The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) is the administrative department of the Ohio state government[1] responsible for primary and secondarypublic education in the state. It is a cabinet level state agency and the director is appointed by the governor. The Ohio State Board of Education used to be the governing body of the department but House Bill 33 (signed by Governor Mike DeWine in July 2023) transferred most of the duties of the State Board of Education to the newly created Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. The department is headquartered in Columbus. The department and the State Board of Education are two separate agencies.
The Board of Education currently consists of 19 members. All serve four-year terms.
Eleven of these are elected from 11 single-member districts, which are formed by combining three contiguous Ohio Senate districts. The governor appoints eight "at large" members. All serve four year terms. The elected members' terms are staggered so that half of the board is elected in each even-numbered year. Vacancies in the elected membership are filled by appointment by the governor. The chairman of the Ohio House of Representatives Education Committee and his or her counterpart in the Ohio State Senate are ex officio members.
The chairs of the Ohio House of Representatives and Ohio Senate education committees are ex officio non-voting members of the board. The board is responsible for choosing a Superintendent of Public Instruction, who manages the day-to-day affairs of the agency.
In 2025, Ohio's biennial budget (HB96) changed the structure of the State Board of Education. The eleven districts will be eliminated and only five appointed members will remain to represent rural, suburban, urban, charter, and private schools. As elected and appointed members either resign or serve out their terms, the membership will be reduced until there are only five appointed members.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
