Gov. Mike DeWine got what he wanted last year when the Ohio legislature accommodated his wish to put K-12 education policy entirely under the authority of the governor’s office, removing most powers from the partially elected State Board of Education. The State Board’s powers to oversee state education policy -- and most of the state board’s funding -- were instead vested in a new Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, led by a DeWine appointee.

The State Board of Education, created via a 1953 constitutional amendment by the citizens, remains in place, but retains only the power to appoint a state superintendent of public education and to oversee state transfers of school district territory, along with teacher discipline and licensure.

The problem now, as cleveland.com’s Laura Hancock recently reported, is that removal of most of the board’s budget could leave it without sufficient funding to cover its teacher-licensure duties.

Without state action, teachers could see jumps as high as 75% in the fees they have to pay for new licenses, warns the state’s largest teachers union, the Ohio Education Association. That in turn could aggravate the teacher shortages Ohio is already experiencing, says former teacher and ex-state lawmaker Teresa Fedor of Toledo, an elected member of the State Board of Education.

The fee now for a multiyear professional teaching or pupil service license is $200; a 75% increase would boost that to $350.

An overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Ohio House tried to fix this last month, voting 85-12 on June 26 to approve Senate Bill 117, which included an added $4.66 million to cover the State Board’s operating expenses.

But the Senate, led by state Sen. Matt Huffman of Lima, refused to take up the House bill.

With the legislature now in recess, Huffman has said the State Board of Education had better turn to the Controlling Board, the legislative-executive panel that helps oversee Ohio’s budget, to make the case for more funding -- while suggesting teachers should pay more for their licenses.

But that’s a gigantic duck for a legislative leader who helped remove funding from the State Board.

Ohio teachers should not have to bear the brunt of the state’s reorganization of its education bureaucracy in the license fees they pay.

DeWine needs to step into the breach here, to ensure a funding fix is found. The next Controlling Board meeting is Monday, and its agenda, which state Budget Director Kimberly Murnieks, a DeWine appointee, oversees, doesn’t include a cash request for the State Board of Education.

The governor should support Controlling Board action to ensure sufficient State Board funding to avoid steep teacher license-fee increases -- and Huffman should restrain his bile and fall in line with the overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Ohio House that favored such a funding fix.

After all, the governor got what he wanted in a revamped education bureaucracy that put education policy under his direct control. That shift relegated the citizen-mandated, partly elected State Board to being a minor partner in teacher and school district boundary oversight. There’s no reason to victimize Ohio teachers as part of that reorganization.

Right now, DeWine’s administration says it is completing an operational review of the 19-member State Board. DeWine’s spokesman Dan Tierney has argued it would be premature for the State Board of Education to request more cash until it takes further steps to manage its circumstances.

A Murnieks spokesman, Pete LuPiba, said the State Board of Education began the new state fiscal year Monday “with a cash balance of more than $3.3 million, which means that they have many months of cash on hand and licensure fee revenue to continue as normal.”

LuPiba added that the state Budget Office, as part of a review of the Board of Education’s operations, “is discussing opportunities for [the board] to take advantage of [state Budget Office] shared services offerings to contain and reduce costs. Until this overall analysis is complete, a Controlling Board request is premature,” he argued.

That’s not good enough.

DeWine needs to state clearly that teachers won’t be penalized for any State Board funding shortfalls and that he will ensure that the Controlling Board acts, if necessary, to avoid that.

Teachers are the often-underpaid pivots of schooling for Ohio’s children. Further burdening the state’s teachers, given a state treasury that can afford the relatively minor financing needed, should be a nonstarter. It’s up to Gov. DeWine to make that explicit.

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