Mike Roberto said he used to give Republicans in Columbus the benefit of the doubt.
But over the course of his two decades working in public education, he’s come to a different conclusion.
“At first I thought legislators just didn’t understand how schools are funded,” he said in an interview. “But over time it started to feel more intentional.”
Last year, he decided to do something about it.
Roberto retired as superintendent of the Aurora City School District in Portage County. And with the encouragement of state Democrats, he’s now running for Ohio’s most competitive state senate district.
More broadly, Democrats are betting frustration among public school officials will help them in this year’s state legislative elections. They’ve recruited several educators fed up with a decade of Statehouse decisions – expanding private school vouchers, increasing religion in schools and a bipartisan school funding plan they didn’t fully pay for – to run in Republican-leaning districts.
“Ohio’s public schools rank in the bottom third nationally, and the only way to turn that around is if we actually send people to Columbus who understand how to fully and fairly fund public schools,” said state Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, a Cincinnati Democrat and the top-ranking Democrat in the Ohio House.
Republicans, meanwhile, have emphasized a different set of education priorities, including expanding school choice and pushing for higher academic performance. GOP leaders have also argued that recent budgets have increased overall education funding, even as they’ve directed more money toward vouchers.
They also note that educators are already part of their ranks. Two members of the Ohio House leadership team – Reps. Gayle Manning and Adam Bird, a former elementary school teacher and school superintendent, respectively – are among the current and former teachers on the ballot this year.
There’s a broader context for Democrats’ recruiting this year, too.
They’re hoping the public educators they’ve recruited can help them with their main political goal this year: ending the veto-proof majority Republicans have held in Columbus since 2012. This would require them to flip five Republican-held seats in the House or three in the Senate.
What the Democratic candidates say
When asked what prompted them to run, the three public educators who Democrats recruited all pointed to a common subject: the most recent state budget.
In that budget, legislators increased school funding. But they opted not to fully fund the bipartisan Fair School Funding Plan that lawmakers approved in 2021 to try to fix longstanding concerns about inequities in public education.
Instead, lawmakers in the most recent budget opted to base the money schools got on outdated cost estimates. They said this reflected budget realities and pressure from rising property taxes.
School officials said that decision is the latest example of the state underfunding schools, which leaves a heavier burden for local taxpayers. They say it’s also left them struggling to keep up with inflation that has made everything more expensive this decade.
At the same time, the state has expanded funding for private school tuition through vouchers, a priority for many Republicans that Democrats argue diverts resources from public schools. Ohio spent more than $1 billion on vouchers last year, up from $444 million in 2021. Republican lawmakers also cut property taxes for many communities while making it harder for schools to pass certain kinds of tax levies.
“They can’t fund the Fair School Funding Plan,” said Roberto, the former school superintendent who’s now running against Republican state Rep. Steve Demetriou for a GOP-held state senate district in the Akron area. “But they do have $2 billion set aside for private schools.”
Graig Bansek, the superintendent of Columbia Local Schools in Lorain County, said those cumulative changes are starting to show up where he lives. He’s now running for a competitive Republican-held House District that Democrats are trying to flip in November. He will face Mike Baker, a business owner, in the May 5 primary election.
Several districts in his area are weighing tax levies or cuts to staff and services as they adjust to the latest budget, he said, and the situation could worsen as time goes on.
“People are upset,” Bansek said, describing local public school officials’ view of the Republican-held legislature. “And it’s not even come close to hitting the fan yet.”
Molly Schneider, a civics teacher for Aurora schools, said Democrats approached her over the summer and asked her to consider running for a competitive Republican-held House seat in the Cleveland/Akron area. She already is an elected Aurora school board member, winning her seat in 2023 during a time when cultural issues emerged as a flashpoint in what previously were fairly nonpartisan races.
“I was concerned about some of the politics that were entering into school boards and school districts,” she said of her decision to run for school board. “They are nonpartisan. They have appeal for everybody. I was just trying to keep some of that extremism out.”
As for her legislative campaign now, Schneider also cited school funding, as well as Senate Bill 1, the higher-education law Republicans passed last year to counteract what they saw as liberal bias on college campuses. Schneider said she’s concerned the law will make working conditions more difficult for professors and the schools less attractive to students.
“The school board and the schools have been so foundational to me. Knowing what they mean to this community and stuff, I wanted to make a difference in making sure our schools stay great,” said Schneider, who will face attorney Samantha Salamon in the Democratic primary.
Democrats aren’t making social issues a focus of their campaign this year. But Bansek said a major part of his job in recent years has been to react to accusations and rumors about schools being too liberal.
He said that is a misconception about teachers, who work hard to keep their politics to themselves. He said schools meanwhile have faced pressure from Republicans in Columbus to inject religion into what they do.
“Every angle right now from a public schools standpoint we’re just getting absolutely murdered,” Bansek said. “Every angle.”
More broadly, Bansek said most lawmakers don’t have firsthand knowledge of what schools actually do.
“We do a great job. But every time you turn around, they’re passing something to make what our teachers do more difficult. And a lot of those people have never stepped foot in a school. And that’s the depressing part,” Bansek said.
A fourth former teacher is running for the Ohio House as a Democrat. Scott DiMauro, a former high school history teacher and former leader of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, is running for an open, safely Democratic seat in the Cleveland area. He is unopposed in the primary election.
A Republican teacher makes a different case
Not all the public educators running for the legislature this year are Democrats though.
Shawn Kaeser, who teaches middle school social studies for Dublin City Schools, is a Republican running to challenge Democratic Rep. Crystal Lett in a suburban Columbus district.
Like the Democrats targeting the Republican-held districts, Republicans are hoping that Kaeser, who’s taught in Dublin schools for 31 years and leads the local teachers’ union, can help him overperform a typical Republican. He will have to do so to have any chance to win – Kamala Harris won the district by 15 points in 2024.
Kaeser’s disarming campaign persona leans heavily on his teaching background, which includes posting history lessons on TikTok, such as this 52-second rumination on the history of the $50 bill.
“Everyone likes teachers – and doctors,” Kaeser said.
Kaeser’s critique of public education differs sharply from the Democratic educators running for the legislature. His biggest problem isn’t school funding – it’s what he sees as slipping performance from students.
He blames the decline on a combination of the proliferation of smartphones and, more recently, artificial intelligence, and a shift in education policy toward making students comfortable – such as by allowing them to retake failed tests – rather than challenging them.
“We say we want them to have grit, but we remove any obstacle in their path that helps them develop grit,” Kaeser said.
Kaeser also supports school choice, a broad term that can refer to giving government funding to private schools, but that also generally offers more flexibility in public education. He and his wife teach for the same school district, but he said their nine children have attended a variety of alternative schools, ranging from charter schools to Montessori schools to homeschooling.
“I have to say public education isn’t the only route for families. It’s the route most people go with… But I like that students and families can make a choice,” he said.
And Kaeser agrees with Republicans that schools could make cuts without affecting the classroom, such as by reducing the number of administrators or potentially consolidating rural school districts.
“As a teacher, I’d like to figure out how to get more money to education… But I’d also say there is a lot of fat to cut in districts,” he said.
Kaeser said he and the Democratic educators running for the Statehouse probably have areas of agreement. Among them: he believes education has become dramatically more politicized this decade.
He said the “culture wars” from five years ago have receded somewhat, but in Dublin, focus has now shifted toward a divisive plan to redistrict schools.
He said this accentuates how hot of a topic education is for voters this year.
“At any event I have, this is the number-one issue that people want to talk about,” he said. “And maybe it is because I’m a teacher in the district. But I hear what people are saying. It’s going to be a wild ride this spring, summer and fall.”