COAL GROVE — Friday’s meeting of the Lawrence County school superintendents had a special guest, speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Jason Stephens.
He was there to talk about over $750,000 that the schools will be using to put in new digital radio and repeater system that will be used by the 150 or so school buses in Lawrence County’s eight school systems to keep in contact as they pick up and drop off students.
It is a necessary system because so much of Lawrence County is rural with spotty cell phone service and so rural that Eric Floyd, the Lawrence County Superintendent, joke they “have to pump in sunshine.”
The Lawrence County Educational Service Center applied for a grant from the Ohio Strategic Community Investment Fund through Jason Stephen’s office and in August, the ESC got a check for $750,000 to buy equipment and pay for installation.
And with the upgrade, the system will link up to EMS and the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office. The system also includes GPS locating, so if a bus has an accident or an emergency, first responders can quickly and accurately locate the bus even in the most rural of areas in the county.
Stephens told the superintendents that there is a battle for school funding between legislators who don’t want public schools and those who do.
“In the battle we have in Columbus for rural and Appalachian schools, it is about a tough a battle you can ever imagine,” Stephens said, likening it to a noisy school board meeting but multiplied a couple of times. “We have folks who do not believe in public education. They are anti-public education.”
He said he knows how much public education means to Lawrence County and its educators. He also pointed out that his children and their friends went to public schools and they grew up to have careers as doctors and engineers.
“All the things we continue the fight in Columbus is to make sure our voices are heard and to make sure we do right by our schools,” Stephens said. “It doesn’t mean it is perfect and there is always room for improvement. And we are going to continue to do that.”
Dr. Richard Murray of the Coalition of Rural and Appalachian Schools present Stephens with a plaque from the organization in recognition for outstanding leadership for the improvement of students, schools and communities.
Murray said that Stephens helped with drafting funding legislation for 35 schools in southeast Ohio.
“Without him, the legislature didn’t even know there was a problem,” Murray said. “Now there is some kind of remedy.”