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Curtains have closed on the public discourse over the Columbus City Schools insurance swindle, though the Columbus Education Association continues to drum on about being “held hostage” in a situation where they chose to sell out members.
When the Columbus Education Association (CEA) settled with the Columbus City Schools (CCS) district administration on Monday September 28th regarding the health insurance plan redesign, the union was agreeing to the exact same redesign the district had proposed on August 10th.
After laying down like a dog to the boss, the CEA made a call to its union members and the community to show up to the October 6th Board Meeting to publicly rage about being “held hostage” by the school district administration regarding the insurance crisis.
It gave the exact same energy as when Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin was mad about voting yes vote to give McCoy Park to billionaires Jimmy and Dee Haslam this past spring.
A topic that, again, the union did not voice any opposition to until the window for a fight had closed and the outcome had already been decided.
It is exhausting to consistently have more guts and respect for working people than capitulating men who are paid many times my salary to represent me in situations where they keep making my life worse.
Anyway, the action at the October 6 CCS board meeting drew a sizable crowd to the untrained eye, but accurate union member numbers are uncertain, as there were people in red CEA shirts leading chants that are not even part of our union.
They actually don’t even live in the greater Columbus area, and I have no idea why they were there, except to assume it is playing into the member-to-union-staff-pipeline.
The pipeline works like this: Union members with actual organizing potential are identified by the state union, and funneled into programs that are run by the state union.
These budding union members get paid an hourly wage to “organize”, but instead of doing the work of organizing labor, they are asked to complete small outward-facing tasks with little to no impact, flooded with paperwork to “prove” they are doing work for the $25/hr paid gig, and forced to go to quarterly weekend retreats where they go through cult-like formalities and spend time doing personality trait quizzes and end up in “restorative circles” if someone “offends the family they’ve built”.
If you behave well enough, and prove you will not disrupt the institution, you will get tracked into a job with the state union. You get to leave your overstimulating, underfunded, and impossible working conditions of the public school classroom and get a big boost in pay, better benefits, and realistic work expectations. And you still get to be “union strong”!
I know because I was part of it for six months. I quit before I had the opportunity to become the topic of one of the “restorative circles”, or so I thought. Turns out if anyone in those programs talks to me or does any union work with me, they are subjected to literal tears and made to apologize.
So I find it laughable when people in those circles start showing up and cosplaying as members of my union, complete with leading chants on a megaphone and wearing one of our union shirts (that we apparently can’t even give to our own members).
The messaging of the board meeting action was questionable. Though I wasn’t there, the rally that was supposed to be all about ‘holding the Board of Education accountable’ for their part in our oppression did exactly the opposite when board member Patrick Katzenmeyer cruised through the crowd and not a single person badgered him.
Katzenmeyer is honestly the last person I’d bust up on camera when it comes to the CCS Board of Education, but if I were at a rally where the tone is supposed to be one of Giving Them Hell, I surely wouldn’t let the opportunity slip through my fingers, especially if I was the one organizing it.
Unfortunately and predictably, the Board got up to some of their old favorite tactics at the meeting on October 6th by making the conscious decision to not open the overflow room for the meeting.
The CCS Board of Education meets in a small room in the old ECOT building — which is rumored to still have stolen taxpayer money seeping through the drywall no matter how many times they repaint it — and they have historically opened the auditorium (at the other end of the building) for an overflow of participants to sit and watch a livestream of the meeting.
It is a sizable auditorium and capable of seating hundreds of people. I have been in it both for Board meeting overflows and district Department Chair meetings. It is a pointed choice to not open it when the Board is well aware the community is showing up in person to attend the meeting.
It is also a pointed move to start the Board meeting with an executive session. This leaves the public waiting for an unknown duration of time until the Board feels like hearing what the public has to say.
It is, at best, an optic that provides the insight the Board is vastly unprepared to be seen as a group, and perhaps at worse, a tactic to wait people out and get them to leave so the room is more palatable for the Board members.
The motion was disappointingly seconded by Sarah Ingles and predictably not even discussed by any others. Everything is always calculated, but I was really hoping for a Simmons stunt to call out the Board’s lack of basic ethics or accountability to the public.
The Board hammered home the message they want nothing to do with the public by roping themselves off from concerned parents and staff, lest a peasant from the electorate have the nerve to deliver them a document with their own grubby hands greased from an honest day’s work that may contain a kernel of the truth.
Perhaps most disheartening of all, only two people spoke about the topic of the insurance swindle at the Board meeting. It is beyond me why anyone would try so hard to pack a room full of people and then not stack public comment.
Stacking public comment is not hard to do, and the inability shows the unclear messaging of the action in the first place.
The CEA President took the night off from speaking during public comment, as he has taken a slot for the past few meetings, and handed it to the woman he has hand-picked to be the union spokesperson for the past three union contract cycles.
This makes sense, as the current union president has said this insurance fight is the beginning of the 2028 contract cycle (despite there being an election for union leadership before then), but it’s already foreshadowing the struggles the union has had in the past two contracts: confusing messaging, an inability to engage and turn out the rank and file membership, and its track record of keeping members in the dark regarding the problem they’re trying to kick and scream about.
When public comment concluded, Board President Dr. Miranda read a statement on the topic of insurance. The meeting attendees, who took that opportunity to leave instead of “look them in the eye”, shouted “shame” as she read.
Board President Miranda then emailed the statement out the next day, around noon, to a list of people I’m having trouble making sense of, as I was not on it.
I attend board meetings, I am a district employee, and I’m a CEA member: my email should theoretically be on any and all lists, but I (along with others) somehow got missed this time.
Board President Miranda communicating with union membership should likely be an Unfair Labor Practice charge, but it’s worth noting that while this communication absolutely paints the district in a false glowing light they definitely don’t deserve, she’s not wrong.
The only real issue I have with this statement is the “$24 million” number (still).
Board President Miranda continues to say the district has only lost an additional $2 million in 2026 (on top of the $22 million in 2025) to the acts of negligence regarding insurance, but has not offered any proof to the general public and taxpaying members of the district (of which I am).
The $2 million was the actual expense as of July, and one would think by October there would be an update on the amount of money being overspent, but the district is held accountable to quite literally no one, so I guess it’s not that surprising.
The total number will become known at the end of the 2026 calendar year, which is conveniently when the district will be making another $50 million worth of cuts to student-facing positions.
By then, no one will care about this issue. If they do, the district has two messaging options and they both favor cutting union member positions along with closing schools:
See how expensive healthcare is? We simply can’t afford to have this many employees.
See how much our teachers are costing us? We spend this much on their health insurance because we care. We aren’t monsters for yet again cutting educators instead of administrators.
See how much we value treating our staff with dignity and quality healthcare? We can’t afford to keep open this random list of schools that we want to close.
While the union should have been informed of the problem as soon as the district started investigating itself, which was September 2025, it is true the union leadership was well informed and chose not to share the details of the crisis or act on it with its membership until five months later.
The union then sent out its own communication to members in respond to Board President Miranda’s, which included the following paragraphs:
The first paragraph references an email the union sent to its members which said the JIC had been alerted to an issue the district had with Aon, but nothing was changing at the time for members, and they would keep members updated on the issue.
They did not keep members updated on the issue, as we only received that one email.
But the second paragraph is what caught my attention, as it leads the reader to believe the union desired to meet with the district about the issue, but they were denied the chances, and the Joint Insurance Committee (JIC) did not meet again until August.
However, the results of a recent public records request that was shared with Shotgun Chelsea shows the JIC did meet after March 11th, and that meeting happened on April 22.
CEA’s messaging is notably carefully crafted to be able to walk it back if these meeting dates and minutes became known.
The results of the public records request shared with Shotgun Chelsea are available for download below: