It’s a double-banger for your inbox this morning, shooting straight from the hip at the local level before giving the lore behind a Statehouse Senator duo.
Columbus union sells out members and makes deal with district, throws temper tantrum after
The insurance crisis in Columbus City Schools has come to a close and union members are still paying for the district’s negligence, albeit in a quieter way. Now that the deal is done, here’s how it went down for educators.
Union leadership had gathered members on a Zoom call September 17th and had them vote on two options for going forward: 1) keep the current benefits plan and pay the extra surcharge amount or 2) redesign the plan and try to keep out-of-paycheck costs relatively stable. Leadership encouraged people to vote for the first option, so most people did.
Members put forth hundreds of questions in the Zoom chat, and leadership said they would get an FAQ out to members as soon as possible.
The second Zoom call was 10 days later, on Sunday, September 27th. Leadership presented the two options to members again, and this time encouraged members to vote for the second option, to redesign the plan and keep paycheck costs relatively stable. The FAQ had not been sent out to members, despite leadership claiming it was done, meaning members were asked to vote without having the information they had said they needed 10 days prior.
Members followed leadership’s voting preference and voted for the second option.
The next day, Monday September 28th, the union met with the district through the Joint Insurance Committee and settled for a plan redesign which raised the out of pocket and deductible costs for members by thousands of dollars, and the Columbus Board of Education cancelled their emergency meeting they had scheduled.
NBC4 in Columbus asked for my thoughts on the “deal”, which I gladly provided, and it was the first time we saw legacy media give voice to the truth on the district’s negligent behavior.
Shotgun Chelsea would like to give a formal shoutout to NBC4’s reporter and multimedia journalist Nico Pennisi for being a real one and reporting the news.
The following Thursday, October 1, the CEA Legislative Assembly (council of union reps, of which I’m part of) voted to issue a vote of No Confidence in the CCS Board of Education.
The move is largely toothless and presents no specifically defined actions for the Board to commit in order to regain confidence.
My beef with the No Confidence vote lies within the lack of accountability measures. Here is what my copy looked like, and I asked questions that reflected my annotations.
“Meaningful and transparent” must be far more clear if the union is expecting the Board to do anything, and this should go without saying, but the communication should be demanded in writing.
“Independent oversight” needs to be laid out with clear language: an independent actuary. It is the CCS way for administrators and board members alike to hire their unqualified spouse into the district for optics and a solid boost to the household income.
The vote of No Confidence hits as a temper tantrum in response to the union leadership’s own decision to sell out its members instead of effectively organize and run a pressure campaign to force the board into common decency.
Furthermore, Superintendent Angela Chapman was invited to the “public participation” portion of the union meeting’s agenda to squeeze pennies from the employees she underpays to fund the local United Way, which sometimes supports students in the very district which is crumbling under her leadership and cabinet operations.
Why the vote of No Confidence does not include the Superintendent is beyond me. This leads me to believe union leadership is, for reasons I’ll surely never know, protecting her.
I will undoubtedly gristle some readers with these words, as our union president worked himself up into a rant at last Thursday’s meeting lecturing union reps about “being online” and “sharing things your administrator can see, your principal can see, that the pubic can see.”
If our union leadership was able to put aside their loathsomeness for me, they’d’ve seen I loaded the bases and set up the narrative for them to hit a grand slam with the insurance swindle, and I had the public records to prove it.
The union leadership is calling for people to attend the upcoming Board meeting on Tuesday, October 6th to “really show ‘em” and “make them look us in the eyes” as they vote to give us shittier health insurance. The rally cries might as well be “We won’t be so cool about this next time, we swear!!”
Generally speaking, I never turn down an opportunity to scold a boss with a microphone, and the CCS School Board deserves a damn good lashing, but the secondhand embarrassment of our union leadership is too much to stomach for me this time. As many are noting, it is harder and harder for me to be quiet about.
Make no mistake, if I thought there was a fight worth having at this Board meeting, I’d be there, but I’m struggling to be sold on the mobilization of members to show up and watch our bosses vote on a deal that will worsen our quality of life that our union leadership agreed to.
Instead, I’ll be cheering on the Independence High School SIXERS SOCCER TEAM(!!) as they play in the championship game at Kilbourne Run Sports Park. Word on the street is everybody who’s anybody will be attending and rooting for IHS.
There will be many board meetings in the next few months to attend, as the CCS School Board has promised another round of $50 million in cuts that will surely come from student facing positions rather than the fat cats rotting away in the old ECOT building that has taxpayer highway robbery built into its foundation.
For what it’s worth, they’re also taking advantage of this public insurance debacle moment to make moves behind our backs and close more schools.
In close, I’d like to give a warm welcome to the CCS district staff and administrators who are now following Shotgun Chelsea. I suggest upgrading to the paid subscription at a mere $8/month for the full experience.
The tips page is also up and running, should any readers feel inclined to submit information anonymously.
Sens. Roegner and Reynolds continue their long history of attempting to silence teachers
The closeness of the two Ohio Senators goes back further than just last week, when they were seen shuffling around together.
I was waiting patiently to speak with Senator Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) before the House session started on approving the gas tax when Senator Kristina Roegner (R-Hudson), took the opportunity to play interceptor with me while DJ Byrnes from The Rooster put Reynolds in the hot seat.
While my priority was asking Roegner about her horrifying bill (SB172) that denotes ICE will be able to come into public schools, this isn’t the first time she has stepped in to protect Reynolds from being held accountable by a teacher.
This behavior actually goes all the way back to May of 2025.
In May of 2025, a caucus of unionized teachers under the name Central Ohio Rank and File Educators put on a town hall for Michele Reynolds in her hometown Canal Winchester.
The event called for Reynolds to attend and answer basic questions regarding her legislative behavior, specifically with her support of Senate Bill 1, which destroyed higher education unions and prohibited DEI initiatives and programs.
Here’s the digital flyer from that event, which serves as a nice throwback and may trigger a Pavlovian response and have you craving McDonald’s french fries:
The Canal Winchester teacher who was organizing the event received an interesting phone call on her classroom phone two days before the event.
Curious as to why an Ohio Senator’s name would show up on the classroom phone’s caller ID, the teacher took a closer look at the 10-digit number attached to the name.
A few quick internet searches of the phone number all reveal the same result: it is registered to Kristina and/or Eric Roegner of Hudson, Ohio.
If you’re unfamiliar with the geography of Ohio, allow this to put it into perspective:
An Ohio Senator has no business calling a classroom teacher during the workday, especially one living 153 miles outside their governing district.
When this happened in May of 2025, the teacher had no idea why a Senator she had never heard of was calling her. But after Roegner’s protection of Reynolds at the Ohio Statehouse this past Wednesday, it’s clear this pattern is not new, but well established.
And it makes sense, considering the teachers were hitting Reynolds pretty hard with the town hall. Reynolds didn’t show up to the town hall, of course, but instead sent her legislative aide, Chloe Green, who happens to serve on the Canal Winchester Board of Education, to answer in her place.
It turns out Columbus isn’t the only district that uses the school board as a stepping stone to higher seats of political power, but to have a legislative aide directly on the school board, while probably not against any actual policy, is a conflict of interest and obvious abuse of power.
It’s worth noting that Green no longer serves in Reynolds’ office, but somehow has escalated to President of the school board. (Dear Canal Winchester educators: please strike)
Roegner’s phone call to the Canal Winchester teacher on her classroom landline during her workday went unanswered because the teacher was busy doing one of the hundred jobs the state government keeps adding onto our plates, but it certainly wasn’t unnoticed.
What could Roegner possibly say to the teacher? I’d be willing to bet it’s the same line she gave me last Wednesday — “I’d be happy to set up a meeting to discuss this further.”
Meetings with them get nothing accomplished. The only backdoor deals that work are the ones that are made against us. Meetings are simply a formality to:
a) hold off the accountability measure and allow the public official to prepare talking points against you
b) make you feel important and bring you closer to the circle of corruption so you are less likely to disrupt it, and
c) ensure there’s no actual record of what is being said, just the topic being discussed.
While Senator Roegner’s call in May of 2025 wasn’t nearly enough to scare us into cancelling the town hall event, actions like that often make educators feel backed into a corner and worried for their jobs and livelihoods if they speak out about their working conditions or, God forbid, hold an elected official accountable for their legislative behavior which results in such working conditions.
I’m cut from a bit of a different cloth and unfortunately have a somewhat defective personality when it comes to scare tactics and flexes of power. I can’t help exercise my first amendment right and ask politicians why they write the bills that they write, and put their answers on the record.
I have not yet paid a price for getting politicians on camera about their behavior, but I know it’s coming. I know that I don’t know what it will be, and it will probably blindside me, but because I have survived what they’ve done to me so far, I know I’ll survive whatever is to come.
The truth is nothing they can do to me will be worse than what my school district and union leadership did to me last spring. Being removed from my classroom and placed on administrative leave on a trumped up allegation of supporting a student-led ICE protest, during the voting window of the union election in which I was running for president, was my worst case scenario.
Keeping me from teaching for an additional 5 weeks after the district investigator found me innocent was the worst flavor of torture.
The bosses won on that one, and I now know how it feels to have the job I love taken from me, with nothing I can do about it. But believe me when I say that’s the worst thing they can do.
They could fire me, but I don’t think they’re that stupid.
I have a detailed record of Columbus City Schools retaliating against me, I have won grievances filed on it against the district.
I won an Unfair Labor Practice against a (now former) school board member, Michael Cole, because he chose to come into my school and scream at me, in front of students, because of the organizing I did to help our staff and students. It was negotiated at the State Employment Relations Board (SERB) and resulted in more protections for CEA members from our school board members.
I have records showing I am a target for my employer, and if I were to be fired, I likely wouldn’t be relying on a burned out union lawyer to litigate my case. I’d get a real employment lawyer and see the whole thing through.
So I operate in this work not with a sense of safety, but a sense of certainty. I also know they can, and likely will, make my job as painful as possible and hope I quit on my own.
But the love I have for my job is why I do what I do with Shotgun Chelsea. Last week I did a long-format interview with 10TV, and I was caught off guard with a question about how the behavior of Columbus City Schools impacts me as a teacher, and the difficulty of continuing on, of keeping the harm separate from my classroom.
I told her I am my best self when I’m in the classroom, “Ms. Gray” is my favorite part of my identity. I often can’t believe my job is to actually teach what I love (literature!) and help teenagers express themselves by finding their unique voice through writing. Being in high school is difficult, and it’s a privilege to be a trusted adult in so many young peoples’ lives and help guide them through their last stage of formal (mandated) education.
But it’s fading fast. I’m in year 6 of teaching and I do not know how much longer I can do this job because the demands are not sustainable, and the student behavior is getting worse. And the problems are so simple: poverty and privatization.
That is the fault of lawmakers in this country.
It’s also the fault of horrible bosses.
There are systems to hold both of those entities accountable, but they’re not utilized. Unions have largely sold out their members to a system that feeds itself and has resulted in capitulating educators’ voices to PACs and protecting district administrations and school boards to the same entity the PACs feed.
The systems of checks and balances that were built into both entities does not exist anymore, all parts of the machine operate to please one entity, whether that’s the union president or the Speaker of the House.
The answer, while rather infuriatingly simple, is democracy and transparency. But electorates of both unions and legislative districts are largely unaware of their rights to begin with, let alone how to disrupt the system that churns our quality of life into a gutter filled with DoorDash and AI.