chapman and CCS School Board President Antoinette Miranda co-hosted a “Town Hall” last week for community and educators to “elevate their voices”.
The town hall consisted of exactly 0 solutions presented, no opportunities for attendees to ask questions, and an odd but unfortunately on-brand rally cry of “Franklin County Democratic Party got you here, so let’s vote for them to keep you here get us out of this!”
Attendees were given a handful of beans — literal beans — and told “don’t spend them all in one place!” while they walked around and voted for their priorities in the district. Which part of public education did they value, and how many beans worth of value was it?
This is not necessarily a step up, but definitely an interesting spin on the tactic last year, which was to give attendees two tokens and three possible boxes to put their tokens in: busses, buildings, or educators.
What they were going for was the community feeling like they were making a decision. What they actually tried to communicate was they think their jobs are hard and these are ~tough decisions~, but even that didn’t sell to the crowd.
It’s kind of like when President-turned-dictator-Trump promised a better country and then had billionaire Elon Musk obliterate all federal programs and departments, and then everyone was told “But you voted for this! You wanted it!”
For the next level of Musk behavior, I’d like to call you in to what’s happening with the school board committees, the result of which the administrators are feeling the first layer of at this week’s board meeting.
Two committees of the CCS Board of Education have apparently merged:
The first is the “Academic and Facilities Alignment Committee” (AFAC), chaired by Jen Adair, infamous for a Board Presidency which led 4,000 union members to the picket line which delayed the start of the school year in August 2022; she was also recently seen crying at a board meeting last spring while voting to fire all of the building substitutes, yet reminding the meeting attendees “I didn’t want to do this, but you voted to keep bussing!” (sound like a familiar tactic?)
The second is the “Equitable & Transparent Resource Management Committee” (ATRC), chaired by board member Patrick Katzenmeyer, who continues to avoid leveraging the impact of political nepotism on a school board, as he is the son of Tom Katzenmeyer, a Central Ohio Wexner circle bad actor, and son-in-law of Sherrod Brown, the longtime Ohio politician who is gimping up to the plate to swing for the fences with a bat full of vintage collector’s edition AIPAC dollars in a Senate race for a seat he lost just two years ago.
The two committees have met as a joint committee twice: September 17th and October 15th.
Any time the leadership of Columbus City Schools starts to move quickly, it is a massive red flag and highlights the fact that they can, in fact, do things if they want to, they just largely choose not to fix the vast majority of the issues the district faces.
The first joint committee session, which lasted three hours, revealed the following school closure and “consolidation” information:
Close Mifflin HS
Mifflin HS building will be the new Mifflin MS
Build a new Northeast HS
Duxberry Park Arts will move to Sullivant ES
Close Seibert ES
Move the Columbus Gifted Academy to Frankin ES
Close the Boys Preparatory School and the Girls Preparatory School
House the Columbus Online Academy (grades 7-12) at Eastmoor MS (which is the building where the Boys Preparatory School currently is)
Close Highland ES
West Broad ES moves to Highland ES as a swing space
South HS (currently a 7-12 model) moves to and combines with Marion Franklin HS
South HS building becomes one big middle school
In addition, Jen Adair released more closure information via the formal Board communication channel of… her Facebook page.
Notable here is the closure of Northland High School, which is the Columbus Partnership — the operative entity behind Columbus City Council — slapping the hand of the Columbus Education Justice Coalition (CEJC) and saying “Nope!”
allow me to explain in layperson’s terms for the average person of Columbus:
In August 2022 the teachers union, CEA, went on strike, and one of the wins from that was a pilot of a Campus Community School, which is confusing because the term “community school” is used to refer to charter schools in Ohio, but it’s a model of a public school that thrives because parents and community members gain an invested voice and pillar in the operations of the school. The CCS Board of Education has been fucking us over with this since its inception, you can listen to the early stages of that fight here.
The CCS Board of Education refused to fund the one union job required to run the Community School model, and when Dr. Antoinette Miranda — dually endorsed by the union and the Franklin County Democratic Party — got on our Board and took the Presidency, one of the first things she did was cozy up to Columbus City Council.
The school district and the union relied on the surface-level explanation of “we need help!” to sell this newly budding relationship to the public, but anyone with half a brain and the ability to see a single pattern knows this was a mending of the fissure of a thread caused by the strike and the formation of CEJC. “Sorry we accidentally started to organize the community and the union! Please forgive us while we lick your boots and come crawling back, and while we’re at it, take whatever you want, including the Mayor’s office.”
So anyway, the Community School model actually got off the ground at Northland HS, and City Council President Shannon Hardin made quite the production of giving $60,000 to CCS to fund the one organizer position that is required to run the model appropriately.
Union leaders, school board members, and city politicians alike bent over backwards to gush over themselves as a press conference inside Northland HS, against the backdrop of the $84,000,000 defunding of the school district in the last year alone by City Council’s tax abatements.
The closure of Northland High School is an extremely politically pointed move.
While union insiders have been reassured the Board is not looking to close schools, the school closure policy is up for discussion at this week’s board meeting, alongside the administrator’s reduction policy.
Also nestled in the agenda is recommendations for high school transportation: one of my favorite topics to watch leaders discuss, because they have no idea how it works or the repercussions of changes to it.
There are three proposals being discussed, all three involve switching to COTA as the main mode of transportation for high school students in CCS, but you must remember there are three groups of students CCS must transport: 1) the kids that go to CCS 2) the kids that go to charter schools and 3) kids that go to charter, nonpublic (CNP) (private) schools. This is ridiculous, obviously, but it’s per Ohio law.
I love COTA and I ride it often. But I can really only get around the city with it, and that’s because I live in the city and within one block of three bus lines. This is not the case for most of my students, and if I were to attempt to commute to work via COTA, it would take 1.5 hours.
Option 1: No yellow busses and no COTA passes provided for any CCS, charter, or CNP 9-12 students. Cost savings: $6.5 million
For options 2 and 3, the number of COTA transfers is taken into account. So “more than one transfer” means a student has to transfer between COTA lines more than one time.
Option 2: CCS purchases COTA passes for all CCS 9-12, charter school 9-12, and CNP 9-12 students. No yellow busses are provided for CCS or charter 9-12 students, but yellow busses are provided for CNP (private school) students with more than one COTA transfer. Cost savings: 4.3 million
Option 3: CCS purchases COTA passes for all CCS 9-12, charter school 9-12, and CNP 9-12. Yellow busses are provided for all 9-12 students who have more than one COTA transfer. Cost savings: 3.8 million
I cannot believe it took people one year to come up with this garbage plan. The payoff simply isn’t worth it, the amount of students we will lose in high schools is not worth the risk of saving $6.5 million.
The logistics of transporting hundreds of students from one building at the same time are not thought through, and I do not trust COTA to figure that out, considering how many years the rapid bus transit on Broad has been pushed back already.
The board agenda gets even more ridiculous when they propose the new bell schedule as an effort to save money, again, with transportation. They are proposing moving the elementary time back 20 minutes, to start at 9:20 and release at 3:50, for a laughably low change in “bus demand”:
The ‘workgroup’ (whoever that was) is projecting this will save $1.6 million. That is NOTHING compared to the headache this will cause for families and educators, not to mention this is in direct opposition to everything research has shown when it comes to school start times.
The school day should operate around times that are best for students and their brain development. Anything else is an injustice to the essence of public education, and yet, the district is proposing to start elementary later and keep high school at the 7:30 start.
Research shows elementary school times should be earlier, and high school times should be later (like a lot later — most studies recommend around 9am).
The people making decisions about what jobs exist, who gets access to employment, which schools get to stay open, and how to cut corners when it comes to child development actually replicates the work of Elon Musk’s DOGE, and I wish I was kidding. I have no idea who is making these calls, but they need to be shown the door and locked out because the obvious and deep humiliation of not knowing how to do a job appears to not exist in Columbus City Schools.
If they want to eliminate yellow buses for HS students then what sense does it make or move elementary ahead? They will be using fewer yellow buses and this should not be an issue. Further, the COTA idea doesn't seem feasible with a 730 am start time. Routes don't get moving until 530 and that isn't frankly enough time to get to school with ghost buses and missed pick ups.
You point out that our buildings are deplorable, but closing, consolidating, and building new is how the district is trying to fix that. You can't have your cake and eat it too. We can't keep every old building open and also build new ones with kids spread across all of them. If Northland followed the South model, the building could stay open as a middle school, and the community school work there wouldn't disappear.
On the bell schedule, if you watched the meeting, everyone in the room was against the proposals, and the board paused them for more research and community input. That shows they're listening.
On transportation, something has to change. CCS spends about $70 million a year on it. Ohio doesn't require districts to bus high schoolers, and other large urban districts already use transit passes instead. If not transportation, what gets cut? Staff is the biggest expense, so the alternative is more staff cuts. The money has to come from somewhere, and that's what's happening.
That said, it's a good post, and you did a nice job piecing a lot of information together. It just needs more context, because without it, it reads like bait. Most people don't know the layers behind some of this, so the full picture matters.