teachers\u00a0<\/a>across Ohio. Under the most recent state budget, the Ohio Legislature approved a change that would shift control of the STRS board, giving political appointees a majority.<\/p>\nCurrently, the 11-member board is composed of seven teacher-elected representatives and four political appointees. Under the new law, the balance would shift to eight political appointees and just three teachers.<\/p>\n
The OEA argues that this change removes the voices of educators from decisions that directly impact their retirement futures.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems that when public education is under attack, this is just another attack to silence the voice of educators,\u201d said Jeff Wensing, president of the OEA. \u201cAre you saying that educators aren’t able to make decisions?\u201d<\/p>\n
Wensing said the system is working well as it stands and that the current board has been effective in making decisions for both active and retired teachers.<\/p>\n
Wensing added that the STRS board has made \u201csound decisions\u201d for educators.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the members of the STRS board \u2014 current STRS board \u2014 they’ve been making sound decisions,\u201d he said. \u201cThey’ve been making benefit enhancements for both retired teachers and active teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said many of her members were outraged by the legislature\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur members worked hard to elect people to serve on that board who they trusted with their retirement futures, and it just felt like another slap in the face to them,\u201d Cropper said.<\/p>\n
The legislature, however, defends the change. In a statement, Rep. Adam Bird said: \u201cWe believe the change was needed to provide stable governance to protect the pensions for hardworking teachers, current retirees, and future retirees.\u201d<\/p>\n
The union\u2019s lawsuit aims to stop the board restructuring before it takes effect in October.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that what happened is a dangerous precedent \u2014 that if the legislature doesn’t like decisions that elected board members are making, that they’ll just step in and change the composition of the board,\u201d Cropper said.<\/p>\n
The final decision will be up to the courts. A judge could halt the board changes if the court sides with the teachers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Educators say the new state law undermines their voice on retirement decisions. COLUMBUS, Ohio \u2014 The Ohio Education…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[28,147,530],"class_list":["post-167040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}