A Hilliard attorney who works under contract for South Western City Schools said school board elections should be taken away from the “biggest” districts in order to reduce the power of teacher unions.
Omar Tarazi, a contract attorney for South Western City Schools board and former Republican member of Hilliard City Council, said during an Aug. 20 forum on “The Future of Ohio Education” that he thinks the state needs to “take away board elections” and switch to appointed boards to give “equal footing” to the board during union contract negotiations.
“I’m much more radical on this — you’ve got to take the golden goose away,” Tarazi said.
“It’s so imbalanced on one side, you need maybe appointed boards for the very biggest ones so you can have some equal footing there so you can stand up against the millions of dollars that can be spent to attack you.”
Panelists during the forum also discussed a gamut of issues related to education, including party affiliation for board members and merit-based teachers’ pay. The event was hosted by right-leaning Americans for Prosperity, and featured Republican lawmakers, school choice advocates and a career technical superintendent alongside Tarazi.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy delivered the keynote address.
Tarazi’s remarks about union influence in districts came after a video was played claiming that unions have an outsized influence on boards of education through their contract negotiation process, and use union dues as a tool to influence school districts.
Tarazi said unions are a “runaway train” and serve as a “mobilization and fundraising machine for the Democratic Party.”
“At the end of the day, all these people in Ohio, which is a red state and voted for Trump, are not going to sit there and be forced out of their homes because they can’t pay taxes,” Tarazi said. “So that people who hate them and won’t even stand for the Pledge of Allegiance — and those are the people that are going to sit there and lecture us about how public education should be.”
The South Western City school board and the district’s teachers union recently reached agreement on a new contract after negotiations that seemed to grow contentious.
A flier for the event published by Americans for Prosperity lists Tarazi as the attorney for South Western City Schools via his law firm. Event organizers told The Dispatch that individuals were speaking on their own behalf and that the titles were presented to “affirm their background or insight.”
Tarazi began working as a contract attorney for South Western in 2024, and billed the district for tens of thousands of dollars that year.
In a statement, the South Western school district said that it is aware that an advertisement was circulating listing Tarazi as the district’s legal counsel, but the district had not been contacted by the event organizers “to approve of the use of the district’s name and/or likeness.”
“Tarazi is not a district employee within the district administration’s scope of oversight, is an independent contractor offering billable legal services to the board of education, and is not an agent or employee of SWCS,” the district statement said.
Any opinions Tarazi expressed were “his own and do not represent SWCS,” the district said.
The South Western board also addressed the circulating advertisements at an Aug. 18 meeting. Board Member Camille Peterson said during the meeting that it appeared as though Tarazi was representing the district based on advertisements for the event.
“It can be misconstrued as if he is speaking on behalf of South Western City Schools and that we all agree with whatever it is that he states,” Peterson said.
Board President Chris Boso said he saw it as an opportunity to get the district’s “foot in the door with lawmakers that have power in our statehouse.”
“I just look at that like it was an opportunity, just like if it was a more Democratic-leaning organization, I’d be glad he was going there,” Boso said.
Tarazi told The Dispatch that he was not speaking on behalf of the district and that “nobody on the panel was there speaking on behalf of any organization.” He also said that when the panelists were introduced, it was stated that they were speaking for themselves.
“If there is any ambiguity on the way the flier was put together, that was clarified at the beginning of the event,” Tarazi said. “It was a private, individual capacity conversation.”
Tarazi said large school districts having appointed boards is “not unusual” and pointed toward appointed boards in New York, Chicago and Cleveland public school districts.
“The very biggest school districts, a lot of them happen to be doing the poorest, the injection of politics at that scale is unhealthy,” Tarazi said.
Emmalee Harding, spokesperson for the South-Western Education Association, called Tarazi’s remarks during the event “deeply disturbing and unacceptable.”
“The (SWEA) is not partisan; public education is not partisan,” Harding said. “Every student deserves a great public education in our district – no exceptions. When Mr. Tarazi and others twist the truth and manufacture controversy to score cheap political points, they create unnecessary distractions from the real issues facing our public schools.”
Others on panel weigh in on unions, school politics
Ramaswamy said during his address that he was in favor of merit-based teacher pay and giving school administrators more power over teacher pay. He said his position was pro-teacher but not necessarily “pro-teacher union.” He said the system is currently not working and not helping schools.
“And you would predict it would not work,” Ramaswamy said. “You cannot run a business if you say that every employee, no matter how well they perform or not, no matter what good of a job they do or not, they’re going to be paid the same. You’d never run a business that way. If you did, it would fail.”
State Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Asheville, said that a solution to the challenges with public education is to bring political party affiliation into school boards. In July, Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a provision in the state’s two-year budget that would make school boards partisan positions.
“Party ID is a signal,” Stewart said. “It tells you that this candidate generally, not a 100%, but generally shares these types of policy positions and these types of values.”
Stewart also said that if conservatives can get candidates onto the school board that they can’t “eat their own” because it will take time to address the issues in public education.
“The folks on the other side don’t care how long it takes as long as they’re making progress,” Stewart said. “We need the same mindset and we can’t have ‘RINOhunter1776’ on Facebook calling our school board members sellouts because they didn’t fix every single issue in the first year.”
Todd Hoadley, superintendent of Tolles Career and Technical Center, a public vocational school near Plain City in Madison County, said that in his first five years in public education when he was a teacher, he was in a union. He said the teachers he’s worked with throughout his career are across all parts of the political spectrum.
“I want to tell you, I was oblivious to what was going on when I was a teacher, to the union activities. I was more interested in coaching basketball,” Hoadley said. “A majority just want to come in each and every day and do right by students.”
This story has been updated with additional comments.
Cole Behrens covers K-12 education and school districts in central Ohio. Have a tip? Contact Cole at cbehrens@dispatch.com or connect with him on X at @Colebehr_report
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: South Western schools attorney: scrap elected boards in ‘biggest’ districts to weaken unions
Reporting by Cole Behrens, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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