The Columbus City Schools (CCS) Board of Education has once again demonstrated their lack of decency when it comes to the wellbeing of the district’s employees.
At the end of July, the news story broke of the district’s Executive Director of HR being fired by the district for losing $40 million. The short version of the story is that the district has been using a third party insurance broker by the name of Aon.
Aon’s job, in short, was to shop around for different insurance policies and advise the district on which policies were best for them based on how staff utilizes health insurance.
Aon instead convinced Courtney Hale, the district’s (now former) Executive Director of HR, to sign off on different policies, some which should have needed approval from the Board of Education, and some that included additional compensation for Aon.
The district also stared to cover GLP-1 drugs at a time when many employers were taking them off of plans due to the popularity of the expensive rapid weight-loss drugs. The costs for the district skyrocketed and the healthcare plans started burning quite the hole in the district’s pocket.
This, coupled with the defunding of public education from the state level and the Columbus City Council’s insistence on the use of gargantuan tax abatements at the cost of children’s education, accelerated the district into it’s inevitable financial plummet.
Employees who worked under Hale alerted others in the HR department, including Amy Grover, Chief Human Resources Officer/Chief Talent Officer (titles which have no real definition) to the issue in autumn of 2025, and the district hired an actuary to assess the financial health (pertaining to insurance) of the district.
The actuary, who is an independent, nonpartisan professional with decades of experience, reported in March 2026 that because of the unchecked behavior of Aon, which was either continuously approved or ignored by Hale, had cost the district $22 million in 2025, a projected $18 million in 2026 (totaling $40 million), with significantly increasing losses expected in 2027.
The CCS Board of Education President, Dr. Miranda, addressed the issue publicly in early August 2026.
From Thomas Cobb at NBC4i in Columbus:
[Dr. Miranda] said an independent actuary found the fund underfunded by $22.5 million last year and roughly $1 million through the first half of this year, totaling $23.5 million. She also addressed a separate $40 million figure, saying it combines the $22.5 million shortfall with the high end of a separate $7 million to $18 million projection for additional 2026 costs.
The Board President’s math against the actuary’s projections has never been explained.
The issue with Courtney Hale was first put on my radar in June, when her appeal for a public hearing regarding her firing was posted in the Board of Education minutes for the June 25, 2026 meeting.
Normally CCS administrators quietly resign on their own, so the notice of a public hearing was particularly interesting because it indicated Hale believed she was being wrongfully terminated.
The story originally broke from Columbus-based independent political blogger DJ Byrnes at The Rooster, and it was shortly picked up by major news networks across Central Ohio.
In just a few days, The Dispatch had the same disciplinary file, and Hale spoke on the record regarding the issue for the first time.
Ultimately, Hale told The Dispatch she had taken the fall for the district and was targeted because she spoke out in disagreement regarding a fellow CCS employee’s raises.
That fellow employee was Mike De Fabbo, CCS’s former Chief of Staff (often referred to amongst district staff as “Chapman’s right hand”).
It is an open secret in the district that Mike De Fabbo, who served prior as the supervisor of the HR department, was writing himself checks in addition to his base salary.
The Dispatch reported on this in July 2026 and found that, while ‘messy’, the raises for De Fabbo and an additional administrator, David James, were ultimately done above board.
Buried in Hale’s disciplinary report is a tidbit of information that fell by the wayside in this story. Probably because it’s nothing new, it’s expected, and it’s just the way “things get done” and “the way things have always been done”, but it’s this:
It’s not so much the off-color remarks that bother me, it’s that union officials were going out to happy hour with district officials after their Joint Insurance Committee (JIC) meetings.
An important fact is the JIC is made up of several unions with district officials — there are multiple unions in CCS, and the health insurance plans are discussed, altered, and agreed to by the JIC because they affect all employees, regardless of which union they are in.
Call me a radical, but I don’t think it’s appropriate or effective for union leaders to wine, dine, or hit up a happy hour with administration.
It’s doubly unacceptable when both parties are being swindled by the Vice President of a known predatory insurance company (Aon) raking in cash.
It’s honestly so embarrassing.
Nevertheless, we have a crisis on our hands and the people in power are refusing to even acknowledge it.
I streamed the the September 8, 2026 CCS Board of Education meeting from my couch, enjoying Trader Joe’s mac-and-cheese when, lo and behold, the last person to give public comment to the completely empty room was CEA President John Coneglio. His speech, which I recommend watching, is here:
30 seconds in I paused my loaded fork halfway to my mouth, and by 35 seconds in I had set down the whole container and was fist pumping the air hollering “Let’s go, John!” at my screen.
And then the Board of Education just moved on to absolutely nothing.
I understand the call to action from our union president being for the district to go after Aon litigiously and recoup the funds lost to their swindles, lies, and incessant contract breaches by withholding information and cherry-picking data.
But also, how does the Superintendent still have her job?
Courtney Hale told The Dispatch that she was instructed to behave in that manner with Aon because that is the way things had always been done. The district’s contract with Aon is not new, CCS has been utilizing the company for 18 years, and she was advised by people who had the role prior to her to sign off on things put in front of her.
Hale also told The Dispatch she was doing the job of five other people and I don’t doubt that one bit because I have seen what CCS does to us in our school buildings; I, too, am a victim of the district’s blatant disregard for appropriate and legal workloads.
Under her leadership, members have lost their jobs, schools have closed, we’re giving up art classes for “workforce preparation” academies that we can’t fund, and now we are short an additional $22-$40 million dollars due to sheer lack of oversight from her stacked cabinet.
Perhaps it’s because the Board of Education is not aware that they could actually solve a problem if they wanted to. Perhaps they actually believe it’s their job to sit there and perform for a Facebook livestream every other Tuesday until they get to move on to whatever political move they have planned next, or until enough time has passed for the “serving my community” box to be checked.
This is seen continuously from Brandon Simmons, the youngest board member always boasting about how he attended and graduated from the Columbus Alternative High School.
Simmons is infamous for typing up his diabolical plan to destroy our unions by pitting us against each other along racial lines so the developer-led task force our Superintendent had put together could close an onslaught of public schools and use the buildings however they please.
But he most recently used the district’s insurance debacle to issue a letter to Public School Hater #1 Senator Andrew Brenner (R-Delaware), Chair of the Senate Education Committee who runs into the nearest bathroom when he sees me coming through the statehouse halls, crying for help.
He sent the same letter to Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula), Chair of the House Education Committee, whose last interaction with public schools was actually never because she was homeschooled and chooses to home school her adopted children.
Let’s address this in two parts, equally disturbing and incompetent:
First, any Board member, including Simmons, could put up a motion to have the Superintendent give a transparent report with accurate, current data pertaining to district financials broken down into different departments, operations, and/or metrics; yet they choose not to.
The Board of Education literally exists to solve these problems and provide a system of checks and balances for the general public (who elected them) to the district’s operations and, in this case, severe mis-handlings.
I am both continuously mind-blown and not surprised at all at the way people in power behave, particularly when they do absolutely nothing.
We are suffering. The students are suffering. The families are suffering.
And then when they do something, it’s a stunt like Simmons pulls.
Secondly, a letter to Brenner and Fowler Arthur? Be so fucking for real right now (pardon my language if you need to).
If we were in a somewhat normal society with a functioning government that gave the slightest amount of care toward public schools, I wouldn’t be criticizing Simmons so heavily.
Because on one hand, he does almost kind of have a point. His letter is essentially saying (with my colorful editorializing and paraphrasing) “Holy shit, this is on fire, can we please have some oversight?!” and when mismanagement is of this magnitude in the state’s largest school district, I can see the argument for more oversight.
Objectively speaking, if we had functioning governing systems that valued true societal gain instead of power over trans people and pumping out brain-dead screen scrollers as a workforce that end up training robots that are probably going to wipe out the human race anyway, I would’ve understood the letter.
But we don’t. We live in Ohio, and we have a government that has run public education into the ground on purpose so they can continue to fund white nationalist churches and billionaires by making vouchers and charters the only options for families.
And we have a board member who reached out to people who are undoubtedly two of the biggest ops public education has seen in years, saying “please come in with overreach from the government that has a proven record of slaughtering public schools” — all because he apparently has absolutely no idea that he himself is in a role that is built to intercept and correct the district behavior he is whining about.
The sour cherry on top is his actions are objectively understandable.
If you are on the CCS Board of Education and you want more political power, which is what I believe Simmons wants, this is how you are supposed behave. It has been documented thoroughly by Simmons’ predecessors.
Assuming he wants to continue a career in politics and gain power over more people, harming children, educators, and families is what gets you there.
The saddest part here is that Simmons is the only Board member who has even done anything at all. No one has made a statement, no one has presented a solution, no one has even asked the Superintendent for a report on any of this.
In fact, in the 20 minute Board meeting that proceeded Coneglio’s comments, the Superintendent, the Internal Auditor, and the Treasurer all said they had no report to deliver to the Board, despite the district’s blatant financial crisis and heightening crisis with the staff district-wide.
I find it fascinating that the above three people, with their salaries reflected below, offered no report or insight to the Board of Education:
Kevin O’Conner: Internal Auditor, $200,000
Ryan Cook: Treasurer, $206,000.06
Angela Chapman: Superintendent, $275,121.60
Keep in mind the numbers above are simply their base salaries and do not include bonuses, stipends, reimbursement for travel/electronics, their allotment of vacation days (35), fringe benefits (retirement contributions are paid for), or memberships to clubs and organizations.
Meanwhile, while I make a salary of $65,090 and am expected to write a “learning objective” on the white board in my classroom just in case a district official decides to do a walk-through, earn 15 sick days a year, and pay 14% of my paycheck into my retirement.
The CCS Board of Education has their next meeting this Tuesday, September 15. Will they find their spines, vocal chords, or hearts? I’ll let you know.
Great article Kelsey. Thank you for the work you are doing to expose this colossal failure from our district. Chapman would still make a base salary of $271,121.60 if she donated what I will be losing from my paycheck each month in order to support my two young children and wife through my health insurance.