Opponents of new Ohio higher education law don’t have enough signatures to get a referendum
Opponents of Ohio Republican lawmakers’ higher education overhaul that bans diversity efforts and faculty strikes, and sets rules around classroom discussion, have failed to collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot this year to block it.
Members of the Youngstown State University’s chapter of the Ohio Education Association tried to get a referendum on the Nov. 4 ballot to stop Ohio Senate Bill 1, but said they ultimately ran out of time.
“Over the course of the last few days, we were collecting over 4,000 signatures a day, and that momentum was only increasing,” said Youngstown State’s Ohio Education Association President Mark Vopat. “It was only because we ran out of time that we weren’t able to get the required signatures. … I believe that if we’d had just a little bit more time, we could have gotten those numbers.”
They needed to collect about 248,092 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties — 6% of the total vote cast for governor during the last gubernatorial election.
Instead, they collected nearly 195,000 signatures and met the signature requirements in at least 33 counties, said Amanda Fehlbaum, a Youngstown State faculty member who helped champion efforts to get a referendum.
The plan was to submit the collected signatures to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Thursday for him to verify the signatures. This was the deadline to submit signatures since the law goes into effect Friday.
The new law creates post-tenure reviews, puts diversity scholarships at risk, sets rules around classroom discussion, and creates a retrenchment provision that blocks unions from negotiating on tenure, among other things. The law affects Ohio’s public universities and community colleges.
“One thing is clear in all of this, the people do not want politicians making decisions about higher education,” Fehlbaum said. “The people do not like this legislation.”
S.B. 1 quickly passed through the legislature earlier this year and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law on March 28.
Fehlbaum said she thought another group “with infrastructure and funding” would come forward to challenge S.B. 1 after DeWine signed it into law, but that never happened so they decided to go the referendum route.
Vopat and Fehlbaum along with fellow Youngstown State faculty member Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich started the referendum process in mid-April and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and the Ohio Secretary of State’s office gave them approval to start collecting signatures May 5.
“I do think we could have pulled this off had we not wasted two weeks waiting on another group or groups to come forward,” Fehlbaum said.
Vopat agrees they would have been able to get enough signatures if they had started the referendum process immediately after DeWine signed the bill into law.
“That might have also given us the extra time we needed,” he said.
The three Youngstown State faculty members said they are figuring out next steps and considering efforts to potentially try to get on the ballot in 2026.
“This is not the end for us,” Jackson Leftwich said. “I want people to know that we’re going to use this momentum.”
More than 1,700 people volunteered to collect signatures across the state. They ended up raising more than $43,000 in small dollar donations with $1,000 being their largest donation, Fehlbaum said.
“I cannot underscore how much we did not have money,” she said. “We did not have paid consultants. We did not have paid petitioners. None of us are getting paid. … There’s no dark money here.”
But they said it ultimately came down to a lack of time, not a shortage of money.
“I would love to take these boxes of petitions and put them on Jerry Cirino’s front door as a visible symbol of how detested this legislation is by the people,” Fehlbaum said. “We’re instead going to spend some of our remaining campaign funds on a shredding service so that information voters shared with us will not be mishandled.”
Cirino is the Republican Ohio state senator who introduced S.B. 1.
Some of Ohio’s public universities have started making decisions because of the new law. Ohio University announced it will close the Pride Center, the Women’s Center, and the Multicultural Center.
The University of Toledo is suspending nine undergraduate programs. Kent State University is closing its LGBTQ+ Center, Women’s Center, and Student Multicultural Center.
Referendums are rare and the last one that passed in Ohio was when voters overturned an anti-collective bargaining law in 2011.