One of the biggest stories to come out of last week’s Democratic National Convention is that of former state Sen. Nina Turner of Cleveland, who came into the convention as a delegate for Bernie Sanders, and by the end of the week it was being reported that she was weighing the chance to run as vice president on the Green Party ticket. Turner is still torn about what happened at the convention and what she’ll do next. Now that the 2016 tickets are set, Turner is among those who is considering her plans for 2018, including former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettlebach, former Rep. Connie Pillich, Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni (D-Boardman) and Republican Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor. Former Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette has died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. And a union-backed group seeking to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Cleveland is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to put the issue on the November ballo
There are less than a hundred days left till the November election. When the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia ended last week, Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine boarded buses and hit the campaign trail. And some of the first stops along the way were in the Buckeye State. And the Republican Presidential candidates followed right behind. Ohio is always a battleground state, but as Statehouse correspondent Jo Ingles reports, this year Ohio’s role in picking the president might be different.
The battle continues between the Ohio Department of Education and the state’s largest online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, better known as ECOT. Since early this year, ODE has tried to perform an attendance audit to gauge how much instruction time each of ECOT’s estimated 15,000 students has received. The fight went back and forth for a few months until just days before the audit was set to begin, ECOT filed a lawsuit against ODE, claiming the state’s new audit standards were in violation of a contract signed in 2002. To take a closer look at the controversial issue, the Statehouse News Bureau’s Andy Chow sat down with Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni (D-Boardman) and Neil Clark, longtime lobbyist and consultant for ECOT.